The year 2017 is around the corner. SEO trends for the next year always trigger heated discussion in the digital marketing field. Here I would like to share with you 3 major SEO trends that many digital marketing experts have mentioned.

 

1. Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)

In 2017, going mobile is not an option, but rather a must. As more and more traffic will go to mobile, Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP for short) will gain more and more importance. But first of all, what is AMP?

 

AMP: A Diet HTML

Thanks to the prevalence of mobile devices, people get connected to internet anytime and anywhere. However, the mobile web browsing experience is still unsatisfactory. Slow loading speed is the major problem. AMP is designed to solve this problem.

AMP Project is an open-source initiative launched by Google in 2015. It is a new web development standards designed for publishers to create optimized mobile content. By leveraging a lighter version of HTML, AMP pages load faster then traditional mobile web pages, leading to lower bounce rate and higher CTR.

What does AMP mean for SEO? When webpages load faster, AMP will get more clicks and fewer bounces. Google would think an AMP site to be valuable to searchers. Therefore, it is likely to get a higher placement in the search results.

 

A sample of a Google AMP search result.

Source: Google Blog

 

Actionable Tips for Marketers

• How to Become AMP: If you are using WordPress Site, the easiest way to be AMP is to install AMP WordPress plugin . Alternatively, you can also follow Google’s instruction to create your AMP site.

• Test and Validation: After creating AMP, you need to test and validate if your pages meet Google’s requirements. If some elements don’t pass the AMP validation, Google will not show your website to searchers. There are a few steps you can follow to validate your AMP page according to Google AMP site.

• Tracking and Analysis: Most of plugins can already enable AMP tracking. If you cannot find any useful plugins, you can Google and add the AMP analytics code by yourself.

 

 

2. Voice Search

As the market focuses more and more on images and videos, many marketers may miss the importance of voice. Voice search programs like “OK, Google” and Siri are growing rapidly in recent years. As voice recognition algorithms are getting smarter, more and more people are aware of the advantages of voice search: speed and convenience.

 

 

 

Actionable Tips for Marketers

• Long-Tail Keywords: Longer queries and increased key variety are expected from voice searchers.
• Conversational Content: Not only marketers need to learn how customers write, but they should learn the way customers speak.
• “5Ws” Content Strategy: Marketers can think about the “who, what, where, why and how” questions your customers may ask and use this strategy to build your content-.

 

 

3. Intention Search

Although key words are not dead, intention search is becoming more important, specially when Google keeps improving its semantic search engine. It means marketers can spend less time to plan exact match keywords. Instead, they should spend more time creating content to match users’ intents. Content strategy changes from “talking” to Google Crawlers to real users. Therefore, knowing users’ intents becomes very important.

 

 

Actionable Tips for Marketers

Here are some suggestions for understanding users’ intents:

• Social Listening: Target audience’s comments or reviews can provide a better understanding of their’ intents. Leveraging the result of social listening to guide your content strategy. For example, if lots of target users are discussing which ways to learn Spanish is better, it is probably the case that their intent is to learn Spanish. In this way, creating content related to Spanish learning will help you gain higher traffic.
• Key Words: Studying key words is another useful way to guess searchers’ intents. For example, from key word “types of loans” we can guess the searchers would like to borrow loans.

Qian Huang is an MBA student from Brand and Product Management Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison graduated in 2017, a digital marketing enthusiast. Connect Qian: LinkedIn.