7 Key SEO Trends to Boost Your Google Rankings In 2017
We constantly hear the phrase ‘change is the only constant’ tossed about throughout the first few months of a new year. Nowhere is this axiom truer than in SEO.
A few years ago, we had the time for trial-and-error when it comes to Google updates because they were so far and few in between. Also, people recognized certain variables and had reverse engineered their way to the top of the rankings. As time passed, (and Google engineers got smarter) algorithms have their updates even more regularly and in ways that have been incredibly hard to decipher.
Entire businesses disappeared because of these updates, and stock markets traded places quicker than a game of musical chairs. A reason for this is because most of the SEO campaigns that were run till the last few updates were catered to bring about massive changes in rankings and offer little or no value to the reader.
What does this mean for you and me? The only way forward was to create value – by this, I mean compelling content that encourages the user to stay on. Let’s look at a few concepts that you need to incorporate for your brand remain in the hunt for revenue and conversions.
7 Trends That Can Power Your Rankings On Google
1) Recognize What Users Want
If you are running a business, the first thing you would do I narrow down your target demographic. This same ideology has to apply to your SEO (Søkemotoroptimalisering) campaigns as well. Instead of trying to get ALL of the people browsing the internet on your page, optimize your website to bring in your target audience.
The days of bringing in a million users on your website and then taking a victory lap are long gone. This is the age of tangible numbers – conversions and revenue. You need to focus on strategies rather than just metrics like keyword density and hits per page
2) AMP Your Website Up!
The advent of super-powerful mobile devices has had an enormous impact on browsing – over 60% of all Google search request are from mobile devices and this only set to increase even further. This suggests that more than half of your users are going to be logging in remotely.
Accelerated Mobile Pages have answered the call for higher performance on mobile devices. These load up quickly and are perfect for users on mobile devices. Google has disclosed that factors like mobile speed and usability are factors to be considered on search engine algorithms.
3) SERPs Love Rich Snippets
Rich snippets have had a noticeable impact on search results. Google now analyzes searches contextually, so if you search for ‘cast of Lion,’ you are taken to a new page where you have a lot more information to check out. Rich snippets have practically doubled in the last two years and are only going to increase even further.
These types of searches are made possible with the use of structured data markup, which maps out a table with possible responses to queries that are generated. Implementing structured data markup on your website will enable these types of searches to highlight your site as well.
4) Give Your Brand A Voice
Another offshoot of advancing tech is the increasing capability of voice recognition. Several apps translate speech to text when it comes to searches. Adding to this fact is that there are a lot more people using this since errors have decreased over 30 since 2012.
You need to get optimizing your website for voice searches which means prioritizing naturally occurring long-tail keywords and applying Structured Data to give queries additional context.
5) Across Multiple Platforms – Cross-Channel Marketing
An extension of multi-channel marketing, cross-channel marketing takes the approach even further. A requirement for this type of marketing on your website is to have your presence in as many types of channels as possible. This means you need to keep your brand image consistent across multiple devices and platforms.
While this is still a fledgling technique, it never hurts to be an early adopter of technology that you know is going to pay off dividends in the days to come.
6) Keep Your Users Secure
While most brands still not have gone ahead with this citing several reasons, Google has established HTTPS as a ranking factor for a website. So if you haven’t already done so, try getting this done as quickly as possible, and you are likely to see increased traffic to your website.
Granted, that migration from HTTP to HTTPS is a complex set of processes, but it is definitely worth it if it’s going to help your website in the long run.
7) Keep It Short And Sweet
One technique followed by most SEO companies is to write pages on pages of so that they can keep their keyword density down to acceptable levels. While this has worked before, these days Google is considering a new metric that measures the value per word of the page.
Another factor is that longer pages tend to load a lot slower as well. Here is where you will optimize your web page speed by optimizing content and images to fall within acceptable page speed parameters.
Conclusion
These are some of the methods that you can use to rank well in 2017. Since these are moving your website towards better QOL (quality of life) status, you will find that these work for you even in the years to come. Do let us know about what has worked for you early 2017 and please feel to use the comments section to give your thoughts!
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