While we’re getting ready for the coming year it’s always good to look back at the passing year and use it to predict future SEO best practices. This is our SEO Year in Review.
SEO and Mobile
At Filament, we started the year predicting that 2016 was going to begin with a carryover from mobilgeddon 2015. Ideally your mobile SEO plan should have begun in 2015 or sooner but honing it and focusing on it was essential in 2016. Remember that mobile searches often include voice search. Knowing how to optimize for voice is going to be a vital part of mobile search in the future. Throughout the year, we touched on these subjects. We will likely see mobile pulling search just as heavily, and in some sectors more heavily, than traditional organic search for the foreseeable future.
SEO and the Customer
Customized markets, relationship marketing and brand building all sort of came together and fell into the laps of SEO specialists. In the past search engine optimization was about letting people know who you are and what you do through keywords, link sharing, a good content plan, etc. As the web becomes more intuitive and personalized, each company must narrow-cast to their specific target audience. SEO is now about targeting that perfect customer and reaching out to them specifically. We’ve watched as simple keywords or short keyword phrases have evolved into specific long tail keywords and brands gain prominence.
Analytics and Automation
Pulling analytics and automation together is a little foreshadowing from Filament as we predict these two fields will likely merge in many ways. We have briefly touched on automation for SEO in 2016 but definitely see this area growing rapidly. Analytics has always been a part of SEO best practices but these two areas actually seem to have a future together. New technology automates your marketing plan and puts your website visitors into predefined buckets. Visitors can then be reached with SEO and marketing efforts geared to them specifically. Analytics help categorize visitors and adapt marketing efforts. This is a fascinating new world for SEO and we are interested in seeing how this marriage will unfold.
Technology Trends and SEO
And finally, we’ve given you some tips on SEO best practices for 2017 that include technology driven changes. Schema, RankBrain, Automation, AMP, etc. SEO analysts have begun looking past the human to see how speed, code, artificial intelligence and other factors can affect a search result. While this is a new realm it’s also an extension of SEO best practices falling into every aspect of your website.
At Filament, we’ve always said that content is king. Search engine optimization plays extremely well with content, pulling in that customer and keeping them. This still holds true and we honestly never expect this to change but the focus has shifted. We’re now looking at the customer differently. Now, there are several customers we should be marketing to: the AI customer, the mobile customer, the loyal brand advocate, the “just browsing” customer, etc. This does not mean less SEO in content, it actually means much more. Content will be customized in 2017 to reach each predefined customer and Filament is ready to help you create optimized content to help you reach your ROI goals in 2017.
