SEO, or search engine optimization, has been around for quite awhile now. The SEO trends, however, seem to differ every year. This all depends on emerging digital platforms and, of course, new technology. The whole purpose of SEO is to gain traffic and draw readers to your website and in turn, bring online visibility to your business.
Background Info
As written in November 2016, this Forbes article predicted the biggest SEO trends to emerge in 2017. Jayson DeMers said, “One of the best ways to accomplish this competitive dominance is to be aware of how search engines are changing, and adjust your content and SEO strategy before your competitors have a chance to catch up. The SEO industry is always moving, so it pays to be aware of these evolutions.” He was absolutely right.
According to DeMers, the rise of accelerated mobile pages (AMPs), “dense” content and the fact machine learning has changed the way the algorithm works, were predicted to be a few of the biggest SEO trends to emerge in 2017. Just to summarize, AMPs is the ability for a mobile device to load a webpage almost instantly. Dense content is posts written neither too short nor too lengthy. These posts provide lots of information in fewer words. Lastly, he mentioned Google Hummingbird as the newest extension in machine learning. Now that it is 2017, we are seeing a mass increase of machine learning that we can all agree has changed the way the algorithm works.
I have chosen to focus on these three points as a basis to understanding how fast SEO trends can change. I would say AMPs did change SEO, but not as much as expected. I speculate this is due to the “mobile-friendly” option available to users as well. Dense content however has definitely made an impact. Although most will agree lengthy posts, over 2,000 words, is more preferred, dense content does appeal to majority of readers. Dense content is an emerging SEO trend as it brings traffic to the site, and posts aren’t a headache to read. Lastly, the way the algorithm works has changed and it created new SEO trends important to be aware of.
Social Media
First of all, social media is the number one trend to stay atop of for SEO purposes. Not only are more social networks emerging and becoming popular, but the activity and engagement on these networks are also increasing. “Products and services are being discovered on social media,” says Jonathan Long from this site, Entrepreneur, “…consumers are turning to social media when they need customer support and brands are active on multiple platforms daily — it’s a major source of quality referral traffic.”
User Experience
User experience, or UX, will also be a main SEO trend to focus on in 2017. Providing a pleasant experience for users means if you keep it easy, they stay on your site longer and may even come back again, or share it to their social media networks. This is also the reason to have mobile-first strategies. With so many people using their mobile devices to connect, it would be a beneficial idea to keep that mind when designing your layout – especially if your content is often trending items.
Adding links will also never get old. The more links you add in your post, the more useful your content is and the wider you are spreading your reader spectrum. Contact reputable IT companies, such as Testing Consulting Group (TCG), to help your business implement such content marketing strategies today.
