SEO Trends to Watch In 2017

It’s all about the user’s experience

This has been a best practice that so frequently gets overlooked in web design and SEO strategies, but it is so important.

By developing your site, content, and SEO strategies around the user’s experience on your site, you are increasing your chances of making it even higher on search engines rankings.

Why is this so important?

By creating a better user experience on your website, you are giving your visitors incentive to spend more time on your site, to visit more pages on your site, and to take action steps like registering for your email lists.

For our 2017 SEO strategies, consider developing your pages with the user in mind by following these 3 steps:

Research

Before ever building your pages, look into what is bringing users into your site in the first place.

What problems are you solving? What questions do your visitors want answered? Find appropriate keywords that will help your answers and solutions found quicker by search engines.

Enhance

After uncovering all the data and answers from the research, take some time and strategicallyuse that information to enhance your site. Some do’s and don’ts in your enhancements:

• Do evaluate and enhance every page on your site where applicable.
• Don’t stuff your pages with keywords (it’s a big turnoff for search engines).
• Do improve pages with media, strong section headers, and clearly defined purposes.
• Don’t let your content get confusing. Answer the questions and move on.

Adapt

After you conduct your initial research and develop and implement your new strategy, make sure you continually monitor your site’s analytics.

If the pages you want to have visited most aren’t appearing at the top of your reports or if you aren’t making the progress climbing the ranks the way you hope, don’t be afraid to adjust. SEO development never stops.

Accelerated mobile pages are vital

Implementing accelerated mobile pages, or AMP’s, into your web development has gone from trending techniques to web development best practices over the recent years.

These pages that are designed to load almost immediately for mobile devices carry great importance for your customers’ experience on your website.

However, implementing AMP’s will not only help your visitors web experience. These pages are becoming more and more impactful for SEO development than ever before.

Search engines are now beginning to show favoritism to websites that have integrated accelerated mobile pages. When you implement these pages, you are working toward higher rankings on those search engines.

Going local with backlinks

If you aren’t getting any backlinks to your website already, then we encourage you to drop everything else and get on this strategy.

One of the longest running effective SEO strategies is to get other websites to link back to yours. This is such a crucial part of SEO development.

However, we have even seen this start to change in the way it is executed.

With the rise of local SEO becoming more and more prominent, and with large companies having more of a budget to dominate the PPC market (and even the local PPC market), figuring out how to stand out in local SEO is increasing in its priority.

The best way we’ve seen to accomplish this goal is to find local businesses and sites that will backlink to your site.

Communicate your personal brand through your website

Personal brands are becoming synonymous with brand transparency, and it’s becoming more and more vital to your company’s website than ever before.

By having a personal brand attached to your website, you increase the potential to open doors to other SEO strengthening opportunities – things like guest blogging, customer relationship development, and increased time per visit on your site.

Before you can start communicating your brand, it is important to understand if the brand you want to showcase is what is being perceived by your customers.

Set up some surveys and focus groups with your customers (and target customer demographics) to uncover what people actually think about your business and its personality.

To showcase your personal brand to increase SEO, we recommend getting extremely active on social media. Go beyond just posting your blogs or deals on social media.

Start interacting with your customers. Just remember communicate your personal brand with your social posts and interactions.

SEO is not a sprint

When it comes to your SEO strategies, you can never become comfortable.

What works today will likely not work as well even within a year. You have to be able to track the changes in search engines’ algorithms, adapt to those changes, and be willing to run the marathon.

It’s time to start working.

The good news is that you are not alone in your efforts. We are here to help. We understand the ins and outs of search engine optimization, and we are ready to help you see growth in your web traffic and page rankings.