How Will the Face of SEO Change in 2017?

The beginning of the new year usually raises a variety of questions as to precisely what will happen in the SEO field over the next 12 months. SEO’s landscape has changed dramatically over recent years, but it remains every bit as crucial and powerful as it ever was. The major search engines are obviously not going anywhere, which means the same could be said for SEO.

So as far as the professionals are concerned, what are the predictions for 2017 when it comes to SEO?

1. Better Mobile Websites
The first and most crucial priority seems set to be to a large extent similar to that of 2016. That being, to offer increasingly sophisticated and improved mobile websites for the growing mobile market. The only difference this year being that just satisfying mobile clients with a basic responsive webpage will just not be enough. Instead, the future of you webpage’s SEO prowess will depend on enhanced and improved mobile focus.

2. Intensive Analysis and Measurements
Along with SEO techniques and tools in general, available methods of analysing and measuring the success of SEO strategies are becoming more sophisticated than ever before. Which in turn means that one major SEP trend in 2017 will lie in meticulously and consistently monitoring each effort made, as and when it is made. This way, no time and efforts are wasted on SEO strategies that are unlikely to deliver results.

3. Increase in Long-form Content
Along with long-form keyword phrases and keywords, long-form content also represents a major element of modern SEO. Along with meeting the requirements of the search engines, long-form content also instils a sense of authority and trust among website visitors. It means having to put a bit more effort into producing the content, but what you get in return more than justifies the outlay.

4. Responding to Customer Experience
While SEO might traditionally have been entirely objective – focusing on statistics and numbers – SEO in 2017 will see much more focus on the overall user experience, but instead using actual user encounters to build effective strategies. The reason being that nowadays, the longer users stay on your site, the more pages they view and the more often they come back, the better the rankings you can expect as a result.

5. Regular Audits
Last but not least, just revisiting an SEO strategy every six months or so to determine its effectiveness is simply not enough anymore. The trouble is, the fact that rankings volatility has been reduced as of late has led many web developers and business owners into a false state of security. They create an SEO strategy that seems to be working and leave it to its devices. Nonetheless, the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to carry out an audit strategy on a monthly basis, in order to be able to eliminate anything that you might be wasting your money and time on.

How Quickly Can You Get My Website Onto Page One Of Google?

It’s possibly the most frequently asked question of every internet marketing company.
Hardly surprising really when you consider how valuable a spot on Google Page One can be for the vast majority of businesses.

For those who achieve success in reaching this seeming illusive territory the rewards can be enormous.

It’s important to realise that optimising your website for the search engines is not a quick fix, but rather a medium to long-term objective. That said, dependent on the competitiveness of the keywords and phrases you want to rank highly for, you could begin to see notable results as early as 6-8 weeks’ time.

Do not be tempted by any internet marketing company which promises you overnight success or instant results. Unless these people possess some kind of magic powers the rest of us mortals don’t have, then their processes will be at best dubious and like many before you, you will almost certainly find your website plummets in the rankings suddenly, or even disappears altogether, along with the so-called internet marketing company hopefully!

Another trick of the unscrupulous agencies is that they will promise you will achieve Google Page One status for a keyword or key phrase, which turns out to be irrelevant. Let’s say your widget manufacturing company is called ABC Widgets London.

Now do you think you’d be impressed by an agency that claimed they could get “ABC Widgets London” onto that exclusive first page?

Well I sincerely hope not:

1. Because there is no competition for that particular phrase
                and
2. 99% of people searching for your type of business won’t be aware you exist, that’s why they are searching, so the likelihood of someone actually typing your company name into the search box is pretty slim.

What you need is to rank highly for those terms your customers will actually use to find you. In the case of our example you would be aiming to attract rankings for search terms like: “widget manufacturing”, “widget manufacturers”, “widget production”, and the like.

This is where the knowledge and skills of your internet marketing advisor will come to the fore. The aim of every competent internet marketing company will be to get its clients’ websites to the top of the rankings . . . and to keep them firmly fixed there.

Clearly, in the world of internet marketing, you cannot do much better than to rank top of the pile every time someone searches for what your business offers.