2016 has now come to an end: it is time to recap what happened this year and try to hypothesize possible SEO trends for 2017.
Clearly, the purpose of this post is not to provide accurate and unmistakable guidelines on what will happen but, based on what has already happened, to provide possible developments for this upcoming period.
Mobile First
By now, the web has changed considerably by increasingly moving searches to mobile: this is true especially for the more commercial and local informational searches, such as weather.
In fact, giants such as Google are giving increasingly more importance to this kind of reserach and have been battling for several years to make web applications highly compatible with mobile devices.
This, apart from being under Mobile SEO spotlight, opens up the road for other trends as well…
Page load time
The differences between desktop and mobile can be considerable, even when considering responsive websites. That’s why optimizing the performance of both the web app and server (WPO: web application performance) for both devices could bring improvements in both user experience and SEO performance.
A website or web project should load the content in an estimated time of about 3 seconds, providing instant access to “above the fold” navigation. This clearly enables you to provide resources faster, reducing wait times and decreasing the gap between your desktop and mobile.
AMP: Accellerated Mobile Pages
As a direct consequence of preferring mobile-oriented research and resources with fast load times, several large companies such as Google Inc, W3C, etc., have created the AMP Project.
In short, AMP is a framework that allows web pages development with limited resources. In fact, it uses a subset of HTML 5, CSS 3, and Javascript tags that allow you to load the resource faster.
It is possible that in 2017 this becomes relevant not only for publishing projects but also for business websites. In this latter case, it may be more interesting to use PWA (Progressive Web Application).
Rich Snippet and Schema.org
Although for several years we have always talked about using micro data, ranging from classic mark-ups to HTML tags to a faster management using Javascript with JSON-LD, it is now essential to use them, especially in e-commerce sites, to better understand the content of the page on search engines by providing clear and accurate information.
As you can see from the guidelines provided by Google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products
once again, the protagonist is mobile.
Among other things, for mobile searches, Google could show this information even in its vertical image engine (Google images).
There are many other developments that are still under development and testing, among which we briefly quote:
- Voice Search – Thanks to micro data and the use of more and more refined voice learning algorithms, many of the searches can be done without the classic keyboard but simply by using the voice. In this sense, this paves the way for Google Now, Siri and Cortana, right to quote the most famous;
- Augmented Reality and VR (Virtual Reality) – With the advancement of usable technology and devices, research and platform interactions could also be affected by these new trends. Just remember Google Glasses example;
- HTTPS and HTTP 2.0 – More security is required especially for those websites that fall into the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) category, that deal with delicate topics (such as health, investments, etc.) and that can affect people’s lives. For these reasons, they must necessarily provide appropriate platforms (secure login, secure purchases, etc…). Additionally, as of January 2017, Chrome browser will show a notice next to the URL in the address bar to indicate if a website is safe or not.
Each step so far highlighted leads us to consider the web as a nonspecific place, open to new approaches and uses. The road is getting more and more towards Internet of Things, where there is no concept of PC, mobile or anything else, but every “thing” could act as a catalyst to provide ready-to-use content.
You must always be careful to technological advances by adapting your SEO strategy to your new content and, above all, to make it is really useful for users.