SEO Trends in 2017

As an SEO agency it is important to understand not only how the previous year has impacted search, but how the upcoming year will also see changes in the way website owners, businesses and agencies like ourselves approach SEO.

Voice Search

Amazon Echo, Hey Google and a plethora of voice activated actions across tablets, mobiles and laptops signal that voice search is going to be big in 2017.

This isn’t to say voice search in SEO hasn’t been around for a while, the Hummingbird algorithm understands voices and the development of the core algorithm to understand the different ways users will search for the same key terms and phrases is core to SEO and the future of the internet.

Multi-Channel Campaigns – retargeting etc.

Looking at more of a campaign side of SEO, we will see a much greater emphasis on users being targeting across different channels. For example, users start browsing on mobiles and move across to laptops in some cases to make purchases. This is particularly prevalent when considering larger purchasing.

Cookie management, retargeting on a user basis and capturing users at different moments in the sales journey is now essential with the level of competition online.

This will mean a greater level of user analysis, data crunching and multiple campaigns to sit under each campaign umbrella.

Let’s Get Technical

Technical SEO is quickly just becoming ‘SEO’ and is no longer a secondary thought after on-page updates or linking.

SEO agencies will audit the full technical make-up of the website on a page level and it is important to ensure each element on the page is delivering as it should to improve site performance.

A slow loading page, or website, is read as poor user experience and in turn search engine crawlers will devalue what is on the page before of this.

Onsite Security

Next up is onsite security – if you’ve not switched over to HTTPS yet as an ecommerce store, then you should immediately. If the website is not ecommerce then ensure it’s on the to-do list for 2017.

Users are now expecting a minimal level of security on site and understand that HTTPS offers this. Eventually this will become a must-have for websites looking for a top-spot in SERPs.

Mobile, Responsiveness and User Experience

Google has had a busy year in mobile and is now beginning to show ‘this website may not be mobile optimised’ messages in search results.

2017 is going to see the algorithms across each search portal flip heavily towards websites offering a great mobile experiences and the ability for users to interact in the most efficient ways.

POLARIS is an SEO agency, contact info@polarisagency.co.uk for more information