Optimize for Mobile:

With more searches taking place from mobile and desktops, it has become inevitable to prepare for mobile-first indexing. To determine the website ranking, Google announced Mobile-first indexing first time in November 2016, with the intention to prioritize mobile sites to desktop sites. Google has also started favoring sites that have switched over to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs).

Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source protocol that allows publishers to create pages that can load quickly on mobile devices. The idea is that, a handful of simple structural changes can make your site load up to four times faster and use eight times less data. AMP improves sites average session duration and bounce rate which is critical to get high rankings in search results.

Voice Search

People like to multitask and in this fast world people find ways to make life easy. Voice search has gained its popularity not just because it’s cool, it has other advantages too; it’s faster and helps to multi-task. Voice chat is also becoming reliable as technology is improving and word error rate is going down. In 2017, we expect more of intuitive search results which is delivered after interpreting the meaning and context of the phrases spoken. Google Home and Echo by Amazon allows consumers to search for anything they want but this also means search engines should also interpret natural phrases as that’s how human speak. Thus, Voice search will continue to evolve and it is essential to incorporate voice search strategy into our website, as voice search optimization will be the future of SEO.

Featured Snippets

A featured snippet is a quick answer to a searched query which is displayed at the top of the search page. It is also referred to as Ranking#0 as it comes before traditional organic results and often the URL of #0 and #1 remains same. So, this gives an advantage to the brand to feature twice on the 1st Page of Google SERP’s. Google Home is a single-result search device which experiments with the voice-only search and uses featured snippets to power answer to searched queries.

Featured snippets were specially designed for devices that only have room to display a small number of results (such as mobile phones) or even a single result. These searching feature has also boost up the Click through rates (CTRs) instead of harming them. Featured snippets helps many users find the information they are looking for without ever needing to click on one of the links so it is very important for the websites to have texts on their pages that answers to the common queries of the website.

Cross- Channel Marketing

The trend of using various channels to market a product in an integrated way has increased in these few years. Cross-channel Marketing is an extension of Multichannel Marketing and when we put them together then they will complement each other to bring maximum impact.

The main goal for every brand is to create prominent brand presence between different devices and platforms so that user makes a purchase. Promoting a website on Facebook or on Google can improve engagement statistics and this will eventually make the website appear on relevant SERPs. Hence, SEO alone is not enough to attract more visitors, Social media campaigning, regular blogging and PPC campaign along with tradition SEO techniques may attract web traffics and convert customers.

User Intension

Keyword Strategy is going to stay as people will search for their queries in the search engines but they are incomplete without user intent. Customers today know exactly what they are looking for, so if the brands succeed in addressing customer’s intent, then they succeed in conversion optimizations as well. Hence, optimizing content based on User Intent is a practice which will be taken up in 2017. Brands will have to analyze what users are searching for and what brings them to their website and to do this the Brands have to stay updated with their analytics. They need to determine what’s working for them and what’s not. Also, Google is also getting better in displaying results that match the specific intent of the Users. This is one of the very reasons, why brands integrate blogs in their website!