It’s 2017 and another year has gone by for the digital media in India. With the new governments focus on “digitizing India” one can see beginnings of change in the way the digital medium was perceived & adopted.
Paid media rules no doubt, and social content marketing is slowly becoming the new must – have in media’s plans along with Google adwords.
Almost every company who has a website realises that most users spend most time on first smartphones and mobile devices and thus a slow and steady move to faster loading and mobile friendly website design can be seen. We still have a way to go here though and the Google Accelerated mobile pages project (AMP) is just the kind of boost required.
Another interesting trend of 2016 was that we experienced was the steady increase in enquiries for search engine optimisation (SEO) which I consider a very positive trend for the users. A highly optimised website incidentally means that it has to be search engine friendly and user friendly which in turn makes the website a key focus area for the Search optimisation experts.
Much has changed when it comes to SEO over the years thanks to constant efforts by Google to make its search results more relevant to user search queries and more changes are anticipated as it improves algorithms.
Here is a quick list of key focus areas for search engine optimisation success in 2017.
1. Mobile will continue to be critical so adopting the right mobile strategy for website design and development will be important.
2. Content is another area which will continue to gain importance with the need for more quality and dense content.
3. On -page SEO – Including Schema markups / structured data to provide search engines a better understanding of the website and it’s pages. After all it needs that information to index your website better and present search results to users in the multiple formats that search results are evolving into.
4. Speed – Faster loading and responsive web pages are the new goal seo rankings. This is another important parameter which impacts user experience and stickiness (loyalty, time spent etc)
5. Marry content with traffic avenues. Yes now the real challenge is to drive users to content but just post it for SEO purposes. So a good content writing plan without dissemination plan will not bear results.
Another important development took place in the recent past which is now seen as the precursor to the new algorithm change is that Google is testing the mobile-first index for providing better search results to majority of its users who search from mobile.
It’s time to take a closer look at your digital marketing plans, and if you have not included search engine optimization as a mandatory part then I suggest you reconsider.
Happy 2017!
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