What's your WordPress SEO strategy for 2017? Presented for the Melbourne SEO meetup and recorded on Facebook live SEMrush page. The aim to help you craft your WordPress SEO strategy for 2017, and understand the big picture SEO trends, and how they can affect your search goals. Facebook Video can be found here https://www.facebook.com/SEMrush/videos/1562473520449358/

1. WordPress SEO Trends
For 2017
Search Trends for Twenty Seventeen
By Peter Mead
@petermeadit

2. Your WordPress SEO strategy for 2017
● Craft your WordPress SEO strategy for 2017?
● Understand the big picture SEO trends
● Can affect your search goals.
● Following are my WordPress SEO trends for 2017

3. ● ‘searcher intent’ will be the key
● The days of keyword loading are over – thank goodness!
● Knowing your searcher intent takes time to research
● Digging deep into website visitors motivation will reap rewards.
● Structure your WordPress site for topics instead of keywords
● In depth, quality content on topics related to your brand and industry.
● Hummingbird and RankBrain will both continue to improve in 2017.
Searcher Intent will beat keywords

4. Epic content, comprehensive useful and engaging.
So demand for quality skilled copywriters will increase.
Long form content that includes:
● images
● diagrams
● infographics
● Videos
This takes time and energy. This style of interesting, engaging and informational
content wins more links.
Quality epic content continues reign

5. Mobile speed impacts:
rankings and conversions affecting as much 50% audience.
most of us will still sit down at a desktop to do most of our work.
Many of us are now using mobiles to search.
Your mobile speed time is very important.
Also the rise of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) the G answer for speed on mobile
Pages load times will be critical

6. ● Organic search results will be harder to achieve
● More real estate in SERPs will be given to Ads
● More variety of Ad types such as larger Ads
● Scraped results such as answer boxes begin to show Ads
Paid channels will continue to rise

7. ● Voice search has been around and improving for some time
● Voice recognition algorithms are improving
● Users will be voice searching more while multitasking
● Becoming a personal assistant devices in cars
● Google Home & Amazon Echo type devices improve more for
search
Voice search will be more prominent

8. ● SEO efforts will focus on mobile to capture over 50% of search
● More focus on Apps as Google extends search functionality
● App Store Optimization, App Deep Linking, App Indexing
Improves
● App Deep Linking should be a powerful tactic to adopt
App Store Optimization on rise

9. ● Accelerated Mobile Pages are flagship answer to mobile speed
● Significant efforts have been invested in this tech
● It’s Google-backed open standard
● Will see more search queries returning AMP content in SERPs
● Will the functionality widen to include more content types
AMP will become commonplace

10. Search engines are trying to gain meaning from your content.
Using schema markup can help
SERPs continue to display rich snippets results
● Products
● Reviews
● Job Listings
● Events
● Restaurants
5 Practical Examples of Structured Data for Rich Snippets in Search Results
http://www.thesempost.com/5-practical-examples-structured-data-rich-snippets-search-results/
Schema & Rich snippets rise

11. ● The SERPs features are forever being improved and changed
● More device types and diverse searching platforms
● Technical SEO will be in demand to meet the rising demand
● Skills for Web Server, Web Coding, Languages like Angular etc.
● Strong technical skills is a must for WordPress SEOs
Technical SEO resurgence

12. ● AI or Artificial Intelligence has been a long time goal.
● Advancements in Machine Learning help systems learn and respond faster.
● Personal assistant style ‘bots’ on our devices are inevitable
● They aim to plug the context gap between users and search engines
● This will lead to an extremely personalized search experience.
How to optimise for this?
Machine Learning & AI steady march

13. What are you planning in 2017 for WordPress SEO strategy?
Melbourne SEO Meetup Community
https://www.meetup.com/melbourne-seo/
SEMrush
https://www.semrush.com/
Moz
https://moz.com/
WordPress SEO Questions
https://www.youtube.com/petermeadit
Digital Streets
http://digitalstreets.com.au/