New SEO Trends for 2017

It feels like just yesterday we were making our wagers on what was anticipating SEO in 2016. At that point blast, and it's just about 2017 — the ideal opportunity for arranging, planning, and strategizing for your SEO achievement in 2017 has come. Also, on the off chance that you require some motivation or some help setting up the needs, I have a modest bunch of valuable tips to share!

Simply once again from one of the biggest (and most trusted) SEO occasions in USA, the SMX East meeting, I've deliberately reported the most essential takeaways for you. Some of them are very sensible and expected, however others are genuine distinct advantages!

've been all eyes and ears for you, and here's what I brought back — the top 5 SEO trends for 2017 as seen by me and the SEO PowerSuite team:

Contents:
1 Google's AMP — just another fad or the future of mobile?
2 301 redirects can prevent your pages from passing topical relevance
3 HTTPS is eating up your referral data. Any ways to fix that?
4 Still building citations for your local business? It might be just the time to stop!
5 Optimizing for voice search — your chase for featured answers

1. Google's AMP- just another fad or the future of mobile?

Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP for short) is a new Google initiative to build a better, more user friendly mobile Web by introducing a new "standard" for building web content for mobile devices. Basically, this new standard is a set of rules that form a simple, lighter version of HTML. And pages built in compliance with AMP are sure to load super-quick on all mobile devices.

Ever since its launch in search results in February 2016, AMP has been in the SEO news. However, despite all the buzz around the project, SEOs and webmasters keep treating it quite warily. Is AMP yet another Google fad to come and go within a few months like many of them did before? Or is the project here to stay and form the future of mobile?

2. 301 Redirects can Prevent your Pages from Passing Topical Relevance:

If you are in SEO for quite some time, you definitely remember the golden rule: don't overdo with redirects — they are a PageRank leak.

However two months ago Google turned the SEO world upside down, announcing that redirects no longer result in losing PageRank and you are free to use any type of 3xx redirection without the fear to lose your rankings.

Well, I hope you haven't got accustomed to this idea over the past two months, because according to Christoph C. Cemper of LinkResearchTools, 301 redirects might actually harm your SEO by intervening in how pages pass their topical relevance via anchor texts.

3. HTTPS is eating up your referral data. Any ways to fix that?

t's been two years since Google started its active campaign for Web security and announced HTTP to be a ranking factor in its algos. The Web blew up with the idea of switching to HTTPS to improve rankings.

Could we still hope to see a ranking boost thanks to the switch? Nope. Truth be told, it's highly unlikely that HTTPS can help you up with Google rankings. On the contrary, there are countless examples of how the switch can go terribly wrong:

So, if not for rankings and security, why on earth would you run through this tedious process? Quite likely your marketing team already has a good reason for switching to HTTPS — your referral traffic.

4. Still building citations for your local business? It might be just the time to stop!

It turns out citation building might be the most overestimated factor for local SEO. A recent study from Andrew Shotland & Dan Leibson of Local SEO Guide showed that the strength and volume of local citations don't seem to matter much for local rankings.

Looking at ~3000 local searches, the Local SEO Guide team analyzed what factors correlate with higher rankings in Google's local packs. And the surprising finding of the study was that citations showed much less correlation than other factors, while the unquestionable leaders are backlinks:

"How come we've been told for so long that citations are the new backlinks?" you might ask. Well, the thing is that most of the previous local SEO knowledge was based on expert surveys rather than an empirical look. And while empirical correlation (which this study is built upon) is still not causation, it might give us some solid clues for setting up our local SEO priorities.

5. Optimizing for voice search — your chase for featured answers:

A featured snippet — also known as a "rich answer" or "direct answer" — is a summary answer to a searcher's question that Google shows in a special block at the top of its SERP.

As you can see from the screenshot above, a featured snippet usually includes a link to the page from where the data was taken. And thus it has a great traffic-attracting potential you can utilize.

ALL THE BEST!