The SEO indus­try – and mar­ket­ing over­all, real­ly – has no short­age of buzz­words. And as we kick off a new year, the odds are mobile-first and AMP will like­ly remain impor­tant phras­es in the search mar­ket­ing lex­i­con.

But for our third annu­al SEO trends post, we reached out to 45 search mar­ket­ing experts to get their takes on what else they see on the hori­zon. Per­haps not sur­pris­ing­ly, they see changes in con­tent, as well as increased focus on intent. And as con­tent from big brands is fea­tured more promi­nent­ly in search results, one SEO rec­om­mend­ed focus­ing on build­ing brand affin­i­ty if small­er brands want to stay in the game, too.

With voice search and con­nect­ed devices tak­ing a more promi­nent role in our lives, the way con­sumers search is on the verge of pro­found change, which, in turn, has huge impli­ca­tions for our indus­try as well.

And no sur­prise here either – machine learn­ing and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty are expect­ed to play big­ger roles in 2017 – with maybe even some live video search results or 3D web­sites. But, at the very least, expect to see more visu­al SEO, too.

Their respons­es fol­low in full.

Simon Hes­el­tine, Glob­al SEO Busi­ness Lead at HPE

Brands will grow traf­fic by doing the same thing they should be doing every year if they want to grow — by invest­ing in efforts to do so. As Google makes its (almost dai­ly) algo­rithm changes, they need to have some­one on top of it, look­ing to see what could, and should, be done in order to help move their pages as high on the SERPs as they can. For exam­ple: If you’ve not imple­ment­ed AMP, look to see if that makes sense for you, if you’ve not looked into PWA [Pro­gres­sive Web Apps], look to see if that’s a solu­tion that can pos­i­tive­ly impact your traf­fic num­bers. If your brand doesn’t have a mobile solu­tion and/or hasn’t imple­ment­ed schema markup on your pages, then you shouldn’t won­der why you’re not gain­ing traf­fic – it’ll be because your com­pe­ti­tion has been work­ing on and imple­ment­ing what you should have been imple­ment­ing.

Voice search is already tak­ing off, with Cor­tana, Siri, Alexa, Google Now, etc. The adop­tion rate will con­tin­ue to increase, and then opti­miz­ing becomes more about being the #1 result, rather than just being near the top of page one.

In Octo­ber, Google announced its mobile first change to its main index. Accord­ing to Google, it will be a more sub­tle change, bare­ly notice­able to the aver­age user. How­ev­er, whether it will or not remains to be seen. The recent redesign to the desk­top inter­face shows that Google is mov­ing more towards the look and feel of the mobile ver­sion. As usu­al, there’ll be fur­ther changes that Google will make that mar­keters will either com­plain about and then work on imple­ment­ing, or com­plain about while imple­ment­ing.

Ryan Jones, Man­ag­er of Search Strat­e­gy and Ana­lyt­ics at Sapi­ent­Ni­tro

I think we’re going to con­tin­ue to see SEO merge with mar­ket­ing. We’ve seen user expe­ri­ence fac­tors play a huge role in SEO and I expect that to con­tin­ue. We’re going to keep mov­ing from just the most rel­e­vant con­tent to the most rel­e­vant “expe­ri­ence” – because that’s what users want. We’ll talk a lot about mobile-first and AMP in the new year, but if you haven’t already done these things you’re behind. We’re also see­ing a par­a­digm shift in how peo­ple search.  The “why” of search is still the same. Peo­ple are look­ing to accom­plish a task or “do” some­thing — but the “how” is slow­ly shift­ing away from typ­ing words into a box. We’re see­ing voice search, but we’re also see­ing search pow­er the Inter­net of Things. It won’t be long until my fridge search­es for food that I’m out of and auto­mat­i­cal­ly places an order for me.

Tony Edward, Senior SEO Man­ag­er at Elite SEM

HTTPS will grow in sig­nif­i­cance. Google will con­tin­ue to push sites to move to HTTPS and they will most like­ly make it more appeal­ing to do so by elim­i­nat­ing their own road­blocks and increas­ing the rank­ing ben­e­fit.

Google’s Mobile First Index Update will be huge as mobile search results will no longer be pow­ered by the desk­top algo­rithm. Expect rank­ings to fluc­tu­ate sig­nif­i­cant­ly at the begin­ning and then sta­bi­lize in the months after.

Fea­tured Snip­pets in Google Search will con­tin­ue to increase and this will dove­tail with the growth in con­ver­sa­tion­al search.

Lar­ry Kim, Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer at Word­stream

Over the last year, Google qui­et­ly rolled out a bunch of algo­rithm updates that made their search rank­ings much more based on user engage­ment met­rics like CTR and dwell time than ever before. We know that the search list­ings that tend to get the high­est CTRs and task com­ple­tion rates (i.e. the sites that ben­e­fit the most from these changes) are the brands we’re most famil­iar with. These big brands who were already doing rea­son­ably well in SEO are now doing even bet­ter because peo­ple click and buy from the com­pa­nies they know and love and now this pos­i­tive user engage­ment is being reward­ed with more promi­nent organ­ic search rank­ings. That’s great news for big brands. But it’s just a bum­mer for the small­er com­pa­nies that were try­ing to use SEO to become that big brand. I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble, but the trend here is def­i­nite­ly favor­ing the big­ger, more estab­lished brands over the less­er-known sites. As a result, I think you need to real­ly think more about how to build brand affin­i­ty with your tar­get audi­ence before they search for stuff so that there’s a high­er chance that they’ll pos­i­tive­ly engage with your search list­ings and con­tent.

Duane For­rester, Vice Pres­i­dent of Organ­ic Search Oper­a­tions at Bruce Clay

Schema will take on a greater impor­tance as more is done on the mobile side with “trust­ed,” i.e., marked-up con­tent.

Voice search is the begin­ning of a sea change. Folks are think­ing of voice search when real­ly they should be focused on answers via mobile devices. As in Cor­tana or Siri speak­ing answers to queries out loud. Exact­ly HOW you get cred­it in a voice search sce­nario remains to be ful­ly explored. Maybe your domain is read as the source? Maybe a book­mark is dropped into Chrome for you for lat­er perus­ing (or a new tab opened)?

We’re going to wear out “voice search” and “AI” in 2017, with some opt­ing for “machine learn­ing,” but essen­tial­ly car­ry­ing on the same con­ver­sa­tions. I won­der if SEOs under­stand how fast machine learn­ing can advance.

We’ll see more exam­ples of Google (and Bing) rolling out “solu­tions” pow­ered by machine learn­ing (get­ting ahead of that curve right now!) where we’ll be able to look back over 6+ months and real­ize the base­line changed well before it was announced to the indus­try.

Local will take on increased promi­nence as busi­ness­es start to real­ize how much loca­tion mat­ters to peo­ple who are large­ly using mobile devices. The local list­ings in Google are just about due to flip to all paid, which will con­tin­ue the trend of stack­ing paid list­ings across the top of all SERPs, effec­tive­ly push­ing organ­ic down the page. This will help train a new gen­er­a­tion of search users to trust paid place­ments more.

Many in the indus­try will sim­ply stop talk­ing about mobile. Because it’ll all BE mobile and giv­en that’ll be the major­i­ty of focus, effort, usage and results, it makes more sense to sin­gle out desk­top as the out­lier. Yup, if you’re not mobile now, say good­bye to your mar­ket share.

Key­word research will take more hits this year, with many tools becom­ing less use­ful (from the engines) and third par­ty tools liv­ing under more restric­tions for access­ing API-sourced data. In any event, we should be mak­ing the direc­tion change to focus­ing on the cus­tomer jour­ney and inten­tions and relat­ing con­tent to the steps a cus­tomer will take next, rather than on “key­word X gets Y num­ber of queries each month.” That mod­el becomes less rel­e­vant as voice search takes peo­ple from a SERP to sim­ply answer­ing the ques­tion.

Dixon Jones, Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor at Majes­tic

I’ve decid­ed that I could not care less about any more mobile mum­bo jum­bo. I get that Google’s going to mess around with their algo­rithm, but if your site is already respon­sive and (like us) most of your users are desk­top based, then I think you’ve cov­ered most of the bases. Every­one else can get worked up about it, but I’m just going to let that pass me by and con­cen­trate on being the ONLY answer for cer­tain queries. That’s because OK Google, Siri, Cor­tana and Alexa are not going away…and they only give ONE result…usually via voice.

