Search Engine Optimization or SEO has been a key component of digital marketing in the past decade. The information age has paved the way for a lot of avenues to target readers and potential consumers. SEO in Manchester has provided a breeding ground for competition that almost anyone and everyone can become a content strategist.
Get ahead of your competitors by adapting to these eight upcoming trends to debut this 2017.1. Voice search is the next frontier
Why key in your search when you have Siri, Cortana and Alexa to do the job for you? Next year, more and more searches would come from voice commands. Expect keywords to be more conversational. Instead of keying in 'best pubs in London', the voice search keywords would now be, 'nearest pubs with draft beer in Soho'.
2. Long content will cease to be attractive
The average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to now a meager eight seconds. You can have Snapchat and Twitter to blame for this decrease, but people are getting tired of the epic messages that used to dominate long content. Save your content from being skipped by making it condensed to deliver a message in just about a few seconds.
3. AMP may just become the new favorite
Since its launch in February 2016, Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) has been a new standard in creating content for mobile devices. You might be surprised to learn that there are a lot of mobile-first communities in the world that first experience the internet on phones and tablets. With content easier to load than HTML, AMP is definitely here to stay.
4. Social content may emerge as a new strategy
When introducing your company to people online, it would be easier to show them your social networking platforms than the company website. People hate to be distracted from their social media habits, especially since loading your page would mean opening the browser and waiting for it to load. Make yourself present wherever your target market is, and make your content work for them.
5. Content publishing quality over quantity
The number of people who 'see' your content doesn't matter as much as how the readers engage to it. Say you publish five articles a day for all your followers to see, with a lot of page traffic but no comments or likes. Compare it with publishing one article with overflowing questions, likes and shares to social media. Which do you think engaged the market more, being more effective in reaching the readers?
6. SEOs will focus more on long tail
Because more and more ads take up the space of organic listings in search engines like Google, you need to focus on long tail keywords. There is less competition when you use keywords that use three or more words with specific targeting. Instead of using 'best Manchester hotels', you may want to use a more specific 'best 3 star Manchester hotels'. This gives you a bigger chance of appearing on search listings.
7. Integration of machine learning may open new doors
RankBrain, Google's machine-learning AI system, picks out trends in user searches that lets people land in your page even if you don't have the keywords they used. Used mainly as a query refinement tool, you can potentially have more traffic from inaccuracies in search terms.
8. Secure sites will be favored more
In the previous years there have been privacy breach cases everywhere. From hacking government sites to personal cloud storage accounts, information finds its way outside its servers. The result is that people feel safer when your HTPPs appears beside your domain name. It makes the site more credible and secure, therefore giving you a higher ranking.
While nothing is cast on stone on how these forecasts would manifest in the next year, it would be good to prepare. Start creating a plan on how your site can adapt to the ever-changing needs of the market. Train yourself, create back-up plans, and do all the necessary changes to make your site 2017-ready. Sometime next year you're going to be thankful that you came across this article.