seo

SEO: What’s Changing And What’s Not?

The headaches have cleared, the wrapping paper thrown away. The dust truly has settled on 2016, and 2017 is well underway. This means that it is time to assess our SEO strategies for the coming year.

Although it’s impossible to exactly predict Google’s next move, we can make assumptions based on historical trends, on Google published data, and on the direction that search results are already taking. In this post, we look at what is likely to change in the coming months, as well as some of the ranking factors that will remain important to your search optimization campaign.

Mobile First

Google has been transitioning to a mobile first search environment for some time, and with good reason. Figures suggest that 44% of all Internet traffic came from mobile phone users and this is predicted to rise to more than 50% by the end of 2017. When you combine mobile and tablet usage, mobile overtook desktop in November 2016.

The move to mobile-first is not breaking news to good SEOs, and any marketer worth the rate they charge should have been pushing a positive mobile experience. This will only become increasingly prominent through 2017, especially as Google is likely to use more structured data, and publish Quick Answers and Rich Cards, on mobile too.

Your website should be responsive, your content optimized for a mobile user experience, but not as an afterthought. Consider that more than half of your traffic is likely to come from mobile devices, and this shows the importance of providing an exception mobile user experience.

Voice Search

Voice Search, Siri, Cortana, Alexa… voice search is big, thanks to improvements that have been made in the technology. Google themselves forecast that more than a half of all searches conducted by 2020 will be made using voice search.

Website owners need to start considering voice search optimization and get ahead of the curve.

Optimize your local listings, because a lot of voice searches are used to conveniently find local businesses. This will also help with another recent and continuing trend in Google search, too.

Local Is Getting Even More Local

Details about local businesses are getting more precise, and especially in terms of the proximity of the business to the searcher. The closer your business is to a device conducting a local search, the more prominent it is likely to appear in local search results.

This move will make local search more competitive. It is also likely that Google will continue to tweak its results, and it certainly doesn’t mean the death toll will ring for local search optimization. In fact, greater competition means greater efforts are required.

Ensure that your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) details are up to date, claim your listings, and build citations. Ensure that the NAP details you use in your citation buildings match your Google NAP listings, and look at your geo-targeted keywords for additional local rankings.

Structured Data

Implementing schema markup on your website is going to become even more important, especially as structured data looks likely to become increasingly prominent in mobile results.

Schema markup is code that is added to a website and contains data to help search engines provide informative results for users. Hotels can provide details of upcoming events. Quick Answers and Rich Cards can provide your SEO with a major boost by listing your site in rank 0 for relevant search terms and queries. If you publish recipes, yours could become a Recipe Card that is extremely prominent on Google search results.

Implement Schema markup effectively on your website, and use Google’s structured data tester to ensure that your site is returning the desired results.

These results will become increasingly important as the year progresses, and as Google continues its march towards a mobile first user experience. Take advantage of this now, before all of your competitors do.

Amazon Will Gain Further Prominence

Amazon may not be considered a direct competitor for Google search. However, it has fast become a powerful product search engine. Some surveys indicate that Amazon is actually used by product searchers as often as Google, when they start the search for a product. While the validity of these claims seems questionable, there is no doubting that Amazon is making serious inroads.

Consider also that the Amazon Echo device is being used increasingly for local searches, and the ecommerce giant could become a major factor in SEO in the very near future.

Some Things Never Change

Of course, for all the changes that we expect to see in the SEO world, there are some ranking factors that are highly unlikely to falter or waver.

