Search Engine Optimization is a constantly growing and evolving tactic to improving your online presence. In order to stay current against the competition, you must be improving your site year-round to stay current. Every year, Google adjusts their algorithms causing marketers and businesses to adapt in order to stay in the spotlight of Googlebots. As businesses are implementing their strategies, SEO experts are preparing for the future. In this week’s newsletter, we will dive in to 2017 SEO Trends and predict future SEO trends.

SEO Trends

The following have been the largest SEO trends in 2017. We also give tips on preparing your site for the future.

AMP | Accelerated Mobile Pages

Currently the most prominent trend in SEO is the increase in mobile usage. Prior to 2016 Google’s ranking system focused on desktop. Due to this increase in usage Google has slowly introduced a Mobile-First Index for search ranking.

This year has been all about optimizing mobile experience, one of the first step was improving the speed. A new initiative led by Google, known as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), is all about speed. AMP can be utilized to improve bounce-rates, mobile e-commerce, and over all user experience.

User Experience

Another trend for 2017 is the initiative to improve the user experience. As mobile is becoming more common websites are putting more effort toward adjusting their mobile sites. This means more energy on creating high quality content, visualization, User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX).

The future of user experience will likely rely on conversational keywords. No longer will you be able to jam as many keywords as possible with hope that one will be typed by a user. Smart phone capabilities are becoming more intelligent with the biggest feature being spoken command search. As this technology improves keywords will need to match with the natural flow of language. For more tips on improving your voice search SEO Strategy read our recent blog post.

Google’s 2018 Mobile-First Platform

As 2018 approaches the biggest SEO rumors are surrounding the Mobile-First Indexing. This platform has kept Google testing and improving since 2016. Google’s new ranking system puts the content from mobile pages ahead of those from desktop sites. While this doesn’t mean your desktop site will disappear from the search engine results page (SERP), it does put your site farther back vs competition. In order to make your site up to date for this change, you need to prepare your mobile sites by creating: a responsive design, mobile friendly content, and increase the speed of your site.

Call the SEO expert’s at Blue Sand Group today to learn more. We can help optimize your site’s SEO!