5 Search Engine Trends In 2017

SEO is undoubtedly one of the most important components of your marketing strategy. It is the very thing that brings potential customers to your website when they input their search phrases in engines such as Google.

However, in order to keep your position on top of the list you will be required to make changes to your existing strategy. New methods of increasing your ranking show up all the time, and 2017 is full of them. You may naturally find some of them to be more suitable for your website, but using at least some of them is most definitely going to help your business grow.

Mobile-first

Let’s be clear here - many points on this list are optional. This one is not. Mobile devices are already accounting for about 50% of all internet usage. You can’t expect people to visit a desktop-designed website on their smartphones and feel comfortable. For this exact reason website indexes like Google rank the ones that are deemed to be suitable for this kind of browsing higher than the rest. Whether we like it or not, mobile-first isn't the future - it's the present.

Personalized predictive search

Behind this name hides a simple idea: to ensure that you'll see what you want to see based on your behavior on the internet. While links are still important for your website’s listing, Google puts much effort into moving in the direction of predictive searches. With the previous point in mind, it seems just logical that in the age of social media and personal devices carried in our pockets for most of the day we will see more personalized and independent results.

Local targeting

Good news for brick-and-mortar venues that are trying to acquire new customers - local search is growing, again due to adopting a mobile-first strategy. People frequently use their smartphones in order to look for nearby restaurants, cafes or shops. By analyzing user location it can be done much more efficiently.

Image and video marketing

The increasing importance of video marketing has already been covered by us in this article: Is Video The Future Of The Internet? . Why do we mention it? Well, some time ago Google acquired EyeFluence (an eye tracking technology company) and Moodstocks (image recognition tech), along with a few other video content-centered firms, strongly hinting that we might see more development in this area - especially since YouTube has encountered multiple problems relating to monetizing its videos and is witnessing growing competition.

Voice search

Growing popularity of digital personal assistants such as Siri or Alexa made voice control much more accessible and familiarized people with the concept. Their features already contain the possibility to search the internet and provide answer, but their capability is still somewhat limited. Regardless, companies such as Bing are already putting up the effort to implement it in their search engines.

The particular strategies you’d want to implement in your SEO will, of course, depend on the kind of website and business you’re running. They might, however, give you an idea about what to look for in the upcoming months.