  • Content remains king, even if the formatting changes. The mobile first policy means that shorter paragraphs and more visual content should be a part of your 2017 content plan, but a change in specific focus does not mean that you should ignore content. Engaging your audience with community building and email marketing strategies will always remain important.
  • Links will always be an important ranking factor. They are Google’s means of determining the editorial value and quality, but Google will continue to try and improve its algorithm to weed out poor quality and black hat link building techniques.
  • This leads us neatly onto another factor that won’t change this year – Google updates will cause panic and joy in equal measure. Those websites that use ethical marketing techniques will experience joy. Those that use questionable tactics may experience the wraith of the world’s biggest search engine.
  • Google strives to promote high quality pages and media in its search results, even if this doesn’t always seem the case to SEOs and website owners. As such, adding high quality content and implementing ethical marketing techniques will yield long term results, rather than the short term hit that black hat techniques tend to enjoy.

Give us your own SEO 2017 predictions below. Or, if you want to talk about the state of SEO in 2017, WildShark can usually be found taking part in the #BizHeroes weekly chat. Alternatively, you can follow us on Twitter @WildSharkSEO, or you can visit the website to view our ethical, white-hat SEO UK services.

27 thoughts on “SEO: What’s Changing And What’s Not?”

  1. Thanks Matthew……………………..For providing such an informative and helpful article. I hope this will help me to do quality SEO for my website according to these changes. Really you’ve done nice job. Thanks for sharing this article please keep posting such an informative article.

  2. Nice article, Matthew. I just disagree with “content remains king” part. A lot of bloggers have great content these days and a lot them think it’s the only thing that they need to succeed. In my opinion, great content is a good starting point, but you also need to know how to get it out there, how to reach new audiences and how to convert the traffic you get to new subscribers or customers.

  3. In my opinion, 2017 is the year of Google SEO Brain Rank and user experience on more websites !
    Thank you so much !

  4. I think 2017 will need to focus on content because the more content it holds, the more time it will stay on the page, which Google likes because it is a factor in the Google Rank Brain algorithm.

  5. Thanks for these valuable tips, I will apply on my blog and see the improvement that these tips will provide in the SEO of my blog.
    thanks again!

  6. This is a very good write up. Well done Matthew. I think the biggest challenge is correctly implementing structured data and smaller firms will always be at a disadvantage at this. Cheers

  7. Thanks a lot to sharing this informative tips for SEO. can you also help me to give an ideas to how i reduce bounce rate for my website.if any tips you have then please share it…
    Thanks..!!!

  8. Thanks Matthew for your post. I must say very good pieces of information. I am SEO professional and I always believe SEO trends are everchanging. Your mentioned points are very effective to understand the basic to advanced trends in SEO industry which I believe can use for development of Digital marketing skill.

    Thanks
    Roger

  9. Content is always going to be important, however, you still have to promote it and make sure people are reading it. In our opinion, content is good if a good solid marketing plan is in place.

  10. thank you for sharing post SEO,I found this article very helpful…

  11. thank you always going to be important, however, you still have to promote it and make sure people are reading it.

  12. This is a very good write up. Well done Matthew. I think the biggest challenge is correctly implementing structured data and smaller firms will always be at a disadvantage at this. Cheers

  13. hanks Matthew for your post. I must say very good pieces of information. I am SEO professional and I always believe SEO trends are everchanging. Your mentioned points are very effective to understand the basic to advanced trends in SEO industry which I believe can use for development of Digital marketing skill.

  14. Thanks Matthew for your post. I must say very good pieces of information. I am SEO professional and I always believe SEO trends are everchanging. Your mentioned points are very effective to understand the basic to advanced trends in SEO industry which I believe can use for development of Digital marketing skill.

  15. Thanks for this article. I especially enjoyed learning about the SEO things that are not likely to change such as content and links.

  16. you still have to promote it and make sure people are reading it.

  17. Thanks for your updates on SEO, I found this article very informative and helpful. Thank you for sharing.

  18. I think another thing that will never change with SEO is authority. If you’ve established yourself as the authority in your industry and create useful, linkable content, you will always succeed with SEO. Great article Matthew!
    -Ronaldo

  19. I think this is still working in 2019. Thank you

  20. Thanks for the post. In my opinion content is the most important regarding to SEO and in near future still will be the most important aspect of SEO.

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