2017 SEO Trends: 7 Important Ways To Influence Results

By Sarah Giometti | SEO

Jan 22

SEO is vital for businesses who want to maximize their online presence. SEO directs traffic to your website, ultimately determining whether your ideal customer finds your solution to their problem or your competitor’s.

Search engine optimization is not always white and black, it can be tricky. Every day, major search companies tinker with their algorithm, changing how effectively your SEO tactics will work to attract customers. That’s why it’s vital to be aware of these seven key SEO trends for 2017 that will influence results– and to start adjusting your SEO strategy in preparation now.

What 2017 SEO trends will be trending in the new year? What type of changes should we be expecting?

1. “Dense” written content will be more SEO friendly (but still less than images or videos). SEO used to favor short, snappy answers to queries, which meant that surface-level answers on blogs and other pages were best, but over the past few years, long-form content has become more appealing since it provided deeper, more useful answers.

In 2017, it’s likely that length on its own will matter less and less. Instead, informative, no-fluff or “dense” content will gain favor. The more useful and comprehensive your information, the higher it will rank in SEO.

2. Videos will gain even more power. This year, video has become increasingly powerful for improving your SEO. Next year, this trend is likely to continue. Videos will continue to gain SEO power, which means that producing high-quality videos for your website and social media websites will truly no longer be optional.

3. AMP will become exponentially more important. This year, Google released the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) framework, a type of website development strategy to speed up mobile load time for websites. Google has recently confirmed its commitment to this product, which means that mobile load time is likely to be a factor in search rank. You need to ensure your mobile load times are up to snuff (or simply switch over to AMP now).

4. An active social media presence will matter more for SEO reach. Social media has long been a helpful way to boost your search rank, if for no other reason than it gives you more pages to find. Now, however, this presence has become a part of many search algorithms– your social media accounts boost your brand’s SEO overall. In 2017, however, just having a page won’t be enough. You’ll need an active presence, too, in order to increase your reach.

5. The organic rank of commercial searches will matter less due to ads. If you are optimizing for common commercial searches, you need to keep in mind that even a top result may not make it above the fold anymore due to increasing numbers of ads on mobile. In 2017, you’ll need to optimize more creative terms, and consider ads to increase your reach in commercial searches.

6. Conversational queries will be more important in SEO. More people are using virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana to make searches. The rate of their use is only expected to increase in 2017. As more people use virtual assistants, the nature of queries becomes more conversational, using questions and full sentences. This means that SEO optimization needs to take the conversational nature of queries into consideration more than ever before.

7. Machine learning will continue to change the way search algorithms work. Google RankBrain has been out for a little over a year now, learning more about how users phrase searches naturally. This data gained through machine learning will likely have a huge impact on automatic changes to the search algorithm in the future. Exactly how this will affect online marketing isn’t yet clear, but you should be looking out for changes throughout 2017.

The sooner you optimize your SEO to account for these trends, the better. Over 93% of online experiences begin with search, which means that SEO is perhaps the most important online marketing tactic that your company can use to grow your business. Don’t risk your company’s success by ignoring these SEO trends for 2017.

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