Predictions & SEO Trends 2017

seo trends 2017 I love this time of the year. It’s great to reconnect with friends and family over the holidays. The traffic in DC gets a little less horrible every day through the end of the year (when it reverts back to dreadful). But most entertaining is reading the growing list of predictions and forecasts for the search industry for the coming year.

Search Google for “SEO trends 2017” and over 27 million results are returned. I made it through most of the results on the first four pages of Google’s results. So I’m going to save you some time and give it to you straight.

Begin the New Year with better search rankings. Call us at (443) 475-0787 or Contact Us online.

Future Hits & SEO Trends

Some pretty sure things for the coming year are:

Mobile search (including AMP) is here and continues to be important
Content is still “king”
The looming impact of artificial intelligence
Voice search and RankBrain are just around the corner
Link building isn’t quite dead, but should be thought of in terms of influencer outreach
Technical SEO matters more than ever

Sounds a lot like 2016, doesn’t it? If you think I missed something, go ahead and look at the first four pages of results. You’ll find the same themes over and over again. This is not to say these “predictions” are wrong. Just the opposite, they’re spot on.

Keeping Promises

Rather than share our forecasts, predictions, or SEO trends – 2017 instead will inspire us to continue to improve. So in the spirit of the New Year, periscopeUP will make the following five resolutions:

Google’s mobile first index will take hold in 2017. For those clients with unique desktop and mobile sites, we resolve to use the robots.txt testing tool to verify your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot. We will do this with consistency and frequency.
Voice search will change the competitive landscape for local search in 2017. For local advertisers, we resolve to fully optimize your website for voice queries. We will focus on the long-tail searches and ensure your content “answers questions” as opposed to focusing primarily on keyword themes.
Google analytics reviews are at the heart of every periscopeUP engagement, but we can go further in 2017 for those clients where it’s relevant. We resolve to focus on attribution modeling to better understand the contribution of all marketing and advertising channels.
Keyword research and optimization are still important, but focusing page level metadata and content to specific terms is not the way forward. Google’s RankBrain (AI) moves the SEO priority from keyword optimization to thematic optimization. Content will remain vitally important, and we resolve to shift toward thematic optimization in line with business objectives.
Technical optimization is still critical to SEO performance. We continuously preach the importance of our clients’ websites to meet best practices with regard to tech. For some, we’ve seen incredible results through technical optimization alone. We resolve to continue keeping our clients’ websites in great order technologically.