So that’s real­ly inter­est­ing. They are using enti­ty search and machine learn­ing to do this, but under­neath all these acronyms, there’s some­thing impor­tant going on…the search engines are turn­ing unstruc­tured data into struc­tured data. We are help­ing them with schema, but that does not start to scratch the sur­face. Struc­tured datasets are every­where and my busi­ness needs to be in those struc­tured data sets, so that – like links – we can give the search engines and algo­rithms sig­nals from third par­ty data sources that we are who we are…and because there can “be only one” we must demon­strate we are the best match.

That’s not easy. It’s not for a sound byte. But that’s where I am head­ing. Google bought Free­base for a huge sum, then buried it. That should say some­thing, but it seems SEOs don’t have a clue where to start tack­ling the prob­lem ahead. Well, I have a clue…but not yet a con­vinc­ing path. By the end of 2017, I hope to have both.

Jose Trucha­do, SEO & SEM, Mobile, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing and Ecom­merce Con­sul­tant

When look­ing at how SEO will look in 2017, I see an extreme­ly excit­ing year ahead, more than any prob­a­bly in the past decade, and the rea­son why is because con­cepts that we have been talk­ing about in the past few years will all make sense all of the sud­den thanks to AI and per­son­al assis­tants such as Ama­zon Echo (Alexa) and Google Home and the less sophis­ti­cat­ed Siri and Cor­tana.

It’s not a secret that from the begin­ning Google has been try­ing to emu­late and under­stand the com­plex­i­ty of the process humans fol­low when per­form­ing a search to deliv­er the best results pos­si­ble, whether it’s in paid search, organ­ic search, image search or nowa­days in the Search Graph. AI is adding a new dimen­sion to that process now both on the side of Google with its use of RankBrain and on the user’s side through a per­son­al assis­tant.

Human behav­ior is com­plex and diverse and it’s always been a chal­lenge for Google to pre­dict how humans will react to a cer­tain search result. It took a lot of tri­al and error and that’s why Google relied so much on human sig­nals such as links that act­ed as human rec­om­men­da­tions of a cer­tain page. Thanks to the com­put­ing abil­i­ties of RankBrain, Google can now test many more vari­a­tions of the results, vary­ing the impor­tance of the for­mer rank­ing sig­nals and get­ting more mean­ing­ful and accu­rate data, which will lead to more use­ful results regard­less of the strength of those sig­nals.

A link can now have a much big­ger impact if RankBrain deems this link to be worth the rank­ing val­ue. This is because it has not been able to test its impact in real time rather than the some­what math­e­mat­i­cal val­ue of the link that was attrib­uted to them until now and the same can be applied to new or improved con­tent.

Per­son­al assis­tants have been around for a few years now, but only in the lat­est part of 2016 were they truly…well, assist­ing. :) Just ask Alexa to play some music and she will try to play music that you’ll like and sur­pris­ing­ly she will (most­ly) suc­ceed with music that you may not have heard of but you will prob­a­bly like. I can eas­i­ly see peo­ple ask­ing their per­son­al assis­tants in the near future to book a trip that they’ll like in a spe­cif­ic time range and get­ting mean­ing­ful results. This means that voice search is going to be much more rel­e­vant than ever and being able to answer voice-search-type queries will be para­mount to the suc­cess of any SEO cam­paign.

How do we pre­pare for that? Fol­low these tips and you will be on your path to SEO suc­cess.

• Lis­ten to your user queries. Use Ana­lyt­ics, Search Con­sole and study your com­peti­tors’ rank­ings to sur­face new ways of cater­ing con­tent for your users. (Tip: Don’t for­get about your FAQs.)
• Make sure your site is mobile ready. We’ll see where the AMP project goes, but the fact that mobile users have long sur­passed desk­top is unde­ni­able, so it only makes sense that Google will give pref­er­ence to sites opti­mized for the major­i­ty of users as demon­strat­ed in Mobi­leged­don.
• Test your site’s speed and improve it accord­ing­ly. Slow and clunky sites have no room in the mobile world.
• Use markup lan­guage on your site. Make it easy for bots (and maybe per­son­al assis­tants) to under­stand your site and allow them to dis­play your results in new ways as demon­strat­ed in Google’s recent inclu­sion of struc­tured markup data in image results.
• Turn your link-build­ing strate­gies into rela­tion­ship-build­ing strate­gies. Give them mean­ing and col­lab­o­rate more than just for the pure pur­pose of get­ting a link, for­get­ting about the algo­rith­mic sig­nals of a link.

Joel Swaney, Direc­tor of SEO at Nina Hale

Brands will grow vis­i­bil­i­ty and traf­fic in 2017 by cre­at­ing and pri­or­i­tiz­ing con­tent focused on con­sumers’ intent. Intent-dri­ven SEO strate­gies will ensure that mar­keters are devel­op­ing the right con­tent for users and, in turn, search engines that con­tin­ue to evolve. What does an intent-dri­ven SEO strat­e­gy look like? Ful­ly under­stand­ing your cur­rent and poten­tial audi­ences – who they are, what their cur­rent behav­iors look like, what their mind­set is. With this infor­ma­tion, you can dive into each audience’s jour­ney, ana­lyze how your con­tent sup­ports spe­cif­ic jour­ney phas­es or actions, and cre­ate a plan to meet those needs with a holis­tic view of con­tent (includ­ing videos and images).

Mobile-first was so 2016. As a proof point, Google recent­ly announced that in 2017 the search engine will pri­mar­i­ly use the mobile ver­sion of web­sites’ con­tent to rank pages in its search results. If a brands’ web­site isn’t already focused on mobile, it will fall behind in the search results.

How do you know if you’re in the clear?

• Brands are okay if their sites are responsive/dynamic and their pri­ma­ry con­tent and markup is equiv­a­lent across mobile and desk­top.
• Brands are not okay and need to take action if their pri­ma­ry con­tent and markup is dif­fer­ent across mobile and desk­top.

Watch out for live video in the SERP. As user intent becomes increas­ing­ly impor­tant for search engines, new and excit­ing types of search results may con­tin­ue to devel­op with­in the SERP. Google already fea­tures live score updates dur­ing major sport­ing events, indi­cat­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty for the search engine to dis­play live video and fur­ther ele­vate the search expe­ri­ence. Google’s part­ner­ship with Twit­ter and Twitter’s part­ner­ship with the NFL could be a gate­way into live video search results.

Search behav­ior is expand­ing beyond tra­di­tion­al search engines and into oth­er chan­nels like YouTube, Pin­ter­est and Ama­zon. There may be a need to con­sid­er these chan­nels at dif­fer­ent points in the con­sumer jour­ney, depend­ing on the intent of the user (research vs. aware­ness vs. acqui­si­tion).

Brent Csu­toras, CEO of Pix­el Road Designs

I think we are in for some pret­ty big things for 2017, but a cou­ple of spe­cif­ic advance­ments have me real­ly excit­ed.

Vir­tu­al real­i­ty has real­ly been grow­ing a lot over the last few years. While pre­vi­ous­ly lim­it­ed to real-life mar­ket­ing events and a hand­ful of basic apps, we are antic­i­pat­ing a large num­ber of VR tech­nol­o­gy releas­es this year, which should make the tech­nol­o­gy more read­i­ly avail­able to all con­sumers. Poke­mon Go and oth­er VR games real­ly kicked off the buzz around VR, but look for aug­ment­ed real­i­ty to join the mix and more busi­ness and social media inter­ac­tion angles to solid­i­fy the tech­nol­o­gy and its usage in every­one’s dai­ly life through the year.

Bea­cons are also going to be huge. Vir­tu­al­ly every app idea I have seen or been pitched in the last year has includ­ed some form of bea­con tech­nol­o­gy. You see it in Snapchat’s loca­tion-based cov­ers and a ton of shopping/retail apps as well. I don’t think peo­ple will focus as much on the tech­nol­o­gy as the actu­al expe­ri­ence it pro­vides, but look for its con­tin­ued growth and impact in 2017.

Chris Hart, Head of Client Devel­op­ment at Linkdex

For 2016, my pre­dic­tions were about some very tac­ti­cal and strate­gic ini­tia­tives that brands and agen­cies need­ed to pay atten­tion to, such as user expe­ri­ence, mobi­liza­tion and apps, big data nor­mal­iza­tion and schema/markup.

2017 is going to be very dif­fer­ent, how­ev­er. Here’s how:

Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cer: The CDO

In anoth­er pre­dic­tive post, my focus is on the con­sol­i­da­tion of chan­nel activ­i­ties under the cor­po­rate posi­tion of Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cer, or the CDO. The end result of chan­nel con­sol­i­da­tion will be an inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing team, where the inter­ac­tion with the end user will be chan­nel agnos­tic. This indif­fer­ence to a chan­nel will result in true mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives and stronger rela­tion­ships with end users. Any­one talk­ing about tips or tricks will be shown the door.

