SEO trends 2017 part 3: Voice Search and Video

These trends are the increasing importance of local content, video and Voice Search and the shift from keywords to topics.

SEO Trends 2017 6 to 9 for higher search engine ranking webshops/sites

#9 Local context more important than ever

Does your business target the local audience. So does your organization work primarily locally? Then a local SEO approach will be more important than ever this year. The need to be optimally visible locally stems directly from the rapidly growing smartphone usage.

Smartphone users can very easily and quickly find information about things they are looking for in their immediate area. Therefore, ensure optimal local SEO visibility. After all, you want your target group to contact your organization first and not the competition, right?

Example: You have an office supply store and are located in Utrecht. People can both visit your store and place their order online. You want people to visit your webshop/site and place their orders there. At the same time you strive for many people to visit your store every day. To achieve this goal it helps to make sure your local listings are up to date.

Therefore, check that your local (business) listings are up to date. Update them where necessary. Do not forget Google My Company. Google shows your company information on the right side when someone searches for your company name. Do you have multiple locations and have these received more reviews then you can get an even more extensive listing.

#8 Shift from keywords to topics

Google is putting more and more emphasis on the user experience. As a result, keywords will increasingly give way to topics.

Google is getting better at understanding what a particular web page is about without leaning too heavily on keywords.

For all organizations with one or more websites and webshops, it is important to keep an eye on the developments (Google is currently fiddling with the Keyword Planner) and to have a creative SEO specialist. The expectation is that companies that are best able to adapt to the new circumstances will win the battle.

#7 Growth of voice searches

With the increasing importance of mobile searches (see also #9 Local context becomes more important than ever), spoken mobile searches are also growing rapidly.

Spoken searches already account for 20% of all mobile searches (Source: Google). Voice search is one of the fastest growing trends.

This trend is expected to continue. In part, this rising popularity of Voice Search is caused by the growth in the number of mobile Internet users. Also, Voice Search is increasingly being used with Internet of Things and devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo.

Voice Search on smartphones is changing the way we search. Longtail keywords are becoming increasingly important as a result. These are keywords that people search for less frequently, but that are more targeted. In Voice Search, longer sentences are often spoken. The spoken search queries, these Long tail keywords, are therefore becoming increasingly important.

#7 Video even more important

In the coming years, video will become even more important for SEO. YouTube is already the second largest search engine after Google. It is expected that YouTube (owned by Google) may well become the largest search engine. Rise in smarphone usage sparks this thought.

Indeed, on smartphones we prefer to watch videos rather than read texts. A good SEO strategy is to create videos and upload them to YouTube. If you include your YouTube video(s) in your web pages (also called embedding videos), then that page will become more visible in search results.

Make sure your YouTube video is SEO optimized. Think about the metadata being in order . Also promote your video through your social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook to generate views, likes and followers.

Ask visitors to share your video with their network or link to your video in some way. Facebook, for example, is also fully committed to video. Take advantage of this!

In two weeks the final 5 tips and thus the conclusion of the series.