Following the footsteps we have made in the past couple of years, we wanted to see what SEO world is like at the beginning of 2017 and how trends and tendencies will turn out to be in the future.
Again, we have analyzed a corpus of the most influential SEO experts from websites such as Moz, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Forbes and Entrepreneur and we have drawn up a short list of 2017 SEO trends.
So, here is what SEO experts believe we should expect in 2017:
1. Content density
Despite all those SEO ‘gurus’ and self-proclaimed experts who believe that Google prefers 3000 words long texts over 300-500 shorties, the reality is quite different.
According to Sam Oh, what matters here is the fact that readers/users (who should be at your focus after all) are those who decide: and they rather go for shorter texts with a point than 3000-word War and Peace competitors (source. Entrepreneur).
What this means is that in 2017 we might actually see denser content free of fillers and fluff. Wouldn’t that be nice to read? Looking forward to reading it already!
2. AMP education
Mobile is still hot. As we have announced in our 2016 SEO trends article, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project was an important topic to be discussed between 2016 and 2017, especially due to Google’s efforts to educate the designers and developers in making their sites faster, mobile-first and designed according to AMP standards and recommendations.
3. Artificial intelligence
There is a lot of written word going on about AI and especially Google’s RankBrain. This project was started in October 2015 and so far we know that it is an algorithm which is said to be the third most influential factor in Google’s ranking algo, next to links and content.
It seems that it is contextually conditioned – e.g. when the algorithm does not recognize a certain word, it starts comparing it to known words and then ranks content based on similarity.
Sounds like a nifty little machine that can do just about anything, right? We will see in 2017.
4. Voice search helps local SEO
In a time when small businesses have made their way on the local so now they focus on local search engines as well, it is not surprising that mobile assistants such as Siri and Cortana who understand English speakers give instant results with great precision. This idea was first introduced in sci-fi books and movies in the mid-20th century and has only now started becoming our reality. The future is here, finally!
Back to you: what do you think, is there anything we have, perchance, forgotten? Is there a rumor about some new things that may be influential in the year ahead of us?
