5 Google Updates to Take Care in 2017

Howdy folks, early greetings of the new year to all my readers. 2016 had been a significant year related to SEO and altogether google commence with a big bang of 2 algorithm update which changed the layout of SERP’s. The project Accelerated Mobile initiated experiments with a mobile-first index. SEO or Online Marketing showcases quick advancement, we shouldn’t dawdle to be ahead of the curve on being left alone by both search engines and your competitors.

Herewith look at the latest 5 SEO trends impacting on panorama of SEO which will be helpful to streamline your site optimization in the new year 2017.

1. Conversational and Voice Search
2. Accelerated Mobile Pages
3. Google Answer Box Optimization
4. Optimizing for Search Intent
5. Mobile App Indexing/Deep Linking

Conversational and Voice Search : Talk to Google

As per the insights of google, nearly about 55% of Teens and 41% of adults are using voice search on their routines. Voice search and digital assistants (Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, etc.) is taking over. Voice search is getting more viable while word recognition error rate dropped from more than 20% two years back to 8% today. What’s more, its prominence is growing at a practically remarkable rate: from a “factual zero” to 10% of all searches in 2015, and 20% of pursuits made with an Android device in the US this year.

If you are thinking to overlook the Voice Search Impact for 2017 then let’s make a top priority to start exploring on how do you optimize your site and content for something like this.

• Focus keyword research on conversational queries with the help of tools like Ubersuggest, KeywordTool.io, Answer the audience or even plain old Google Autocomplete provides insight into the way people use your keywords in voice search.
• “who”, “what”, “when”, “where” or “why” are mainly used by voice searchers. We can start building pages of questions that begin with these adverbs and answer them using conversational language.Surplus tip for it make the FAQ’s.
• Use schema markup to help search engines which provides semantic meaning behind your page content.
• An important part of helping search engines understand your content is helping them crawl your site more efficiently.Make sure the answers to questions are findable. Use the Sitemaps test tool and robots.txt Tester to validate your sitemap and robots.txt file.

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages

The Accelerated Mobile Pages initiates to boost page speed and usability to provide a user experience optimized for mobile devices. Make a quick note AMP isn’t a ranking signal, so using this it won’t make you outrank a page that has better content and/or links while it will be helpful for you in major aspects of mobile friendliness.

The growth of smartphones and mobile has also intensified the idea of the “micro-moment.” Micro-moments are the times at which someone turns to a device, often a phone or tablet but not necessarily, looking to fulfill an immediate need directly on the landing page.

Mobile SEO has been important since mobile search surpassed desktop last year, but moving forward to this, it’s going to become mandatory. Plus, as Google further experiments with its mobile-first index, the mobile versions of your pages are going to become increasingly more important than the desktop version. Using AMP, it lets you maintain consistent content and design and share important ranking factors like link juice and domain authority between versions.

Google Answer Box Optimization

Ever since Google’s Hummingbird update, the search engine has been transforming itself from a search engine into an “answer engine.” to connect searchers directly to their goals, not just the best websites they suppose are relevant to their queries. One part of this shift has been the Answer Box, officially known as “featured snippets.”

Featured snippets are the title and URL of a page, along with the page text Google thinks best answers for the searcher’s question. The Answer Box appears at the top of the SERP. The Answer Box is generated automatically when Google is able to determine that a searcher is looking for a particular piece of information. You can’t opt in (you can opt out by adding the “nosnippet” meta tag to your page) and you can’t decide what text Google uses. The Answer Box isn’t new, but as Google gets better at figuring out search intent, it’s becoming more frequent.

Unfortunately, since feature snippets are generated by Google automatically, you can’t really determine what content it chooses to feature. You can, however, optimize your pages in a way that will make getting featured more likely. And since, thanks to Hummingbird and Rank Brain, Google is getting better connecting searchers to answers, Answer Box optimization is absolutely something you should be doing in 2017.

Optimizing for Search Intent

Hummingbird and Rank Brain have transformed the way Google interprets search queries and determines keyword relevance. That means choosing keywords mainly capture searchers intent.You still need to optimize your pages and content around keywords. We can optimize our content into 3 types as below.

• Complete an action type searchers who are surfing with a goal to complete their requirement and are looking for the specific relevant landing page. If they don’t come across it they will bounce off our site.
• Finding Information is the one who won’t complete an action in beginning but there are greater chances of goal conversions. To capture these searchers the use of phrases like “what is”, “do I need”, “how to” and “where to find” are more in their queries. We can target them for our campaigns.
• The users who are researching products are the one who are looking for something but they don’t know particularly which one, or how to decide.The most suitable phrases to target these searchers are “top 10″, “reviews”, “deals” and “product guides” in queries that will make their decision-making process simpler and easier.

Mobile Applications Indexing

According to the Statista prediction the mobile apps market need to grow 268.69 billion in 2017, a growth of 20 percent.Yes, the top mobile application development companies in India are focusing not only on mobile apps development but also on the promotion too as per the SEO strategies. Initiating from the HTTP URLs to google search console validation tracks its performance in search results.

To get the monetary benefits from the app market and you rely on the organic traffic it will assist you to create more integrated, cross-channel experience for your users. Google can suggest links to your android/ios apps to review it. This only works for indexed apps on Android devices, but the potential in terms of traffic and engagement is huge.

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