With the significance of mobile traffic growing year-after-year, SEOs and digital marketers are asking themselves: what is the next big change in search? Here’s what we’re keeping an eye on for 2017.

The Growth of Amp

It’s been one-year since Google launched its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) program and the results are clear – search engines are prioritizing page speed and user-experience as key ranking factors. There are countless studies pointing to slow page loading speeds as a contributor to a bad user-experience. In one study, Kissmetrics found that a 1 second delay in page response can lead to a 7% loss in conversion.[2]

To encourage sites to “speedup”, programs like AMP have incentivized fast speeds on mobile optimized pages. Although AMP was originally targeted at news sites, Google has expressed interests in expanding the reach of AMP into other ecommerce sites like eBay.[3] Digital marketers should expect the further expansion of AMP out of niche markets like news sites and into more promotion heavy spaces like tech and ecommerce.

Mobile First

In 2015, Google broke the news that more searches were done on mobile devices than on computers in 10 major countries, including the U.S. and Japan.[4] Since the early internet, digital marketing strategies were fit around the desktop mold. From user-experience optimization and page formatting to asset dimensions, sites were developed with an “optimize for desktops-first” mentality.

While desktops hold a considerable size of the query shares, mobile’s growth continues to rise year-over-year, overshadowing all other devices as a user’s ideal choice. 2017 will mark the start of a mobile-first approach to SEO. As mobile continues to take more query shares, more sites will respond by prioritizing strategies for mobile screens and internet connection speeds.

Machine Learning for Mobile Queries

The next leap for search engine algorithms is mastering semantic search for listings that accurately reflect the user’s intent. The context behind a keyword is always changing, taking on niche meanings. This is especially evident with acronyms and metaphors, two aspects of common language that are historically challenging for search engines.

Google’s recent RankBrain project is taking on the challenge of deciphering context and intention behind keywords. RankBrain works by translating massive amounts of written language into mathematical vectors that computers can understand. This enables them to try phrase combinations until a probable result is found.

As far as we know, Google is currently using RankBrain to handle all two trillion queries per-year. It will be interesting to see how RankBrain manages queries from mobile devices versus desktops, due to their inherent differences. Mobile device queries are phrase-centric as users are conditioned for on-the-go searches while desktop keyboards enable long-tail queries. As the amount of traffic generated from mobile devices grows, search engines may invest their algorithms further into mobile queries.

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[1]Adam L and Andrew L. “2016 U.S. Cross-Platform Future in Focus”. comScore. http://marketingland.com/digital-growth-now-coming-mobile-usage-comscore-171505
[2]“How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line”. Kissmetrics. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/loading-time-lrg.jpg
[3]Barry S. “eBay goes AM, sign it might break out past news?”. Search Engine Land. http://searchengineland.com/ebay-goes-amp-sign-might-break-past-news-253254
[4]Jerry D. “Building for the next moment”. Google. https://adwords.googleblog.com/2015/05/building-for-next-moment.html