SEO is constantly evolving, with major search engines changing the way that they sort results to suit the searches on a regular basis. Many past practices such as keyword stuffing are now obsolete.  In fact, excessive usage of keywords now results in your website being blacklisted. The SEO game is always afoot and if you want to remain on top of it, you will have to remain updated and make adjustments to your strategy accordingly.

2017 is set to be an interesting year for mobile users. Reminiscing about Mobilegeddon 2015, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if Google makes more algorithm updates to benefit mobile users.  With this in mind, here are some of our SEO predictions for 2017:

Condensed Information

Over the past few years, there has been a trend to upload lengthy content on websites. However, as we see it, 2017 will not favour fluff. On the contrary, SEO marketing will prefer condensed, relevant information. The more information that can be delivered without an extensive usage of words, the better for your search rankings.

Mobile Friendly SERPs

Google announced on 4th November that it is focusing on making its search results more mobile-friendly. This means that the algorithms will display SERPs by examining website to see if they are optimised for mobile. We believe that such transformations will enhance the user experience, so if you have a website that doesn’t yet have a different configuration for desktop and mobile, it is a good time to make relevant changes to your content to allow for this.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

AMP is a protocol that makes it possible to create WebPages that can be loaded immediately on mobile devices. The trend of AMPs was announced in 2016 and it has gained pace as 2016 rolled out. The main purpose of the open source protocol is to make websites load faster and use less data. Google favours the websites that have crossed over to using AMPs and we believe that there will be a greater inclination towards sites that use AMPs in the upcoming year.

Algorithmic Machine Learning

We predict that the way the algorithms of the major search engines work will also be completely transformed. Google Hummingbird is an existing algorithmic function that makes use of long tail keywords and spoken language queries to display the most relevant search results. We believe that search engines are likely to incorporate more machine reading functions to update algorithms for users who are on the go, use long queries and incorporate normal speech-language when browsing the internet.

Expect a Growth in Voice Search

Voice Search is one of the most underrated mobile search features. If Google is focusing on semantics with machine learning algorithms and giving importance to AMPs, it wouldn’t be shocking to hear Google beginning to talk about improving voice search queries.  With many voice assisted applications available to mobile users, this would just be the next step in making SEO more mobile-user friendly.

To discover more about SEO and other best marketing practices in 2017, read Iconic Digital’s blog here.