The Importance of SEO in 2017

At the moment, there are 644,275,754 active websites on the internet. What this means is that your chances of getting discovered without a proper guidance are not optimistic. Sure, your niche may not be as saturated as some others are, but chances are that it already has dozens of websites better optimized and crawler-friendlier than yours. Luckily, it does not have to stay this way. All you need to do is optimize your website for search engines, which means that sooner or later, you will have to turn to the SEO.

Rich Answers and Why They Matter

There is a joke that the best place to hide a murder weapon is the page 2 of Google search results.  Just think about your last few Google searches. Did you actually have to click on the link or did you just read the answer from the rich answers? To be completely honest, the above-mentioned statistic regarding the number of active websites was also acquired in this way.

There is nothing strange in this because people always tend to go with what is more convenient. Since December of 2014, rich answers have seen a gradual growth in popularity. Nonetheless, in order for your content to get a spot here, you will need to achieve a high ranking, but not just that. Metadata, alt tags and of course having an adequate keyword in the page’s header are also things you need to pay close attention to. Finally, keep in mind that rich answers always address questions, which means that the search used will usually start with “why”, “how” or “where”.

Becoming Crawler-Friendly

If there is one thing that can be said about crawlers, it's that they are becoming more intelligent by the minute. While Sci-Fi fans fantasize about the rise of Terminators and similar killer-robots, what they do not realize is that Google’s ranking system is extremely close to the actual AI. The notion of self-learning is something that is already getting implemented in most search engines and it is only a matter of time when even Google's engineers will not know all the metrics that affect a website’s rank. Still, we are years from this and at the moment, having the right SEO agency still means being able to exploit the system to your own advantage.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)

Since 2015, there are officially more Google searches from mobile than desktop setups. Although this may not seem that big of a deal, when it comes to the way search engines work, this fact has completely revolutionized the industry. First, Google started favoring mobile friendly websites, but now it is taking one step further. The notion accelerated mobile page (AMP) stands for those pages that can load in an instant on any mobile device. Given the fact that nothing kills page traffic like a slow response time, it is likely that in 2017, APMs will undergo a significant boost in popularity.

Improvements in Voice Search

Finally, while voice search is something that is available for a while now, this technology is still not working the way it was expected to. This is not a problem that Google alone faces. A while back, a Chinese driver crashed his Tesla due to a mistake in translation. Luckily, the consequences of such a mistake during a Google search are not that dangerous. The worst case scenario is that a person in question gets frustrated after few unsuccessful attempts and then simply regresses to typing. However, things are about to change.

In 2017, Google will aim towards better recognition and understanding of the uttered words. Namely, this strategy will also rely on your GPS location, since it will enable Google to put your words in both appropriate language and context. Finally, with the use of personalized information on your Google profile, this should be made even easier and more reliable. Whether or not this actually works remains to be seen, but it is beyond doubt that this will once again reshape the world of SEO as we know it.

Conclusion

Even if you do follow all the latest Google announcements and guidelines, the change is arriving so fast that even the greatest veterans of the industry have a hard time keeping up. Because of this, it is estimated that in the following period, the SEO industry will face its golden age.