The main purpose of this blog is to get insights into the constructive discussion around the future of SEO and digital marketing in 2017. Since SEO is trending and a lot can happen with the knowledge and through constantly growing industry segment. The optimization work is now regarded as an essential part of any serious digital-marketing strategy.
There has been a change considering the business investment of 65 billion dollars on SEO services and with an estimated projection to climb over 70 billion dollars by 2018.
Now major search engines are continuing to refine and update their SERPs and algorithms displays. One shouldn’t wait to react rather act and believe there are proactive and possible ways that SEO is still working hard on your part.
Industries have come a long way and are looking for easy optimization techniques that SEO can render worth it scale and position. Now predicting what will come next is determined only after looking at some of the events that mark the evolution of search engines over the past 12 months.
Search engines are steadily moving to mobile only world forcing a change of mindset from desktop to mobile. In the mobile only world, there is a high relevance of local search. This seems to be a strategic reason for all the tests that represent over the local outline.
The Shift from Desktop-First to Mobile-First
Until this present time, SEOs have taken the mobile searches to be one of the many specializations and have represented them over international SEO or local search. That mentality was same as seen decades back when SEOs considered AMP just another added task to implement checklist instead of adding a signal of real intentions of search engines (Google): mobile search in all search.
When mobile-first indexing was announced it became 100% clear that those represented a revolution that dated back to the periodic era and so this is the era to prioritize mobiles.
This epochal change is evident when seen at the source of search traffic (both paid and organic) for your websites.
A survey study can reveal how much traffic was from mobile and from desktop during the past three months. Even though this analysis cannot be considered granular and exhaustive, however, the trend continues to work fit and fine. The results as per volume of USA during last Nov clearly say that mobile search is bringing more traffic to a website than desktops.
Four industries display exceptions to the rule that brings crucial thinking viz:
1. Travel
2. Science and
3. Internet & Telecom
4. Computer & Electronics,
A good example of a web that takes desktop searching as the crucial source of search traffics are:
- Mobile search traffic representing only 55.7% of all traffic
- Desktop search traffic representing 71% of all traffic
What to Plan for 2017?
Preparation for mobile-first Indexing
There have begun various experiments to make the index mobile-first. There is almost a surety that the desktop-first will be switched to mobile-first in 2017. This could create a mobile version with any possible format (viz: PWA, adaptive, responsive, site, m.) of our site making the pages and content present in both desktop and mobile versions the same.
There is a hardcore challenge that this might effect to lose your rankings because in desktop search you can have visible content which is discarded in mobile versions. Consequently, it will lose the SEO visibility and so responsive becomes necessary to deploy effectively and avoid the problem.
Next is the implementation of structured data in mobile versions. Now reconsidering all the user conversion and experience at optimization level, these offer mobile and desktop.
Again, planning and rethinking is one new link building strategy for those having separate m. Mobile sites. This acts as a defensive strategic discussion as no one is aware of the inbound links to the desktop version in a mobile-first index world.
In the light of search engines and mobile-first indexing there are good rapports if you have a new fully functional one in time for the end of 2017. Other it would be better to go for a desktop only site.
Four pillar of future of SEO
SEO has come a long way from being all about creating relevant content, building backlinks and on-page optimization. Since SEO is moving towards a more inclusive strategy, a huge part of present-day practices are influencing search queries as opposed to keywords and creating content around them. The four pillars upon which the SEO stands to hold the future as seen from the analytical point of view are:
1. RankBrain
2. Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)
3. The Knowledge Graph & rich answers
4. Real-time, Integrated Penalty Filters
3 Predictions about the future of SEO
1. AI will run search
With the announcement of RankBrain last year, everything changed dramatically in the search world. RankBrain being among the three search ranking factors makes AI a great thing for search.
With time when machines learn a pattern it ultimately leads to more accurate results thereby killing the black-hat SEO and making it industry focused as a whole.
2. AMP will be a ranking factor
With Google operating in the divided world of mobile-desktop indexing system of operation, the process is creating two indexes (one for desktop and one for mobile) the mobile becomes the primary index.
Since the world is of mobile-first, this has led to the change of buying, interaction and searching mechanism. Mobile search has come up with roughly to 59% of overall search-query volumes.
3. UX will play a larger role
Knowing that Google is obsessed with users make the search results more and more customized to create for them a customized experience (UX). If the content doesn’t engage the user, means you will lose your battle without taking much effect to your information details.
For gaining a better position, users inside/out role is a must. This could help to create content for them and engaging them through free analytics tools (moreover also for tracking their activities).
Now less than 30% of small-businesses use web analytics, coupon codes, call tracking and 18% admit to not even track anything; whereas 45% of marketer don’t formally evaluate their analytics for accuracy and quality.
