Guest post by Nathan Elly.
The new year is well underway.
As we reflect on the major events in the world of SEO in 2016, web marketers need to evaluate how the changes will impact the SEO strategy through the rest of 2017. The biggest news in 2017 has so far been the Penguin 4.0 algorithm update, however there were also several other changes that had caused a stir in the SEO world as well. Specialist SEO agency Digital Next has seen the impact first hand and share their predictions for the future of SEO in 2017.
Relevance needs to be prioritized.
The key trend that came out of all of the updates in 2016 is the influence on relevance over authority. Previously, SEOs had focused more on the authority of sites to improve the amount of pagerank that would help to rank the site for its desired keyword. Now we are seeing improvements in site’s rankings if they receive links from more relevant sites, even if the authority of their site isn’t as high.