Nowadays, modern businesses don't go around without SEO as part of their digital marketing arsenal. According to research conducted by Ascend2, 82% of the surveyed marketers considered SEO as a more effective digital marketing strategy, with 42% stating that its effectiveness has increased significantly. Eighty-one percent of the survey's respondents revealed that their SEO efforts are at least above average.
SEO last year, as predicted by many industry experts, has been really more about innovations with Google, still the leading search engine.
In 2017, these are the top trends that you should watch out.
1. Everyone Goes Mobile
When 5 billion people are already on mobile, how could you pass up such gigantic opportunity?
More and more companies will adopt a "mobile first" strategy when it comes to SEO.
Let's also not forget that Google is now moving to a mobile-only world. According to Gianluca Fiorelli in his article in Moz.com, mobile-first indexing has become an inevitable result of almost a year of changing the people's mindset from desktop to mobile.
2. Video Marketing Still Reigns
In 2016, video has been predicted to rise more in relevance compared to text content. This year (2017), it is predicted that online video will account for 74% of all web traffic. This figure alone shows the potential impact video marketing can bring into your SEO campaign.
When 81% of people feature their video on their brand website, the need to optimize these pages to rank on top of the SERPs become more of a necessity. This is one of the major reasons why 93% of marketers will use video for online marketing, sales, and communication.
3. AMP is Becoming More and More Popular
AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, is another technology launched by Google to create better mobile experience for online users. It was launched in 2015 but was integrated in the SERPs on the first quarter of 2016 (February).
According to SearchEngineWatch.com, one of the most successful AMP integrated websites in 2016 is Gizmodo. They got a 50% increase in impressions and 80% from their AMP pages are new traffic.
4. Content Quality is King
You might be familiar with the popular tag line "Content is King," but that is not the real deal these days. It's now "Content Quality is King." The quality of your content can predict the outcome of your digital marketing campaign, more specifically in SEO. There's no point in producing content that would only be thrown into the gigantic trash bin of the World Wide Web.
5. Backlinks Are Not the Top Ranking Signal Anymore
This is not news to anyone who has been keeping a tab in the latest happenings in the industry. But, for those who are still not aware, backlinks have already continuously spiraled down in relevance through the years. Why is this happening and how can this bring impact on how you do SEO this year?
Of course, there are still many who don't agree on this. See here, Backlinko's study last year, wherein they said that backlinks are still the most important search ranking factor. But this is negated by Search Metrics. Their study revealed that backlinks have continuously lost their relevance and are no longer the ultimate factor in search ranking.
Courtesy of YahooFinance