Machine Learn­ing, AI And Voice Search Get Seats at the Big Kids’ Table

There is a lot of talk about machine learn­ing and AI, espe­cial­ly with all of the focus on RankBrain in 2016. For some, these evo­lu­tions may sound like the rise of Skynet. For oth­ers, it is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to engage and reach a great many more peo­ple.

In Decem­ber 2016, Google Trans­late, which made its debut in 2006, was con­vert­ed to an AI-based sys­tem, which I feel will have an expo­nen­tial impact on improve­ments to voice search, which, since 2014, has been on the rise. Don’t get me wrong, opti­miz­ing for such tech­nolo­gies as Echo, Google Home or Cor­tana will prove hard­er than for tra­di­tion­al SERPs, most­ly because humans use dif­fer­ent parts of their brains for writ­ten and oral com­mu­ni­ca­tion. So where the key­board helps to nor­mal­ize data entry, there is no such nor­mal­iza­tion for oral com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Google Will Accel­er­ate Shut­ting Down Free Data

For some time now, Google has been pulling back on the data it gives away for free. We all worked through Not Pro­vid­ed, and now we are see­ing a sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tion of Search Vol­ume data. Look for fur­ther degra­da­tion of any­thing free.

Which brings me to…

 Intent, Rel­e­vance and Authen­tic Rela­tion­ships

While it is clear we are rush­ing head­first into a mar­ket­ing world where effi­cien­cies are large­ly gained through accel­er­at­ed data pro­cess­ing and automa­tion, embrac­ing data man­age­ment, mar­ket­ing automa­tion and pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ic solu­tions is key to now required data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing strate­gies. The rub to the end mar­keter is that all of these tech-dri­ven solu­tions will need to be pro­grammed, run and mon­i­tored by humans that are in tune with their user coun­ter­parts. There is no “Ron Popeil Set It And For­get It” solu­tion in our near future.

Bri­an Childs, SEO Suc­cess Man­ag­er at Moz

The big SEO trend to watch for is going to be voice-acti­vat­ed con­trollers.

Voice con­trollers such as Google Home and Alexa will con­tin­ue the trend we have already seen with mobile devices and wear­ables. For the past few years, search engines have opti­mized for con­sis­tent­ly small­er screens. Voice-acti­vat­ed con­trollers remove the screen alto­geth­er. That means that the goal of SEO changes from rank­ing high in a search result page to rank­ing #1 or not even exist­ing.

We can see evi­dence of this trend in the ads most com­mon on TV and in front of block­buster movies over the hol­i­day sea­son. How many times did you see an ad for Google Home or Alexa? This is just the begin­ning of a trend that will even­tu­al­ly replace a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of all search­es. Voice con­trollers will per­me­ate our work­spaces, homes and vehi­cles.

Mar­keters will have to pay spe­cial atten­tion to ques­tion for­mat search terms and begin opti­miz­ing their con­tent so it aligns with the com­mon ques­tions their tar­get vis­i­tor asks. And keep in mind that a search query might not lead to a site vis­it. Fig­ur­ing out how to infuse your brand with the answer will become a new chal­lenge.

I rec­om­mend spend­ing the time to learn about the markup required to show up in com­mon uni­ver­sal results and put in the effort to research how your tar­get vis­i­tor uses a voice con­troller. Watch what they do, ask ques­tions about whether they have voice con­trollers in their offices, and pay atten­tion to which uni­ver­sal results show up on the search pages for your tar­get key­words.

Alyssa Esker, Senior SEO Super­vi­sor at Edel­man

Over­all, I think we’re reach­ing a cross­roads where SEO has been fair­ly key­word-dri­ven and peo­ple just aren’t search­ing like that any­more – which you can even see reflect­ed in the recent­ly pub­lished Search­metrics Rank­ing Fac­tors Study in which their big con­clu­sion was there real­ly are no set rank­ing fac­tors any­more because search has got­ten so per­son­al. I think you will see a big over­re­ac­tion to this by peo­ple putting a heavy focus on mobile and nail­ing voice search and Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages are going to become the new schemat­ic mark up. I am going to SMX West in the spring and they already have one full ses­sion ded­i­cat­ed to AMP and sev­er­al focused on voice search just to show how much the indus­try will begin to cling on them.

But what I think the indus­try will strug­gle with is focus­ing on the searcher, not the algo­rithms. SEO is going to have to become more like pro­gram­mat­ic buy­ing in that con­tent will have to be incred­i­bly tai­lored and direct­ed to the tar­get con­sumer at the right spot at the right time on the right device in the right way. Which is going to be very dif­fi­cult because there are no guar­an­teed tar­get­ing para­me­ters or impres­sions that can be secured with SEO, unlike ad buy­ing.

With that in mind, those who are doing SEO right will focus on things like in-store search, which Ikea is doing by imple­ment­ing image recog­ni­tion for their prod­ucts so that cus­tomers can search and find it in their aisles eas­i­ly. There should also be renewed ener­gy about bea­con tech­nol­o­gy with Google’s Eddy­s­tone frame­work and oth­er bea­con tech­nol­o­gy where a cus­tomer doesn’t even have to phys­i­cal­ly search but is served search­able con­tent just because of their prox­im­i­ty to a loca­tion.

Antho­ny De Guz­man, SEO Man­ag­er at Saatchi & Saatchi

It’s a buzz­word most of us are already sick of — but in 2017 the SEO trend will con­tin­ue with mobile. With the mobile-friend­ly boost in 2015 and the mobile-first index in 2016, there will like­ly be one or two more mobile-relat­ed updates impact­ing a company’s SEO on the mobile chan­nel. With Google AMP now in the pic­ture and a his­to­ry of Google test­ing slow labels for slow-load­ing mobile sites, Google will like­ly expand that to usabil­i­ty on mobile devices.

I pre­dict a con­ver­sion-based SEO strat­e­gy trend for 2017 in mobile as that may strong­ly impact how mobile-friend­ly a site can be. There will like­ly be a trend of key­word research based sole­ly on voice search – and how SEO spe­cial­ists will inte­grate that with Schema and Knowl­edge Graph queries for mobile.

Patrick What­man, Head of Con­tent at Men­tion

The biggest changes to SEO in 2017 will con­cern where and how peo­ple search for infor­ma­tion. First, we’re only going to see more voice com­mand tech­nol­o­gy akin to the Ama­zon Echo. This means that more peo­ple will be search­ing ver­bal­ly than ever before.

We’re also going to have to be aware of the dif­fer­ent places peo­ple search for infor­ma­tion online. That means opti­miz­ing for Face­book search, Medi­um and soon we’ll be search­ing with­in What­sApp and Face­book Mes­sen­ger, too. Be aware of the chang­ing ways that peo­ple use their phones and com­put­ers and try not to focus only on Google.

The biggest thing that SEOs can do to pre­pare for next year will be to con­tin­ue to improve the expe­ri­ence for vis­i­tors. As search engine arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence evolves, it will reward sites that pro­vide the best inter­ac­tion to users. That might mean using more video, click­able fea­tures or chat tools. What­ev­er keeps users engaged on the page longer will see the best results.

Tom La Vec­chia, Pres­i­dent at X Fac­tor Media

The Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages project ensures that your site will need to be mobile friend­ly or it sim­ply will not rank. Mobile or respon­sive sites are nec­es­sary, not a like-to-have, oth­er­wise, your site will see a dra­mat­ic decrease in organ­ic traf­fic.

Be mind­ful of UI and UX as Google looks deep­er at your vis­i­tors’ expe­ri­ence with your site.  Be sure to mon­i­tor the bounce rate and the num­ber of pages vis­it­ed, as well as return vis­i­tors.

Think local. Google now only shows 3 results for mobile search as well as desk­top. This accounts for 20% of all search and has a 70% con­ver­sion rate from inquiry to action. There­fore it’s crit­i­cal that you take your Google My Busi­ness list­ing seri­ous­ly as you don’t want to miss out on this robust traf­fic.

Test your site for speed as this will also be a fac­tor for search rank­ings as Google wants to ensure that vis­i­tors have access to your site and speedy load times will enhance usabil­i­ty.

No longer does a page have to have 600 to 1000 words — as long as it’s rel­e­vant and engag­ing it will rank.

Josh Pat­ter­son, Senior SEO Direc­tor at Jel­ly­fish

With more and more of the buy­ing cycle hap­pen­ing online, brands should look to expand the reach­es of their con­tent strat­e­gy to get in front of con­sumers high­er up in the fun­nel. Sub­se­quent­ly, with search becom­ing more and more con­ver­sa­tion­al, it is imper­a­tive brands build vis­i­bil­i­ty and trust not only for short-tail queries but the­mat­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant top­ics asso­ci­at­ed with their audience’s needs and pain points.

