SEO is a rapidly evolving field, and every year Google and the other main search engines produce numerous innovations. The future of SEO in 2017 is likely to be incredibly exciting, and include things that we might not have thought about even a couple of years ago?
What’s coming for SEO in 2017? Well, the truth is that only Google really knows what they are working on – but there are some likely candidates. Over the last few years, the search engines have engaged in a strong push for improving the quality of its own index – to cut down on spam and to focus on sites that publish facts, rather than ones that push bad information and unclear agendas.
Google also wants to keep people inside its own ecosystem – using knowledge cards and mapping links to help people get information without having to load up a second website. This is something that is frustrating some webmasters because it is depriving them of valuable page views. White Noise Digital, the best Baltimore SEO company, told us in a recent interview that they have been practicing safe search engine optimization for years. “Focus on the end-user and you will have excellent results with your SEO.” That is exactly what their digital marketing team told us last month.
Over the course of this year, we can likely expect to see more local and mobile search. More emphasis on interactive content, and more emphasis on providing content that is personally relevant as well as user-relevant. These are all things that make it hard for a webmaster to specifically target for.
The best thing that any individual webmaster can do is to focus on providing users with content that is informative, entertaining and engaging and supplied in a rich media way. Google already understands PDF files, videos and images pretty well, but there will inevitably be even more improvements soon. One area that it is pushing towards right now is mobile apps – the search engine can already index inside some apps, and it is working on providing even deeper app links so that mobile users can get instant access to exactly what they need via their smartphones.
Location-aware content is a valuable thing and something that the search engines are again working on with enthusiasm. With location aware search, people can look for pizza shops or local garages and be shown ones in their area, even if they haven’t entered “near me” or “in CITY” as a part of the search.
No-one can really predict what will happen in the next algorithm update or what the secret to good rankings will be from month to month – which is why it makes so much sense to just focus on offering good content and having a robust website. It is rare for a quality website to be penalized when ranking updates happen – usually the websites that suffer are the ones that were doing something dishonest or trying to game the system. If you do not do this, then you will have a website that is relatively future proof and that is going to continue to perform at least reasonably well even if the target features of the most popular search engines do change.