Today, more and more businesses understand the importance of SEO in driving and developing their online presence. This understanding has come hand in hand with the growing complexity involved in maintaining an effective SEO campaign.
Over the coming year, this complexity will increase, as mobile platforms gain an ever-greater ascendancy over desktops. This will lead to changes in the way Google and other search engines rank websites based on searches made on mobile devices.
While the ways in which users are accessing the internet and performing searches are changing and the signals used by search engines are increasingly complex and manifold, SEO consultants emphasise that it is still important to remember that the underlying principles of SEO, i.e. ensuring content is relevant and authoritative, remain the cornerstones of a successful campaign.
Mobile Platforms
The increased use of mobile technology such as tablets and smartphones to access the internet over the past few years has been plain for all to see, and around 80% of us make at least some use of mobile technology in our online activities.
Today, the majority of this usage is for accessing email and social media as opposed to web searches and visiting pages, but the trend towards mobile for more and more online activities cannot be ignored.
While the majority of website visits are still via desktop at present, the majority of social media visits are via mobile. The fact that so many of us use multiple devices to access the internet emphasises the need to consider adaptive web design that works well across all platforms.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
AMP will form a critical component of SEO in 2017 and further emphasises the important role of mobile technology. The project has the backing of Google and is designed to allow faster delivery of content to mobile devices by using simplified AMP HTML code. This type of content can load much faster than traditional HTML.
AMP uses an open-source framework, and so could have far more far-reaching consequences than analogous technologies such as Facebook's "Instant Articles" technology that is closed-source and therefore bespoke to Facebook. AMP can be used by anyone - all it requires is for webpages to be built using AMP HTML.
While AMP is clearly an important project for anybody involved in web design, there is an additional aspect to it that puts it at the forefront of SEO considerations - this is the fact that Google searches on mobile devices will give preference to pages that have a valid AMP version, displaying these in a separate section above non-AMP results.
Remember The Basics
While AMP and mobile technology will be major topics for 2017, the key to successful SEO will not be so different to 2016 and years gone by - and that will be good quality, relevant engaging content that people want to read.
In 2017 it will be more important than ever to ensure your SEO campaign is in the hands of an expert who understands the fundamentals of SEO, the latest trends and developments in online technology and the specific and unique needs of your business - and who has the skills and experience to tie these strands together in a campaign that will push your business ahead of the competition.