Things like “seman­tic search” and “machine learn­ing” have begun to cause a pan­ic among SEOs. Every day there’s a new piece on how to craft a strat­e­gy for search to cater to these new devel­op­ments. How­ev­er, at the end of the day, while algo­rithms are evolv­ing, the core mis­sion of search engines is not. Pro­vid­ing help­ful and use­ful infor­ma­tion to users should still be the core of any search strat­e­gy.

A more con­nect­ed world is emerg­ing before our eyes, and with that, the way in which peo­ple search is chang­ing. Voice search, as well as search in gen­er­al, is becom­ing more con­ver­sa­tion­al and ques­tion-based, and we are see­ing search engines begin to evolve to cater more so to this for­mat. This is caus­ing brands not only to have to devel­op con­tent to remain vis­i­ble for top­ics and queries rel­e­vant to their audi­ences but also craft this con­tent in a fash­ion con­ducive to inclu­sion in new search fea­tures such as quick-answer box­es and more.

Brock Mur­ray, COO of seo­plus+

Mobile opti­miza­tion can’t be ignored in 2017. Mobile opti­miza­tion will need to be a pri­or­i­ty for every busi­ness look­ing to remain com­pet­i­tive in 2017 and in the years to come.

With the major­i­ty of search­es now hap­pen­ing on mobile devices, it is no sur­prise that Google has begun to eval­u­ate web­sites based on their mobile com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and ease of use first and fore­most. Google recent­ly intro­duced its mobile-first index, which will pri­mar­i­ly look at the mobile ver­sion of a web­site to gauge the rel­e­vance of land­ing pages to the user and rank pages in search results accord­ing­ly. Thus, if your site does not offer rel­e­vant con­tent and a pleas­ing expe­ri­ence on mobile, you can expect your rank­ings to drop sig­nif­i­cant­ly – regard­less of how your web­site appears on desk­top or what val­ue and depth it pro­vides to a PC user.

This new update is just part of a string of recent changes pri­or­i­tiz­ing the mobile expe­ri­ence. From organ­ic search results to paid ads, to the local 3 pack, to Google Maps – if your busi­ness’ online pres­ence is not opti­mized for mobile users, you can expect to see a dras­tic drop in your per­for­mance, rank­ings, and click­throughs. To cre­ate an expe­ri­ence opti­mized for mobile, you need to make sure your web­site is mobile-friend­ly and designed to be lean, with light­ning-fast load­ing times. If you haven’t already imple­ment­ed AMP ver­sions of your pages, now is the time.

While the site must be lean, it must also con­vey your core mes­sages in a clear and mean­ing­ful way so that users and Google bots alike under­stand the val­ue the page is offer­ing. In this vein, con­densed con­tent will be of the utmost impor­tance in 2017. This means alter­ing your con­tent to be con­veyed in easy-to-digest bites opti­mized for quick and clear view­ing on mobile. This will mean web design­ers and con­tent devel­op­ers work­ing togeth­er to deliv­er a uni­fied mes­sage in inno­v­a­tive ways – think pow­er­ful head­lines and CTAs, graph­ics, charts and info­graph­ics.

In 2017, it’s time to take a proac­tive approach and ensure your entire dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy accounts not for where search once was, but where it is going.

Mar­cus Miller, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Strate­gist at Bowler Hat

2016 was an inter­est­ing year. Greater promi­nence of local results. More screen space ded­i­cat­ed to search ads. More search ads that them­selves are big­ger in size. Ads are also rolling out to local results. Search is matur­ing as a mar­ket­ing chan­nel and, as such, SEO for com­mer­cial key­words is becom­ing ever more com­pet­i­tive and ever more dif­fi­cult. Com­pe­ti­tion from ads. Com­pe­ti­tion from big estab­lished play­ers. In 2017, the major­i­ty of busi­ness­es are online, so it is a hus­tling and bustling mar­ket­place and it can be a bru­tal envi­ron­ment for new­com­ers.

I think in many ways 2017 will be a con­tin­u­a­tion of what we have seen in 2016. The big win for organ­ic search will con­tin­ue to be via con­tent mar­ket­ing. The devel­op­ment of tac­ti­cal con­tent pieces that help get busi­ness­es in front of their poten­tial cus­tomers a lit­tle high­er up the fun­nel is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent to win­ning the hearts and minds of cus­tomers in the bat­tle­field of organ­ic search. This needs to then be con­nect­ed to oth­er dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tac­tics like lead gen­er­a­tion, email mar­ket­ing, remar­ket­ing etc. to help nur­ture those prospects ever clos­er to a sale. Like­wise, a sol­id strat­e­gy to help turn browsers into buy­ers is essen­tial — are you the best on price? Fastest to deliv­er? Have the best guar­an­tee? Best ser­vice? What is your USP? Why would a cus­tomer buy from you?

My biggest pre­dic­tion would be that the days of think­ing about SEO as a sin­gle catchall dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tac­tic are all but over. For busi­ness­es to win the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing war, we have to con­sid­er strat­e­gy, SEO, SEM, social and con­tent. Often this charge will start by devel­op­ing tac­ti­cal con­tent pieces and then using paid and organ­ic pro­mo­tion to get that con­tent in front of folks and then nur­tur­ing them along a sales fun­nel.

SEO is still crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant and get­ting in front of users as they browse search engines will still be what dri­ves the largest vol­ume of web­site traf­fic, but busi­ness­es can’t sim­ply rely on rank­ing for a hand­ful of com­mer­cial terms.

Fur­ther to that, there are a lot of mov­ing parts and mobile will con­tin­ue to grow, voice search will con­tin­ue to grow and sug­ges­tions from tools like Google Assis­tant will con­tin­ue to inte­grate search and sug­ges­tions into your life.

Ben Hock­ing, SEO Direc­tor at Be Found Online

AMP Will Become a Must for All Sites

In Feb­ru­ary 2016, when Google offi­cial­ly launched the Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages project, it only made SEO sense for pub­lish­ing sites, as it was lim­it­ed to the Top Sto­ries sec­tion. That didn’t last long. AMP became a part of the main Google SERPs by August and even recent­ly made an appear­ance in Image search results.

Although Google has been adamant that hav­ing AMP pages won’t cause your rank­ings to improve, the unavoid­able fact is that in almost every sce­nario, the AMP equiv­a­lent of a respon­sive page is going to dra­mat­i­cal­ly out­per­form respon­sive web pages in load time. Users are always going to want things faster, so this rank­ing fac­tor will nev­er cease to be crit­i­cal for SEO and your site’s suc­cess as a whole.

Voice Search Will Become a Big Deal

Let’s face it, when Siri came out with the iPhone 4S in 2011, it was a lit­tle ahead of its time. It felt awk­ward and was a nov­el­ty at best for most users. Fast for­ward to the 2016 hol­i­day sea­son and the mas­sive suc­cess of the Ama­zon Echo has all the tech giants ful­ly on board with their own smart speak­ers. Google has Home. Microsoft is work­ing on its Cor­tana-based smart speak­er. Expect a big boom in voice-relat­ed search­es start­ing the day after Christ­mas, and con­tin­ue through­out the rest of 2017. If you don’t believe me, sim­ply Google, “Ama­zon Echo sales fig­ures.”

Jonathan Allen, Pres­i­dent of Long­neck & Thun­der­foot

In 2017, I pre­dict that SEO will find that Google RankBrain is way more for­giv­ing than we ini­tial­ly antic­i­pat­ed and an algo­rithm pow­ered by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will actu­al­ly improve our tra­di­tion­al white hat SEO skills and return the indus­try to core prin­ci­ples.

Prac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing (and assum­ing there are no major changes to the Google Search Con­sole), I think RankBrain means we’re going to see way more rel­e­vant incom­ing key­word data via Web­mas­ter tools than we’ve ever seen before. This is because arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is going to be able to do expo­nen­tial­ly more tests to under­stand the orig­i­nal intent of the search query.

In turn, this is going to cause a much wider range (or longer tail) of key­words, phras­es and sto­ry ideas emerg­ing in our incom­ing search query data. This new data yield could mas­sive­ly enhance our under­stand­ing of what top­i­cal rel­e­vance means to Google, but, more impor­tant­ly, will help us bet­ter under­stand the infor­ma­tion needs of the mar­kets we serve.

