Any new year is a new beginning. And it actually doesn’t matter if we talk about personal development or new technology trends. The same thing is with SEO. If you want to be one step ahead of your competitors and get love from search engines you should follow all their updates or be an extrasensory perception expert. If the last one isn’t about you then this article will help you to get some knowledge on what you should do to go great guns.

So it is about time to start doing things to improve your SEO strategies for reaching new successful results in 2017.

Is it possible to make any predictions in SEO at all? Well, yes, if you are abreast of news from search engines and trends that have formed for the last few months. So let’s take a look at what was happening and what is of current interest for any specialist of SEO industry.

AMP

First of all, it is growing popularity of Accelerated Mobile Pages, also known as AMPs. As you probably discovered, Accelerated Mobile Pages represent an open-source protocol thanks to which webmasters are allowed to create pages that can be loaded almost immediately on the mobile devices. In other words, simple structure that this format implies makes a website load four times faster. Another benefit is an amount of the data that will be less. Also, note that Google likes those sites that have switched over to AMPs more. One of the biggest search engines gives visibility in a carousel and a small icon of a lightning bolt that indicates AMP status.

Content

Make sure you get as much value from your content, existent and future, as it is possible. And this is why. When you read same content that has been re-written few hundred times on different websites you will probably be irritated. But imagine if you see this within one website. Another problem is when content has been made according to all the search engines requirements without thinking about end users. In the end, there are long uninformative texts with no value at all.

How to make your content valuable

To understand if the content on your website is good enough you should, first of all, answer such question: is it relevant to the target audience interests? In this case, quality of the content is in the second place. You should know what answers your audience is trying to find inside of blog posts or pages content to make it useful. If you complete this task you will receive more chances for your website to get higher rankings in the search results for the queries that are relevant.

It is easy to make your content more valuable, just follow these tips:

• Analyze that content you already have on the website to find topics that are the most popular among your audience.
• Make a research to get more information about your audience. It will help you to answer the questions that are interesting to the visitors of your website.
• Learn how to create new qualitative and relevant to users interest content faster than your competitors do. This will let you be one step ahead of them in providing new information.
• Don’t be afraid to expand the list of topics you write about. It will give you a chance to increase your audience and improve your online reputation.
• Make researches and monitor news from SEO influencers and search engines. It will let you be the source of the freshest and most actual information. As a result, you will get more visitors and be positioned as an authoritative source.

All content, if we talk about quality and informative sides of it, needs time. But we know that it is the most valuable thing in the modern world. So how to kill two birds with one stone – to create new and good content and save time at the same time? Let’s see what you can do:

• Focus on content instead of its optimization because it is pointless to spend time on completing the SEO tasks if your content is not appealing to your target audience.
• Monitor the keywords you have used, the site’s data dynamics, the engagement levels on each of the topics you’ve described. Your main aim is to find out what your visitors expect to see on your website pages.
• Think like your future reader not like a search engine. It will make the process of writing easier.

Remember about visual content

For some reasons, it became more important than it has ever been. It adds value to the text content and sometimes even replaces it. Does visual content affect SEO? It certainly does. There are few simple rules for optimization of your visual content.

Before optimizing your images choose those that are relevant to your content. First of all, it will improve your website’s user experience. For instance, if you write a blog post about SEO tools a picture of a cat won’t be relevant. Of course, a lot of people love cats, but it doesn’t mean you should use them for every article at your website. When you choose images for your website content avoid using of pictures got from stocks. The thing is that they will make your website look like a brochure and characterize your business as a characterless one. Also, there can be problems with copyright. It will be cheaper to pay to your own photographer or make pictures by yourself than to purchase expensive files that might be already used by someone else. The same rule goes for graphs, charts, and visual designs.

After you have picked the images for adding them to the text content, you should optimize them for search.

• Image size. Huge images can slow load time of your site pages which will directly affect your rankings on different search engines. There are a lot of different tools that will help you with this task. The most known are Photoshop and Paint.
• Give names to your images. First of all, it will help you when you search them on your device. Also, it is important to add alt-text which will describe your image. Remember that Google is not able to see your images, but it can read what you write in the alt-attribute. What should be there? Clear, descriptive text, not stuffed with keywords.
• Exclude usage of your images by other websites. There are many automated reverse search tool where you can add your images and receive an alert if another site uses your image.

If you add video to your website you should also take into consideration transcript of it so search engines are able to discover it too.

For any visual content, it is necessary to be unique. Don’t forget to add personality to it and make it shareable so visitors of your website are able to share it to different social networks, for example.

Improve user experience

As you already know, such important factor as user experience focuses on target groups of people and bases on their design preferences and industry’s trends. It is not the same as SEO because it focuses more on the site and its data for increasing the visibility of content in search engines. The main difference between SEO and user experience is that the first one helps to lead traffic to the site and reach a higher position on SERPs, while the second one determines if that traffic can be converted into the goals that were set by a website owner.

What you can do to guarantee a smooth visit to your website users:

• Check if your website has broken links, different error pages, and duplicate content.
• Ensure the content is appealing to users and search engines. It means that it should be readable and crawlable.
• Make sure that the navigation helps a user to browse the pages without any problems. Menu and link structures, as well as a page’s design, should be smooth. Even a tiny detail can have an impact on user experience.
• Don’t forget to test pages loading speed. Heavy images or some scripts may be a reason of slow site loading.

Be aware of your online presence

Having an optimized website is not enough to guarantee strong online presence. The problem is that most of websites owners usually forget about its possibilities. In the modern Internet world, it is one of the most significant components of any marketing strategy. And in this case, the size of your business or the type of industry are not key factors.

It is impossible to imagine outbound marketing without online presence because it reinforces your brand and what you offer to a target market. Starting from the moment you’ve communicated with your audience for the first time, you’ll need to build and improve a web presence. It will help to explain to your audience why your product or service is so great and provides with a chance to increase a number of your potential customers.

What benefits online presence has

• Access to your services and products 24/7. Thanks to the 24-hours access that the Internet provides, your website can become some kind of virtual showroom. Your potential customers will be able to research a product or a service when business hours end. The benefit of an online store is obvious because it allows making a purchase as soon as a customer is interested without waiting for your brick-and-mortar shop to open.
• Building trust of your potential customers. Online presence includes a brand building that will help you to improve your existing and build potential customers trust. When you provide an online presence a customer can access to your product or service and also check out the company. What can help you to win their loyalty? Online reviews, interactions with other customers and qualitative help posts. Remember that positive impression helps to complete a future purchase.
• Increasing of the audience. The Internet obviously gives much more chances to win customers hearts than offline office or store does. Being present online helps you to reach out to everyone who comes to your virtual office. And these are not only people from your city or even country. In other words, the online presence of your company guarantees to increase customer base.
• Reviews: to be or not to be. Some people are afraid to provide their websites visitors with a possibility to publish reviews as they think the chances to receive a negative one are high. Your potential customers will probably check for reviews of the company or product before they decide to buy anything. Also, even having bad reviews can play into your hands if you reply to them showing that you care about what people think about your company.

Conclusion

As you can see there are plenty ways to improve your SEO tactics to get better rankings for the websites you optimize in 2017. The main rule is to take into consideration every single detail. Don’t forget to check search engines updates and SEO trends, always remember to check if your website provides the best user experience possible to its visitors. Remember, your website’s success depends only on you.