We’re well into 2017 now and it’s time to step into our office Tardis to see what the future holds for SEO in the upcoming months. As you’re probably aware by now, the way that we plan and strategies our SEO campaigns continues to adapt and change at an astounding rate. There are many reasons for this, including changes and updates to Google’s algorithm as well as heightened customer expectations and alterations to their behavioural patterns etc.
In order to survive at the top of the SERP’s, your SEO strategy must adhere to these new changes. So, we have carried out a lot of research and studied our socks off to bring you this refined list of SEO trends we expect to see in 2017 and beyond:
Google’s AMP
Last year it was all about getting your business on mobile. This year, Google assumes everyone is responsive by now and if you aren’t, well you’re not worth talking about in Google’s eyes. Google’s AMP refers to Accelerated Mobile Pages. As you can probably guess from the title, the main purpose of AMP is to provide mobile users with a more sleek and fast internet experience. It’s basically a much lighter variation of HTML and loads web pages 30 times faster. Many business owners have already reported their AMP pages perform better in search and it looks like it will continue to grow throughout 2017 as more people become aware of its booming rewards.
Voice Search
Optimising your site for voice search could be your golden ticket towards increased traffic and bigger conversion rates in 2017. Why? Well, it turns out it’s all about those featured snippets you keep seeing everywhere. A snippet traditionally shows a piece of data, along with the link to the source page. Voice search churns out more featured snippet listings than text search. What makes this good news for you is the fact that whenever your featured snippet ranks on voice search results, Google will reference your brand. This provides a unique opportunity for extra branding where it counts and your featured answers to voice queries could potentially send waves of quality traffic right to your online store.
Schema Mark-up
Schema is useful because it simplifies your site for search engines. This makes sure that your listings are displayed properly, no matter the format. For example, Google may decide to answer a user’s search query with rich snippets and using Schema markup helps to ensure that your site is always prepared. It is essentially code that you can put on your website. Its main purpose is to aid search engines by telling them exactly what your data means, therefore helping search engines like Google provide more useful and informative search results.
As you can see, 2017 is set to be a game changer year. Whilst these three SEO trends are expected to be the most influential, they will come along with numerous other trends such as the fall of local citations in improving local rankings and the expected disclosure from Google that the giant search engine does in fact use engagement data to impact their ranking systems. Contact our SEO services Dublin team or our SEO consultants in Dublin if you have any questions.