I think this is real­ly good news for SEO soft­ware com­pa­nies because the sheer pow­er of AI to com­pute expo­nen­tial­ly more queries than ever before is going to flood web­mas­ters with rank­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that were pre­vi­ous­ly unknow­able to them.

This will be a great thing to hap­pen, but will simul­ta­ne­ous­ly make it more com­pli­cat­ed than ever to under­stand why these oppor­tu­ni­ties exist, as RankBrain will be able to make holis­tic assess­ments and draw seem­ing­ly intan­gi­ble con­nec­tions between a matrix of rank­ing fac­tors that are influ­enc­ing the search query result in tan­dem. In short, how RankBrain works won’t stand up to the scruti­ny of typ­i­cal sin­gle-issue SEO sci­ence exper­i­ments.

So, smart brands and busi­ness­es should look to invest in SEO solu­tions that empow­er them to con­duct much more sophis­ti­cat­ed tests that tar­get a pletho­ra of pos­si­ble vari­ables. How­ev­er, the most suc­cess­ful invest­ments in SEO soft­ware and ser­vices will be those that take a long-term view of the prob­lem and plan to exe­cute a fail fast strat­e­gy.

It’s coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but my bet is that we’ll see that the results of many “failed” tests against core SEO hypothe­ses (such as link build­ing, key­word opti­miza­tion, site archi­tec­ture, etc.), will ulti­mate­ly pay off in a break­through moment where RankBrain sud­den­ly recal­cu­lates your website’s search posi­tion to under­stand that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

Michael Bon­fils, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at SEM Inter­na­tion­al

When it comes to Inter­na­tion­al SEO and con­tent mar­ket­ing, the focus for us in 2017 is on cre­at­ing cul­tur­al con­tent that focus­es on spe­cif­ic seg­ments of a cus­tomer jour­ney but ALSO focus­es on the psy­cho­graph­ic behav­ior and motives behind that behav­ior to tai­lor more tar­get­ed con­tent. For exam­ple, Joe is a pow­er­ful Ger­man exec­u­tive, so based on his per­sona and the psy­cho­graph­ic cat­e­go­ry he fits in, we are devel­op­ing con­tent that is tai­lored to not only Joe but also to the entire cat­e­go­ry of sim­i­lar Joes who have sim­i­lar traits. This means chang­ing con­tent to be short­er, but more proac­tive because we have already researched the behav­iors of how they inter­act with con­tent.  So far, our tests have shown extreme­ly favor­able results by cre­at­ing con­tent that’s spe­cif­ic to motive and behav­ior on a glob­al lev­el.  99% of the con­tent out there is just gener­ic and not tai­lored to a per­sona cat­e­go­ry.

Hubert Southall, Asso­ciate Cre­ative Direc­tor at Sapi­en­tRa­zor­fish Mia­mi

So what’s the big focus for brand search mar­ket­ing over the next 12 months? Google’s Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages.

Google launched AMP in Feb­ru­ary, and 10 months lat­er, only news media was doing it well. This was to be expect­ed. AMP is a nat­ur­al fit for their busi­ness. For oth­ers, it was only real­ly in the last quar­ter that brands start­ed weav­ing AMP into their plans. 2017 is the year AMP explodes. We will see the new cre­ative ways inno­v­a­tive brands make AMP work for them and this will get the atten­tion of oth­er brands on the side­lines that will want to get involved.

Steven Ray Mar­shall, Direc­tor of Search and Con­tent Mar­ket­ing

Back­links are on their way out. Google’s recent announce­ment to no longer penal­ize sites for spam­my links speaks vol­umes about its abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy qual­i­ty sites with less focus on back­link weight­ing. This means back­links are tak­ing their right­ful back­seat to con­tent rel­e­vance.

Refo­cus­ing search­able con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts away from spray-and-pray method­olo­gies to actu­al rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing strate­gies will be the new trend. Con­sis­ten­cy around what’s used will be the mantra this year. Brands will have to begin map­ping user intent to their con­tent in smarter ways. This means we’ll start to see brand mar­keters and media out­lets start to move towards greater stan­dard­iza­tion around key­words that are being placed more reli­gious­ly in high qual­i­ty, con­sum­able con­tent at all lev­els across all the mar­ket­ing chan­nels, not just in a brand’s own web­site.

Anna Lebe­de­va, Glob­al Con­tent and Pub­lic Rela­tions Man­ag­er at SEM­rush

I believe there will be two big SEO trends for 2017 – mobile-first and voice search.

Mobile-first is actu­al­ly not a trend any­more. It is a pre­req­ui­site as Google has just made a sec­ond announce­ment about mobile-first and desk­top crawl­ing for 2017. This will cre­ate a big chal­lenge for many web­sites since not all of them are mobile friend­ly. This change will lead to an addi­tion­al focus on the tech­ni­cal ele­ments of SEO, such as AMPs, page speed and oth­ers and it will also force you to pay more atten­tion to your con­tent. Your con­tent will have to be designed for mobile devices. You will prob­a­bly need to think about how to put more suc­cinct con­tent on your pages that will, at the same time, answer users’ ques­tions and meet the demands of search algo­rithms.

We’ve all seen that search is mov­ing more and more out­side of the search box and becom­ing more per­son­al. Thanks to the explo­sion of machine learn­ing, voice search will con­tin­ue to grow in pop­u­lar­i­ty (20% of mobile queries are already voice search­es) and it should become a true force in 2017. This will def­i­nite­ly change your key­word opti­miza­tion strat­e­gy as you will need to think beyond text-based queries. Peo­ple don’t speak the way they write. When using voice search, con­sumers expect direct answers, so keep this in mind as you devel­op your con­tent strat­e­gy in 2017. Think about cre­at­ing more con­ver­sa­tion­al, per­son­al­ized and local con­tent. It will be more impor­tant than ever to know your audi­ence in order to cre­ate high­ly tar­get­ed con­tent to address con­ver­sa­tion­al queries.

Ricar­do Mar­tinez, Founder of Per­con­vly

For 2017, Silo struc­ture is going to become huge. Pow­er pages are going to have a high impact on long con­tent form instead of focus­ing so much on just pro­duc­ing con­tent. 2017 will need to be direct­ed towards pro­duc­ing high qual­i­ty and high­ly share­able pieces of infor­ma­tion that peo­ple essen­tial­ly want to read or view. There are way too many peo­ple pro­duc­ing low-qual­i­ty posts focus­ing on two or three broad key­words instead of doing in-depth research to get the most out of a post.

In 2017, peo­ple will also need to take a dif­fer­ent approach towards social media and SEO to under­stand that each social media plat­form has its own voice and its own way of cre­at­ing user gen­er­at­ed con­tent and there­fore will need unique approach­es direct­ed towards the spe­cif­ic audi­ence. What works on Face­book will not work 100% the same way on Insta­gram, YouTube, Twit­ter and Pin­ter­est.

Most impor­tant­ly, as e‑commerce grows, SEO will focus on the actu­al val­ue deliv­ered not only on the home­page but on prod­uct pages and cat­e­go­ry pages as well. Too many peo­ple focus on just their home­page rank­ing, but the major­i­ty of the val­ue will come from non-brand terms on prod­uct pages.

Nicholas Rubright, Founder of Dozmia

I think in 2017, with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence pro­gress­ing fur­ther and Google using it to rank search results, the qual­i­ty of the con­tent itself will become more impor­tant, with a slight decrease in the val­ue of out­side vari­ables like back­links and social shares. As arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence improves, search engines will be able to bet­ter under­stand the con­tent itself in a sim­i­lar way to how a human would through the use of machine learn­ing. What this means is that by writ­ing awe­some blog posts and cre­at­ing in-depth, detailed con­tent, small­er blogs and star­tups will be able to bet­ter com­pete with large pub­li­ca­tions.

This isn’t to say that exter­nal fac­tors won’t influ­ence rank­ings — they will, and I think the biggest influ­ence in rank­ings will con­tin­ue to be author­i­ty back­links. How­ev­er, as search engines become bet­ter at ana­lyz­ing the con­tent, the algo­rithms will weigh the con­tent’s qual­i­ty to a greater degree against oth­er vari­ables. I think in 2017, we will expe­ri­ence huge jumps in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and deep learn­ing algo­rithms in near­ly every indus­try that’s heav­i­ly influ­enced by tech­no­log­i­cal pro­gres­sion.

To sum­ma­rize, in 2017, Google will become bet­ter at under­stand­ing your con­tent, so if you want to win, cre­ate the best con­tent.

