SEO Predictions for 2017

New Year’s resolutions are not just about our personal goals, so it may be the ideal moment to focus on business goals and seek for the best ways to boost your digital and online presences starting with SEO presence to improve authority, value and ranking.

Here are a few things you need to make sure you have this year;

Searching is the Key:

As simple as this may sound, it is important to create content that adds value, while it maintains its relevance for the target audience. It is not just about creating quality content, but about knowing your audience, to the extent that the content is useful and has more chances to be ranked higher in the search results for the relevant queries.

According to Search Engine Land, 51 percent of traffic to websites comes from organic search and an additional 10 percent comes from paid, this must mean over 60 percent of the traffic on your site arrives from the search engine results pages alone. While organic search is the primary driver of website traffic, the role of ads cannot be overlooked.

Google recently took initiative to increase their prominence on the display page by eliminating the ads that once appeared along the sides of the SERP. However, these ads now appear on the top of the page before the organic results and with this, there may be more changes ahead for PPC.

If you want your brand to succeed in 2017, you will need to find ways to coordinate organic ad paid search marketing disciplines and understand how they can work together to build the relationships with customers.

How to seize SEO Opportunity:

1. Focus on your largest channel – organic search

Organic search is the largest channel for most B2B and B2C websites, so it is important to focus on your efforts there to begin to build a strong case for the value of optimization.

Although organic search does not have direct media costs, it however has the potential for high returns while also driving brand awareness in addition to revenue, making it a great starting point for conversations with other brands and clients.

It would be a great idea to use data as your source for the strategy to guide your efforts – while building your organic channel.

2. Invest in your talent

There will be different channels within marketing and they will become more connected with search in the age of the micro-moment and the new customer journey, the value of strong marketers who understand the different channels become even more evident. This investment should be in both existing employees and new ones.

3. Digital Growth

To succeed with SEO in 2017 brands are required to put SEO at the core of their organization and digital centers of excellence.

Rather than having SEO as a standalone – you will need to integrate it with the rest of the brand marketing functions, from PR to SEM. Brands need to recognize the changing customer journey and how those changes impact the strategies used by the organization.

In order for brands to succeed moving forward, they will need to understand the different intent signals of various types of queries.  They need to know how to optimize all of the content they produce, from videos and images to social posts, to be present for these customers and address their needs during the micro-moment.

The most important thing that brands need to take away from this; is SEO integration – breaking down silos and functioning as a single promotional unit, rather than having it handled by several different departments.