7 SEO Trends that Dominated 2017
The year 2017 is nearing its end. It was a game-changing year for SEO India as well as other regional and global SEO service providers. In order to devise competent search engine optimization services, one needs to stay abreast of the latest search engine changes and trends.
SEO industry is always transforming, evolving into something more intuitive for users. Therefore, it’s important to keep track of it to stay and survive in this rapidly transforming industry. Though several search engine optimization trends appeared in 2017, only a select few were able to impact it greatly.
The following list enumerates the top 7 trends that greatly impacted the SEO industry in 2017:
Increased Role of Personal Digital Assistants in Making Search Queries
For the past couple of years, there’s been a continuous untiring development in personal digital assistants. Some examples of these intelligent non-living beings include Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Echo, and Microsoft’s Cortana. All of them improved greatly since their first appearances. Among other functions, these personal digital assistants allow users to make search queries using simple voice commands.
The year 2017 saw a continuous improvement in digital assistant technology and the way they were able to fetch relevant results for their human companions.
Machine Learning Effecting Search Algorithms
The launch of Google RankBrain in 2015 amazed and excited webmasters about the possibility of algorithmic machine learning. The updated version of Google Hummingbird aims at learning more about the way users phrase conversational queries. It is meant to further advance the Google Hummingbird algorithm, on its own i.e. automatically.
In addition to witnessing machine learning in fields such as data interpretation and marketing automation, 2017 brought many changes from Google supporting machine learning. Coupled with the fact of an arduous research undergoing in machine learning, the trend is most likely to improve for several years to come and making SEO India and elsewhere firms to refurbish their methodologies.
Personal Branding in SEO
Personal Branding Methodology
Personal branding is an efficient way of building user trust and securing guest posts, among several other things. It is also an effective way to improve incoming traffic for a website. Till 2016, only a very limited number of brands have taken advantage of this new SEO methodology. However, it all changed with a surge of businesses adopting personal branding in SEO in 2017.
The impact of personal branding in SEO was so huge that almost every SEO service agency required realigning their services by taking the latest trend into account. This led to a fierce branding competition in the market, bringing many more opportunities for the talented to the table.
SEO for Mobile Apps
For the last 3 or 4 years, apps have gained mainstream attention. SEO options for mobile applications appeared a short while after Android apps made their debut. App streaming is an important implication of the immense interest gained by mobile applications. The feature allows users to stream app content without the need to download the apps on their devices.
In 2017, we witnessed a surge in app indexing and deep linking to in-app content. Though apps replacing the traditional website surfing system seem like a distant thing, the advent of application technology is for sure one of the biggest SEO trends observed in 2017.
The Advent of Dense Content
It’s no secret that the Internet is loaded with same content, written using different words, phrases, and colloquialisms. Earlier, content marketing was focused on the production of as concise content as possible. However, the trend shifted to a surge in epic content – long content that comprehensively covers a topic – over the last couple of years.
The content market is now flooded with both these types of content. To save readers from visiting the same content over and over again, dense content appeared as a savior in 2017. By definition dense content is defined as content that has a very small margin in the gap between itself and size of the page on which it is displayed. It surely enforced many SEO Service Agency firms take the concept into account from now on.
The Rise of AMPs (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMPs, benefit webmasters with the ability to create web pages capable of loading almost instantly on mobile devices. The open-source protocol is backed by Google. The project started a few years back with a select few websites that switched to AMPs, which started to appear in Google Search results with a lightning bolt icon.
In 2017, many big websites, as well as newcomer websites, decided to move to the swift platform. AMP authority claims to make websites load with about 8 times less data than the original webpage. It also claims to make loading time quadruple times faster. This is achieved by means of simplistic structural changes to the website making use of AMPs.
UEO (User Experience Optimization)
User experience is the most important concern of search engine optimization. It is clear by the fact that Google supports websites that load quickly, are well-optimized for mobile devices and most importantly, enjoyed by visitors. Though there was a rise in the practice of UEO, it was 2017 that marked a high in the new SEO practice.
Accelerated Mobile Pages is an important technology aimed at User Experience Optimization. As 2017 witnesses a rise in several websites adopting AMPs, it is a clear indication of businesses focusing towards UEO.
Conclusion
Continuous technological growth is transforming the way we use search engines. 2017 witnesses a great deal of changes to support the fact, as well as hints at something revolutionary on its way.