Itai Sadan, CEO of Duda

Respon­sive web design will become more impor­tant than ever, but with a twist. Google’s switch to mobile index­ing means web pro­fes­sion­als will have to bal­ance cre­at­ing a mobile-friend­ly, con­ver­sion-focused expe­ri­ence with author­i­ta­tive and com­pre­hen­sive con­tent. This could prove to be a bit of a chal­lenge because text that isn’t well laid out on mobile can be a con­ver­sion killer.

The web­site design indus­try will head fur­ther down the mobile-friend­ly rab­bit hole and Google will keep using its influ­ence to push web design­ers to cre­ate bet­ter mobile user expe­ri­ences.

HTTPS will con­tin­ue to be pushed for increased secu­ri­ty and it’s like­ly we’ll see this giv­en more weight as a rank­ing fac­tor.

There will be an increased impor­tance of struc­tured data (schema) with­in web­sites to help search engines dri­ve ultra-per­son­al­ized search results.

Chris Hornyak, Edi­tor of the Con­tent Fac­to­ry

Based on both my own expe­ri­ences and the lat­est data about which search rank­ing fac­tors gained promi­nence in 2016, I think SEO is going to con­tin­ue head­ing in the direc­tion it has been for the last few years. That is to say, while prop­er for­mat­ting (H2 tags are more impor­tant than ever) and good link­ing strate­gies still mat­ter, the most impor­tant thing is cre­at­ing impres­sive con­tent.

Yes, being an expert at key­word research is still cru­cial to suc­cess, but ulti­mate­ly, it’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly obvi­ous that the most impor­tant thing is that you’re pro­vid­ing some sort of val­ue to your vis­i­tors. It’s not enough just to get peo­ple to your site any­more — you have to keep them there and give them a good rea­son to trust you.

In an era where it seems like every­one is pump­ing out con­tent, my advice to any mar­keter try­ing to get ahead in 2017 is sim­ple: spend less time ago­niz­ing over learn­ing SEO tricks and spend more time craft­ing con­tent that pro­vides val­ue in a way that’s tonal­ly dif­fer­ent from your com­peti­tors.

Anvar Jamal Saifi, SEO Spe­cial­ist at Bad­ger Maps

2016 was a good year for SEO because Google rolled out its Pen­guin update, which won’t deval­ue the whole site but indi­vid­ual links. When Pen­guin first launched, it was puni­tive by nature. If your site was affect­ed by Pen­guin, your entire site was demot­ed in search with­out clear expla­na­tion or instruc­tion as to how to recov­er. The harsh­ness of Pen­guin, com­bined with the mis­in­for­ma­tion sur­round­ing the algo­rithm, cre­at­ed a neg­a­tive envi­ron­ment and con­tentious rela­tion­ships between busi­ness own­ers and Google.

It does­n’t mat­ter whether you are a mar­keter, app com­pa­ny or a dig­i­tal agency, one big chal­lenge in 2017 will be to focus more on off-page SEO rather than on-page SEO to bring some qual­i­ty back­links. That is because of the Pen­guin update and as sug­gest­ed by Google’s Gary Illyes. 2017 will make legit­i­mate SEO com­pa­nies and brands hap­py as they can now achieve great results in a short peri­od of time as Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time. Changes will be vis­i­ble much faster, typ­i­cal­ly tak­ing effect short­ly after we re-crawl and re-index a page. So, now you have more time to invest in oth­er mar­ket­ing areas, which can bring you more vis­i­bil­i­ty, traf­fic, con­ver­sions, sales and prof­it.

We might see online busi­ness­es adopt­ing new web tech­nol­o­gy stan­dards such as AMP pages, rich snip­pets, rich cards and struc­tured data. AMP is an exten­sion of HTML built for per­for­mance. It helps decreas­ing page load­ing time, lead­ing to a bet­ter over­all SEO.

When you use struc­tured data to mark up con­tent, you help Google bet­ter under­stand its con­text for dis­play in search and you achieve a bet­ter dis­tri­b­u­tion of your con­tent to users from search. Anoth­er fea­ture that might get trendy is opti­miza­tion of web­sites for voice search, local search and wear­able devices. With these adop­tions, we might have a high per­for­mance and a more rel­e­vant search expe­ri­ence in 2017.

Anas Baig, SEO Spe­cial­ist at Edge Mar­ket­ing

The world of SEO con­tin­ues to change at light­ning speed. Cus­tomer usage and expec­ta­tions, not to men­tion Google’s algo­rithm updates, keep us mar­keters con­tin­u­ous­ly mak­ing adjust­ments. Let’s take a look at what you can expect from the won­der­ful world of search engine opti­miza­tion in the com­ing year.

Using a schema markup is becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant with chang­ing Google and user trends. It makes it eas­i­er for search engines to under­stand your site, there­by help­ing to ensure that it is dis­played cor­rect­ly.

Google has been increas­ing the num­ber of char­ac­ters allowed in some of the meta descrip­tions and titles. This trend can be a chal­lenge for mar­keters to take advan­tage of because they have not been rolled out to all web­sites, nor has Google announced that they are per­ma­nent.

Per­son­al brand­ing is one of the online world’s secret weapons. Peo­ple will try build­ing rela­tion­ships with influ­encers whose fol­low­ers are rel­e­vant. Once they’ve built a suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ship, their brand will be endorsed by that influ­encer, ulti­mate­ly reach­ing mil­lions of audi­ence mem­bers in no time.

SEO in 2017 is like­ly to be just as sur­pris­ing and excit­ing as it has been in the past. Brands need to use their time now, how­ev­er, to start strength­en­ing their sites for the trends of the future.

Andrew Mey­er, SEO Team Lead at Seer Inter­ac­tive

Google is mov­ing clos­er and clos­er to an audi­ence-first men­tal­i­ty with answer box­es, voice search and mobile-first. Brands will need to adjust to this mind­set to con­tin­ue to improve in 2017. Think about what your users want and need most and cre­ate the con­tent that answers those ques­tions, needs and desires. It’s not enough to sim­ply build out prod­uct or ser­vice land­ing pages, but instead focus on the addi­tion­al require­ments a user will have when search­ing for that infor­ma­tion and share it with them before they even ask for it.

Sim­i­lar to how brands will need to shift to grow in 2017, the trends that are emerg­ing are clear­ly focused on user-first and audi­ence-first:

SEO is focused on get­ting users to your site, but it’s also impor­tant to review how users are inter­act­ing with your site and how their expe­ri­ence evolves. Focus­ing on CRO and UX to help increase con­ver­sion rates should also be a piv­otal part of your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing mix in 2017. This also aligns well with the audi­ence-first men­tal­i­ty.

If you’re not already think­ing about voice search, this is some­thing on the hori­zon that will be impor­tant to keep an eye on. Box­es are the first step, so under­stand­ing how Google inter­prets and shares this infor­ma­tion will be the basis for how voice search evolves.

Jason Dodge, Founder of Black Truck Media + Mar­ket­ing

If brands have not done so, focus­ing atten­tion on the mobile-friend­li­ness of their sites is going to be key. While it has been of much dis­cus­sion since the prover­bial Mobi­leged­don with Google’s mobile-friend­ly update of 2015, the notion is that more times than not, a user’s first expe­ri­ence with your brand online is going to be via a mobile device. At the end of the day, if a brand has not been con­sid­er­ing its mobile user base and how they inter­act, con­sume and pur­chase, it could be miss­ing out on valu­able traf­fic.

Schema markup and meth­ods of mak­ing it eas­i­er for a machine to inter­pret the data on their site is also impor­tant. Giv­en the push for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing at the helm of Google search, imple­ment­ing prop­er schema can aid a site in prepar­ing for the future of search. While the fate of any algo­rithm change is unknown, it is clear that machine learn­ing is the future and devel­op­ing a method to help the machine get through your site, digest its con­tent and ren­der it an ide­al can­di­date is cer­tain­ly going to improve your odds in the long run.

An increase in the num­ber of nat­ur­al lan­guage search­es, AKA voice-prompt­ed search, is going to con­tin­ue to increase and have an impact on the indus­try. With all the major tech play­ers hav­ing their hands in the mar­ket for a more inter­con­nect­ed lifestyle, get­ting answers to ques­tions becomes eas­i­er. While it still might be a touch too ear­ly to tell the impact this can have on SEO, if a brand’s products/services are more tech­ni­cal, requir­ing addi­tion­al research and Q&A queries, we could see shift­ing strate­gies come into play.

In addi­tion, we can con­nect the dots between an increas­ing pop­u­la­tion of searchers on mobile devices, loca­tion-based queries and nat­ur­al lan­guage use. Voice-prompt­ed search­es tend to ask ques­tions in a more con­ver­sa­tion­al approach. SEOs and dig­i­tal strate­gists should be pre­pared for this.

