As reported in a recent article published in Website Magazine, recent developments at Google will greatly impact the digital industry in 2017, causing SEO companies and SEO professionals to take notice.
As a result, SEO professionals will find that providing effective SEO strategies and tactics will be a more complex endeavor than at any time prior.
Acknowledging that keyword research, link acquisition and content development practices are still ‘immensely important’, the article goes on to present 4 developments at Google that will effect SEO in 2017.
As a Detroit SEO company, AQABA Technologies has been tracking these developments – and will continue to do so throughout 2017, adjusting our strategies to leverage these changes for the benefit of our SEO clients.
According to Website Magazine, the 4 developments shaping Google SEO in 2017 are as follows:
- Google’s new ‘real-time’ Penguin update features an algorithm that allows Penguin to operate in real time. As the result of data being refreshed in real-time, changes made to websites will be visible in a shorter amount of time.
As a result, if a site is experiencing an overall negative SEO performance – and changes are made to correct the matter – these changes will be acknowledged by Google more quickly due to the real-time Penguin update.
- Search queries will become even more accurate for more and more Google users, as Google is employing RackBrain – a method by which Google understands more about the queries it receives. As a result, searchers who type in ambiguous search terms and phrases are more likely to get the results they want.
- Google will continue to integrate results from its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project into its search results. According to Website Magazine, Google began displaying links to AMP pages into the main search results in August 2016. Google now has over 600 million AMP pages in its index, showing Google’s commitment to the AMP project.
The magazine reports that SEO professionals have been slow to adapt their strategies to account for the effect of the AMP project – but that more and more are now beginning to target their optimization initiatives around AMPs.
- Google has moved in the direction of enhancing its search engine results with semantic-search information – even more so now than in the past. Called The Knowledge Graph, this knowledge base will help Google do what it wants to do- that is, to provide more accurate and meaningful results to searchers.
How these developments impact SEO in 2017 will be better observed than predicted – but as the article asserts, SEO professionals who “understand how to optimize in the age of personalization and instant answers are those positioned for the greatest level of success in 2017 and beyond.”
