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It’s that time again. We’re drawing a close to 2016, and getting ready for 2017, and as marketers, that means evaluating our strategies and planning ahead for our budgets and tactics for the new year. I’ve already written about how I expect 2017 to change SEO (and some of the highlights from 2016), but those analyses are extrinsically focused; they examine how search engines and overall trends are going to evolve.
Now, I’d like to take a look at how we all should evolve as search optimizers. Since the theme fits, let’s call these the seven New Year’s resolutions you should be making for your campaign in 2017:
1. Create better mobile experiences.
Mobile, mobile, mobile—you’re probably sick of hearing about mobile, but it’s not going away. Google released yet another mobile-friendly update this year, and you can bet the mobile favoritism will only increase in 2017. Note that I specifically chose the term “mobile experiences.†It’s not enough to have a site that’s responsive, and therefore usable on a mobile device. You should be building all your online interactions with customers to be convenient, accessible, and intuitive on mobile devices. This is especially true if millennials factor into your target audience; as a general rule, think mobile first, and have everything else come second.
2. Measure and analyze more thoroughly.
There are tons of tools available online to help you measure, analyze, and understand your SEO efforts—most of which are free or inexpensive. There’s no excuse not to be measuring everything you do, from start to finish, as it’s the only way to gain insight into the real impact of your efforts. When I say “thoroughly,†I don’t just mean tracking more metrics—instead, I mean doing more to ensure that your conclusions are accurate, and turning those conclusions into actionable insights rather than speculative hypotheses. Your data can tell you pretty much everything you want to know—but you have to ask the right questions and examine the right areas.
3. Develop more long-form content.
Content marketing is still the king of online marketing strategies as far as I’m concerned, but competition is getting thicker and readers are getting pickier. People have trust issues thanks to fake news, and are getting sick of seeing the same types of headlines and short-form content over and over. The best solution to this is lower quantities of richer, more detailed, long-form content. It means you’ll have to put more effort into every piece you produce, but you’ll stand out from the competition, win more users’ trust, and secure more conversions as a result.
4. Get on top of rich snippets.
I’ve been talking about the importance of rich snippets and Schema.org microformatting for a few years now, but I’m not surprised that most business owners still haven’t gotten involved here. Microformatting is a specific content structure that makes it easy for Google to parse your information, thereby making it accessible to the Google Knowledge Graph and other intelligent content displays in SERPs. Rich answers and rich snippets (the resulting SERP displays) are getting more frequent, which means 2017 is the time to get involved if you haven’t already. Make the pledge.
5. Produce more, better videos.
It was a big year for video, and 2017 is going to be even bigger. With Facebook and other platforms jumping on the “live video†bandwagon, and more mobile consumers hungry for more visual content, the demand isn’t dying down. In fact, we’re seeing a flood of businesses jumping on the trend, which means it’s no longer enough to simply make video content. You have to commit to making your videos better, with more charismatic hosts, better production values, more creative ideas, more practical information, and of course, more raw entertainment value.
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2016/12/22/7-new-years-resolutions-for-seo-in-2017/