It’s the time of the year when digital marketers review their strategies and reflect back on the trends that shaped online marketing in the past year. Here’s a piece to help you get retrospective on your SEO initiatives, one of the key factor that adds up to the success of your digital marketing efforts. The major SEO developments in 2016 were relating to mobile-friendly searches, AI and understanding user intend so as to provide a more accurate search result that matches the query. Read on to have a better understanding of what went by and how to plan your search engine optimization strategies for the year 2017.
Major SEO trends in 2016 (and guess what, it’s here to stay!)
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)Google’s announcement on the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project came in mid of 2016 as an an open source push for a faster, open mobile web, that helps to increase speed on mobile devices. It allows users to easily access information such as news, weather etc., with faster loading speed. The AMP functionalities are focused on key areas such as content, distribution & advertising. If you haven’t implemented AMP on your website, add this to your must do list for 2017, so that content on mobile and tablet works better and faster for everyone, everywhere.Here’s the link to Google’s official guidelines on AMP:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6340290
- Voice Search & Instant Featured Answers This is a featured snippet which is also known as a “rich answer” or ” rich snippet”, that allows Google to give a quick answer to a query in summary format at the top of a result page. Though this feature has been around for a while, it is now becoming more popular and relevant in online businesses like ecommerce websites, ticket booking, event listings, maps and others. To make sure that your website content is displayed in Google’s rich answer box, use structured data with proper heading for your content H1, H2, H3 etc.
- Rank Brain, AI and Semantic Search Search engines has evolved over the years and its only getting better, proves new features like Rank Brain and AI. Search engine uses Artificial Intelligence to understand the user intent for a search query and provide the result as a human this rank and provide more personalized search results. So stop being too keyword focused next year and start optimizing your website content in a way that will match the user intend and not just the keywords
- Local SEO became more important Local SEO is nothing new and has been around for many years now. But this is going to gain more solid ground in the coming days, according to Entrepreneur.com. So do all that it takes to make sure that Google understands your local business offerings and where you are located. That includes having your local web pages optimized with long tail keywords and other details like NAP.
- Penguin Algorithm Update Google officially announced that Penguin is now part of the core algorithm. It means that Penguin works now in real time, if your website has bad backlinks, you need not keep any more hope that your website will be able to rank higher in searches. So don’t forget to take a closer look at your website backlinks the coming year or it could hurt your prospects of flourishing your business online.