Chris Gre­go­ry, Man­ag­ing Part­ner at Dag­mar Mar­ket­ing

Com­pa­nies that don’t focus on improv­ing site speed will suf­fer in 2017. Although it might seem like a good idea to load up your home­page with videos and fan­cy slid­ers, cool and cute don’t con­vert. Peo­ple don’t have the patience to wait for pages to load, so sim­ple and clean are bet­ter choic­es. Every­one should test their site speeds. Although 85 is the rec­om­mend­ed speed, if you’ve got a score of 80 or more, that’s a good sign. If you’ve got some­thing less, you should pri­or­i­tize the site speed rec­om­men­da­tions pro­vid­ed.

And, when you’re mak­ing strate­gic plans for your company’s future, put voice search on your agen­da. Voice search will be a dis­rupter – prob­a­bly not in 2017, but rel­a­tive­ly soon. When a prospect search­es by voice, for exam­ple, he or she will only get one result. That means mar­ket­ing depart­ments will need to adjust their strate­gies. Plus, we’ll be going from the Pig Latin ver­sion of typed search to long­tail voice search. Instead of sim­ply match­ing key­words, mar­keters will need to solve for a query.

Kameron Jenk­ins, Direc­tor of Mar­ket­ing Strat­e­gy at Scor­pi­on

While Google con­tin­ues to main­tain that links and con­tent are its top rank­ing fac­tors, RankBrain is grow­ing in impor­tance. In fact, Google’s Andrey Lipatt­sev revealed ear­li­er this year that RankBrain is third in impor­tance on the list of most impor­tant rank­ing fac­tors. Essen­tial­ly, RankBrain aims to under­stand searchers’ ques­tions by study­ing words in con­text, mean­ing it will change the rank­ings on many queries as it learns. The ques­tion you should be ask­ing your­self is how to pro­vide the best answer to searchers’ ques­tions. If Inter­net mar­keters can crack that code, they’ll be posi­tioned for suc­cess in 2017.

Anoth­er hot top­ic for SEO in 2017 is user engage­ment. Many believe that the future of SEO is less about back­links and more about how well your site draws in searchers and keeps them there. A recent Google search rank­ings fac­tors study released by Search­metrics indi­cat­ed that back­links are a declin­ing rank­ing sig­nal. The impor­tance of pro­vid­ing an excep­tion­al user expe­ri­ence by opti­miz­ing for things like organ­ic click­through rate, time on site and bounce rate will only increase as time goes on.

In 2017, expect to see an empha­sis on long-form con­tent that engages users and increas­es their time on site, light­ning-fast pages tak­ing up the top spots in search results, a con­tin­ued empha­sis on mobile usabil­i­ty now that more than half of all web brows­ing is done on mobile and results that look like they were writ­ten for you rather than search engines.

Dmytro Spilka, Head Wiz­ard at Solvid

With the recent intro­duc­tion of AMP and mobile-first index­ing, we will be see­ing more and more web­sites shift­ing their course towards the mobile-first web. As Google begins to pri­or­i­tize mobile search results over the desk­top, the change would lead to a mas­sive deploy­ment of AMP inte­gra­tion and increased atten­tion towards mobile user expe­ri­ence.

Not to for­get voice search, accord­ing to Google CEO Sun­dar Pichai, voice search accounts for 20% of all mobile search­es, and with the recent release of Google Home and Ama­zon Echo, the per­cent­age is only pro­ject­ed to rise. Hence, search mar­keters and SEOs would need to adapt and opti­mize their web­sites for the new, evolv­ing search.

Ed Brancheau, CEO of Goo­zle­ol­o­gy Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing

SE.LO.MO isn’t a new hip-hop star. It’s where SEO will be head­ing in 2017.

SE.LO.MO stands for Search Local Mobile and it will be crit­i­cal as Google moves its index to mobile-first because web­sites are start­ing to get more and more local traf­fic from mobile devices.

Plus, as more and more peo­ple use voice search, SE.LO.MO will gen­er­ate longer and more local queries, such as “Where can I get break­fast near the Hotel del Coro­n­a­do?” And if you own a break­fast joint in Coro­n­a­do and are not pay­ing atten­tion to SE.LO.MO, then you are going to lose cus­tomers.

Chris Long, SEO Man­ag­er at Go Fish Dig­i­tal

As Google adds more and more com­po­nents to the SERPs — Knowl­edge Pan­els, Rich Snip­pets, Map Results — SEOs will need to under­stand exact­ly how to ana­lyze and influ­ence each of these things to max­i­mize their clients’ vis­i­bil­i­ty. It’s not enough to know the rank­ing fac­tors of the stan­dard 10 blue links any­more.

The biggest trend I see on the hori­zon is more and more voice search com­ing into play. 20% of mobile queries are now voice search and I only see this num­ber grow­ing as the tech­nol­o­gy gets bet­ter and more afford­able. This means SEOs should real­ly start to pri­or­i­tize opti­miz­ing for Answer Box­es. If I see a client that gets an Answer Box, it’s not unusu­al to see a CTR of over 50%.

Erez Kanaan, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Con­sul­tant

I real­ly like the idea of 3D web­sites that offer a web­site with a com­plete vir­tu­al real­i­ty expe­ri­ence to the user. With the ris­ing use of VR devices, users will be able to surf a brand’s web­site with VR glass­es and inter­act with the brand and its prod­ucts. Imag­ine you go to an ecom­merce web­site and look at their prod­ucts in 3D and just add it to your cart and check­out. You can approach a store employ­ee and ask ques­tions, and, as a whole, brands will be able to deliv­er an enhanced shop­ping expe­ri­ence that involves more sens­es.

Bill Row­land, SEO Direc­tor for Trin­i­ty Insight

As Google con­tin­ues to focus on behav­ioral met­rics to bet­ter assess qual­i­ty, page speed will con­tin­ue to be increas­ing­ly impor­tant and Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages will be at the fore­front. From the Octo­ber 2015 AMP intro­duc­tion to eBay’s July roll­out of 8 mil­lion AMP pages and Google’s Sep­tem­ber announce­ment that AMP pages will receive “expand­ed expo­sure,” it’s clear that 2017 will be a water­shed when com­bined with Google’s shift to Mobile First Index­ing.

As a result, it will be crit­i­cal that e‑commerce devel­op­ers focus on design­ing pages that will per­form well and mer­chants are will­ing to exper­i­ment with AMP on at least a por­tion of their sites. Google has already giv­en devel­op­ers a guide in devel­op­ing accel­er­at­ed mobile pages, but it’s up to online retail­ers to take a leap of faith to imple­ment these changes.

Alex Bar, Own­er of Third Tem­ple Dig­i­tal

In 2017, and fur­ther on as well, SEO will see changes and progress made in machine learn­ing and nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing. Every major com­pa­ny is now invest­ing in devel­op­ing soft­ware that will be able to under­stand rather than rec­og­nize lan­guage. This means the cur­rent way of cre­at­ing SEO con­tent with web crawlers rather than cus­tomers in mind could soon be made obso­lete as Google, Ama­zon and Bing are work­ing heav­i­ly on turn­ing their algo­rithms into some­thing that will be able to under­stand the ques­tion and pro­vide the answer rather than just rec­og­nize key­words and find the text with the most match­es.

In 2017, we will have to take a long and hard look at the data to under­stand who the cus­tomers on the oth­er end are and why they are com­ing rather than just tak­ing a look at the most searched for words and phras­es and repeat­ing them a cer­tain num­ber of times through­out the text.

Anoth­er poten­tial big trend, whose growth will also be made eas­i­er by nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, is voice search. Even now when the tech­nol­o­gy is much more in the voice recog­ni­tion rather than the voice under­stand­ing stage, around 20% of search­es on mobile devices are voice search­es. Add this to the fact more than 55% of users now use mobile devices rather than desk­tops to access the Inter­net and it comes as no sur­prise that soon we will be look­ing at what peo­ple are say­ing when look­ing for some­thing as well. If the per­cent­ages do not look too com­pelling, this means that 230,000 voice search­es hap­pen every sec­ond. Giv­en the appeal of voice search­es and their “tech­i­ness,” these num­bers are bound only to increase in the future.

Liraz Postan, Head of Glob­al SEO and Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing at Out­brain

It will be impor­tant for brands in 2017 to keep abreast of trends and ensure that their con­tent is rel­e­vant and cur­rent. If there’s a cer­tain top­ic every­one is talk­ing about, iden­ti­fy it and write about it.

