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Never underestimate the value of search…//

Never underestimate the value of search… featured image

With over 167 billion searches undertaken on Google every month* (an average of 63,000 searches per second) anyone with a website will understand the importance of optimising for search. But what exactly is everybody searching for?

Every year Google provides its ‘Year in Search’ retrospective – highlighting the moments that defined the previous year:

Knowing what people search for provides valuable insights – whether it’s information about world events, famous people or how to do something.

For me, Google’s Year in Search provides a peak behind the scenes at the mood of the world – are we happy? Are we sad? During uncertain times, what do we search for?

Whatever the mood, relevancy is key. In order to succeed in today’s digital world your site and the content contained within it needs to be relevant to fulfil the needs of your user audience.

Want to know more about what people in the UK were searching for last year? – check out Google’s Year in Search Trends Page.

Looking ahead to 2017 what SEO trends should we be keeping an eye out for? As with all things technology-related, there are many different trends being talked about by the digital community. Below are three key trends which we think will feature highly in 2017:

  • Content: Content will continue to play an important part in SEO strategy, but quality, relevancy and length (longform), rather than quantity and frequency will be key factors to ensuring success.
  • Mobile Experience: Providing the ultimate mobile experience is more ‘must-have’ rather than ‘nice to have’. A fast-loading site is essential and Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) initiative signals their intent in this arena, with many SEO experts predicting that the launch of Mobile First Indexing is just around the corner.
  • Rich Snippets: Using structured data mark-up (schema.org mark-up) on your website will make it easier for Google to extract and display more useful information about your content e.g. pictures, videos, reviews etc. that will help you stand out on a search engine results page (see below).

 

Getting the best out of search engine optimisation, like most elements of digital, changes on a regular basis. Keeping up with the latest trends is an ongoing process, not a one-off activity, which you carry out just prior to your website launch. If you need help with any aspect of search engine optimisation, we’d be more than happy to get involved.

Get in touch today.

* Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillion-searches-per-year-250247″