One thing we can count on for this New Year of 2017 is that the world of SEO continues to change at lightning speed. It’s a day in and out reality for us digital marketers to be keeping up with customer usage and expectations, Google’s never ending algorithm updates, and any other of the daily seismic shifts in the world of digital marketing. Complacency will easily destroy your rankings, and rankings are oh so important when it comes to thriving or surviving in modern marketing. Considering that 93% of online experiences begin with search, prioritizing the latest best practices in digital marketing and optimization will be critical to the success of any website.So this new year is as good as any to take a fresh look at the trends and developments that we have seen throughout the past year and see how they’ll play a part in dictating where we are heading next. Let’s get to them shall we? Schema Using a schema markup is increasingly advisable for advertisers with changes to Google and user trends.Schema lays out your site more clearly for search engines to understand its nature, and of course this helps to ensure that it is displayed correctly. Schema can also be particularly helpful when Google decides to display rich answers, as is the case with quick answers or a rich card. Google has made known its preference to display answers that make it easier for users to find what they are looking for. Rich snippets are displayed for recipe and videos, AMP articles, local businesses, music, reviews, and TV & movies. Although this may change in the future, using the schema helps to ensure that your site is more likely to be identified and served up accordingly. Then there’s Google directing more towards Quick Answers, jumping up from just over 22% in December 2014 to over 40% by the beginning of 2016 and having continued to increase incrementally over this past year. Schema improves the effectiveness of your snippet boxes. Schema is these days tied very closely to RankBrain and artificial intelligence.This is to be expected, with this machine learning now standing as Google’s third most...