Brands will also increase the efforts they put behind pro­mot­ing their con­tent — get­ting oth­er web­sites to rec­om­mend their arti­cles. How? They will earn links to their sites by becom­ing an author­i­ty and offer­ing high-qual­i­ty con­tent. Bring­ing real val­ue to their read­ers. Cre­at­ing good con­tent is not enough if no one can find it. Smart brands will make sure their con­tent and SEO strate­gies over­lap.

Nav­i­ga­tion will also be high on the agen­da of brands. Nav­i­ga­tion is all about the user expe­ri­ence and it’s impor­tant that brands make sure their users can eas­i­ly nav­i­gate through their sites. They’ll require some help from UX experts and devel­op­ers, so it could take time. But a lit­tle patience will pay off in the end.

Mea­sur­ing, ana­lyz­ing and act­ing upon their suc­cess will also be key to pro­duc­ing strong growth met­rics. A few things that brands should con­sid­er in 2017 are:

• Traf­fic: Use your ana­lyt­ics tools to make before/after com­par­isons in traf­fic. Mea­sure all free traf­fic sources, not only organ­ic search-dri­ven traf­fic.
• Engage­ment: Mea­sure your bounce rates. Install a heat-map and a click-map to see whether the con­tent was rel­e­vant for your users. How much did they scroll? Did they click on sev­er­al images/links? Did they sub­scribe to your blog/product after they read the con­tent?
• Con­ver­sa­tion: Cre­ate a con­ver­sa­tion around your content—on your site and social chan­nels and in relat­ed groups. Con­ver­sa­tion = engage­ment = qual­i­ty con­tent

One of the biggest trends we’ll see in 2017 is busi­ness­es hir­ing actu­al experts to write their con­tent. If their busi­ness is gam­ing, they will approach real gamers. If they are a B2B com­pa­ny, they’ll have marketing/business experts write about and for them. They know what users are inter­est­ed in because they are the users. They don’t even need a list of key­words; it comes to them nat­u­ral­ly. And, most impor­tant, they bring real value—useful information—to the audi­ence with the con­tent they pro­duce.

Data will also con­tin­ue to be impor­tant. Smart com­pa­nies will use data from a range of sources (e.g. Answerthepublic.com, Google key­word plan­ner, keyword.io, ubersuggest.io and oth­ers) in addi­tion to inter­nal busi­ness data to under­stand what they should be writ­ing about: what their users are look­ing for in their prod­uct, includ­ing infor­ma­tion that may be miss­ing from their site. Once they have this infor­ma­tion they will use it to address the needs and con­cerns of users through the con­tent they pro­duce.

Mark Churchill, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Man­ag­er at Wealth Club

The tech­ni­cal side of SEO is going to become much more impor­tant in 2017. Or rather – it already is, but SEOs are going to real­ly cot­ton on this year, and it’ll change jobs.

Why? Sev­er­al fac­tors are dri­ving this, but here are two of the most impor­tant…

1. Things, not strings.

Search engines care about real world enti­ties and the rela­tion­ships between them. Until recent­ly, they’ve had to join the dots them­selves based on words and pat­terns. The shift to a “things not strings”-approach isn’t new – Google Knowl­edge Graph launched in 2012 – but linked data is now enter­ing a rapid adop­tion phase and I think 2017 will be a tip­ping point.

This means YOU tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty to help machines to sur­face your data in search. It’s going to become vital to know how to mark up data cor­rect­ly and liaise with devel­op­ers to get this done. Your pages, prod­ucts, peo­ple etc. will need to include machine-read­able for­mats like RDFa or, increas­ing­ly, JSON-LD, which looks like it is emerg­ing as the win­ner.

If you’re in ecom­merce or you’ve been run­ning events, you’ll know how schema.org markup is already vital. In 2017, more cat­e­gories will stam­pede towards the adop­tion of linked data. In my indus­try, we’re work­ing on full recog­ni­tion for finan­cial prod­ucts in schema.org. Even­tu­al­ly search queries such as “what’s the low­est rate Amer­i­can Express card” and “which invest­ments have a his­toric yield over 6%” will pro­vide actu­al prod­ucts as answers, not just a list of web pages.

2. Search with­out a SERP

SEOs are increas­ing­ly aware of the impor­tance of “fea­tured snip­pets” on the SERP. But what if the user nev­er sees a SERP at all?

Voice search only got two men­tions in last year’s pre­dic­tions, but I bet a lot more will men­tion it this year. Instead of giv­ing you a set of pages to click on, the search engine is look­ing to serve you the best answer to your voice query – and for your site to be the source, that means prop­er­ly for­mat­ted, ful­ly marked-up data.

As voice search ramps up in 2017 (through not just smart­phones, but oth­er con­nect­ed devices, e.g. cars and AI-pow­ered assis­tants), SEOs will real­ize that, just like with fea­tured snip­pets, it means a shift from opti­miz­ing pages to opti­miz­ing for answers.

Alyssa Tyson, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Man­ag­er at Pan Com­mu­ni­ca­tions

In 2017, we will see a shift towards a mobile-only strat­e­gy, ver­sus the mobile-first strat­e­gy that has been buzzing for a few years. It has been a few years since brands with­out a mobile-friend­ly or respon­sive web­site first felt a hit in organ­ic search traf­fic. Then in 2016, we saw the fur­ther inte­gra­tion of AMP, speed­ing up page load times for those on-the-go users.

We already under­stand the impor­tance of engage­ment on social, with­in our con­tent mar­ket­ing, and even on our sta­t­ic web­site. Mak­ing a con­scious effort to con­sid­er mobile engage­ment when plan­ning web­site or con­tent devel­op­ment will begin to sep­a­rate brands from their com­pe­ti­tion.

With voice search becom­ing more pop­u­lar from the devel­op­ment of Siri, Alexa and Cor­tana, among oth­ers, con­tent mar­keters will need to ensure they are writ­ing in a nat­ur­al lan­guage and are devel­op­ing con­tent around more ver­bose and spe­cif­ic search­es. To appear in voice search­es or even in the #0 posi­tion, con­tent mar­keters should strate­gize around pop­u­lar­ly searched ques­tions. The time is now to move away from the stan­dard key­word strate­gies that have been pop­u­lar in the past.

The bot­tom line is sim­ple: to con­tin­ue to grow organ­ic traf­fic, brands need to con­sid­er their users’ over­all search expe­ri­ence. An on-the-go audi­ence will require quick load times and quick access to the infor­ma­tion for which they’re search­ing. If SEOs and con­tent mar­keters neglect these facts, they’ll miss out on a key por­tion of their audi­ence.

Ken Wis­nef­s­ki, CEO of Webi­Max

AI, par­tic­u­lar­ly Google’s, has been evolv­ing at a rapid pace. And we keep hear­ing about its abil­i­ty to glean mean­ing from images. I think SEO is poised to see a bit of a rev­o­lu­tion in visu­al con­tent. Just like con­sid­er­a­tions of how key­words rank in a Google search has absolute­ly changed the way peo­ple write, I think we are enter­ing an era of more visu­al SEO where con­sid­er­a­tions of how Google’s AI per­ceives images will change what kinds of videos and images artists cre­ate, and what mar­keters choose to use.

Anal­isa Gold­blatt, Mar­ket­ing Man­ag­er at Real­Mas­sive

We’ll see smarter and com­pressed fea­tured snip­pets — imag­ine nev­er hav­ing to click on a search result, because the answer to your ques­tion is imme­di­ate­ly giv­en every time. We’re mov­ing from “search” to just “ask.” No “search­ing” (by the orig­i­nal def­i­n­i­tion of the word) will be required.

Jess Her­bine, Senior SEO Asso­ciate at Trin­i­ty Insight

I believe that tech­ni­cal SEO is on the verge of a renais­sance. With so much infor­ma­tion around the Web on how to opti­mize con­tent for search engines, those with tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and skills will be at a dis­tinct advan­tage in 2017. Google con­tin­ues to pro­mote its pref­er­ence towards web­sites that migrate to HTTPS and con­tin­ues to place an empha­sis on mak­ing AMP more promi­nent with­in the search results and eas­i­er to mon­i­tor and imple­ment.

I think that brands who remain on the cut­ting edge of these impor­tant inno­va­tions will be reward­ed — if not because of their par­tic­i­pa­tion, then because they are the types of busi­ness­es who are dili­gent about main­tain­ing good site health and pro­vid­ing an exem­plary user expe­ri­ence.

The switch to mobile-first index­ing may not shake up rank­ings at first, but SEOs will find that its per­ma­nence has last­ing effects on dai­ly oper­a­tions and long-term busi­ness goals. This change will have a rip­pling effect that impacts many touch points: from web­site audits to month­ly reports; site redesigns to site migra­tions; copy length and for­mat­ting to inter­nal link­ing, and more.