As another year draws in to a close, we’re looking at 2017 and what trends we can expect to see, especially in terms of social media and of course, SEO – search engine optimisation.
2016 has seen a range of trends, including mobile optimisation becoming a crucial aspect of your SEO and also the use of social media affecting your search rankings. So what can we look for in 2017 to ensure the continued growth and great SEO rankings?
Mobile Optimisation & AMP
Mobile Optimisation grows more and more important, and it seems fairly obvious now that Google will be looking towards mobile-first indexing on search results before long – now is the time to get your website fully responsive for mobiles and tablets, before these changes come into force on a large scale.
Not only does your website need to be responsive, but also your content – this is referred to as structured data markup (or Schema Markup), to help Google better understand the context of your content for display in the search results. Read more about how you can mark up your content via Google Guides. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-content
Mobile optimisation will also focus more on local searches, with the assumption that if you’re searching on the go you’re probably in the right area. Make sure you get those Google for Business pages up to date and full of information for your customers.
Google have also implemented AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages, and we predict this to continue to grow, especially with AMP showing highly in searches on mobile devices already. For those who don’t know about AMP you can read more on our blog here.
Voice Search
Heard of this? I’m sure you’ve seen many people asking questions of Siri, Cortana or Google, but did you consider this for your website? Voice search is certainly something to keep an eye on over the coming 12 months, more so on Bing than Google. Consider that over half of the teenagers in the US and 41% of adults in the US use voice search on a daily basis.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
Many of the larger search engines, Google included, are making massive hints in the realm of web apps, whether they drop the hints in conferences or news releases it seems that getting a web app for your business (ecommerce website for example) is going to be the next big thing.
Bing as a search engine
Still think it’s Google and only Google? Time to think again, Bing now powers the search for Siri & Alexa, as well as being the default search for Cortana – that’s a lot of devices and users using Bing search. Don’t forget that Bing are also in love with voice search at the moment too.
Virtual Reality
Some pretty interesting movements happening around VR at the moment, but have you started to use it for business? Consider these facts:
• In 2016 Google purchased Eyefluence
• In October 2016 Google launched the DayDream VR Headset
• YouTube rolled out 360 degree videos (as well as Facebook offering this feature too)
Valuable Content
Time and time again when we’re discussing SEO with clients, we realise that many still think good search engine rankings are about peppering content with key words, and linking to every business within 100 miles on a Links page. We’ve been going on about providing short, quality content and this will be a continued trend in 2017. Avoid long winded, low quality essays, this has the opposite effect, aim for 500 words per page and make it relevant to what the page is about and what your customer wants to read.
