How to Dominate SEO in 2017

The importance of appearing at the top of the search engine results has been realized by everyone by now, the individuals and businesses alike. Right from its beginning, Google has been offering the most relevant and organic search results quickly and accurately, for which Google has changed its search algorithm almost 500–600 times so far. While some of these changes were minor, some have deeply impacted the search results.
Google’s major algorithmic updates which have had significant impact on the search results, were Google Penguin & Google Panda. These algorithm-changes were mainly intended for the fine-tuning of semantic search i.e. improving the search results and removing the spoofs and scammers from the search results.

On April 21, 2015, Google released a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm Mobilegeddon that’s designed to give a boost to the mobile-friendly pages or sites in Google’s mobile search results. This update has impact only on the mobile searchers and it doesn’t give a ranking boost only to the mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results, without affecting the desktop rankings. For this, Google has to crawl your web pages to see if they are mobile friendly or not. So, you must make sure that your most important pages are indexed as mobile friendly, sooner than later. Now Google is moving towards Mobile First Index. Read the complete story from Here.

How do I know if my site is mobile friendly?
According to the guidelines, every website should be made mobile friendly, even if the majority of your traffic comes from desktops. If you still haven’t made your website mobile-friendly, then now’s the time that you should.
Because most of the website users are using mobile to browse it these days. So, if you really don’t know whether your website is mobile-friendly, take the Mobile Friendly Test now !

Mobile usability – here’s a complete  guide from Google
Responsive design – here are some of our best blog posts
Page loading speed – a free assessment tool from Google
Mobile friendly content – a great post by Neil Patel

You can do it by yourself if you’re tech savvy enough or, otherwise you can consider hiring a web designer.

UGLY TRUTH
Google may roll out as many ‘latest updates’ as it needs to but the very fundamentals of Google’s search engine would remain the same for ranking any website on the search engine:

#1: Indexed Age
Indexed age refers to a date that Google discovered a particular domain or webpage, not when it was originally registered or released. Google mainly considers indexed age of any website and its content. So, the conclusion is that a brand-new website will always be a newcomer to Google and this is why it takes time for it to get ranked on its SERPs as compared to a website that has some indexed age.

#2: Authority Profile
Authority Profile is nothing but the no. of the sites that are linking to your domain. Google will always check this healthy link profile that signifies the authority of your website. This means that you should always strive to get quality links from quality content across the web. Further, it’ll look for IP-diverse links, which means that these links should not all be coming from the same source maintaining a variety of the sources.

#3: Content
It goes without saying that the content of your site is one of the most critical elements for its ranking. Still, there are many-a-people who hardly care about the website content. But the truth is that it is one of the major things that tether you to Google’s relevancy algorithms. Small content with errors, or duplicate and spun content can really hurt your website a whole lot. Instead of this, therefore, the content shouldn’t only be lengthy but it should also be well-written, keyword centric and highly engaging and interactive for the readers to spend a good amount of time in consuming and digesting it.

#4 Site speed
The website speed has become even more important with the current mobile-first index. This basically implies that since the weight of the content each page bears also significantly affects the page loading speed and can eventually affect the user experience; it also needs to be taken care of.

#5 User experience and engagement
Search engines regard User experience and engagement as important measures. When a website visitor leaves the website in less than a few seconds’ time, it simply implies that they failed to find what they came, searching for, on the website. Whereas, when a website visitor who spends considerable amount of time on a website interacting with its multiple URLs, perusing different resources, this implies good user experience and proves the relevance of the site. In a mobile-first world, apart from the user experience for one page, the user’s navigation from one page to the other also matters.

So, to conclude, relevancy matters the most to Google which outweighs all its latest updates including the mobile algorithm as we have already discussed earlier. This means that even if, for a large brand, the web page is not mobile friendly and the brand is being searched on mobile, the Google mobile results are bound to show it. So, Google still has to rank the website in the top position regardless of the fact whether it is mobile friendly or not.
So, the bottom line is that Google won’t out-rightly remove your website even if you do not go mobile friendly immediately. However, to be on the top of Google Search Results in SEO, you just need to follow the Google Webmasters Guidelines and NOT ignore the latest Google updates completely.