Locallogy's 2017 Digital Marketing Predictions

So long 2016, hello 2017! It’s a new year and we at Locallogy are all reflecting on the changes we saw in this past year’s digital marketing industry: location pages became a game-changer and online customer reviews are making and breaking businesses, just to name a few. All this reflection on 2016’s trends has us all wondering: what will happen in the digital marketing field in 2017?

We’ve done the research, so we’ve got a pretty good idea of where the industry is going (although, we don’t know everything ). Check out our team’s predictions for what we can expect out of digital marketing in the next year.

• Landing Pages: Learning to optimize more than just your home page will become more important in the coming year.
• Mobile-First Indexing: The mobile-first approach has been on the rise for a while, but will 2017 be the year it takes over completely?
• Visual Paid Advertisements: When it comes to advertising, visuals will become more important than content.
• Voice Searches: With just a single answer given, voice searches are changing what content is seen (or rather, heard).
• Live Video: How this instant interaction tool will be incorporated into marketing for small businesses.

Optimization of Landing Pages

Simply put, any page of your website that a visitor gets to from a place other than your own website is considered a landing page. So, if someone searches for “move out cleaning Columbus, Ohio” and The Maids Columbus shows up as a search result, the page that appears when the user clicks on the link becomes the landing page, since the visitor came to it from an outside source. Recently, people have been getting increasingly specific with their searches, which means highly specific landing pages are key for businesses to show up in search engine results.

Through industry research, it has been discovered that people are more likely to find what they are looking for on a website as a specific landing page, rather than finding the home page and navigating through a website to find what they need. We’re certain that the increase in highly targeted landing pages isn’t going to stop any time soon, with websites’ keywords getting more specific by the day.

Mobile Surpasses Desktop

It’s no secret that most businesses have adapted mobile-friendly versions of their websites, due to the amount of people performing online searches on their phones. However, what used to be a second thought in website development has officially moved to a mobile-first strategy. Not only is the mobile version of websites becoming increasingly important, but it will soon be the only option for businesses.

Google is gradually moving toward a search engine structure that is based solely on mobile-first indexing. Research shows that people are using their phones more than desktop computers to perform online searches, a trend that is only expected to grow as long as smart phones and tablets arewidely used.

With the reoccurring theme that visuals are a must in digital marketing, our team is predicting that 2017 will see a huge increase in non-text paid advertising. This means that instead of ads appearing as realistic content, we will start to see more visual ads, such as videos or images.

You can expect to see visual advertisement on social media, such as Facebook and YouTube, where people are looking for visuals more than content. For advertisers who can get it right, we expect to see a very positive return on investment. On top of that, we should expect to see improvements in ad targeting on all these platforms as marketers offer clients more advanced features to have an edge over competitors.

We’ve had the power of voice searching in our hands for years…literally. The iPhone’s Siri voice-controlled search has been around since 2011, and now other devices, such as Google’s “Ok Google” feature and Amazon’s Alexa, have started popping up as well. You know how it works: you ask a question and your device tells you the answer (rather than giving you multiple results to choose from), based on its own Internet search. But how does your device choose what answer to give you?

Digital marketing researchers are starting to explore these voice-activated searches and figure out how to optimize your personal results. Obviously, everyone strives to be in that top spot, which will be even more coveted when voice searches only give one result. We predict that this will be a major player in how people search for things in the next year, as well as change how search results are chosen.

We’ve already started to see live video have a growing impact on social media bases like Facebook , Instagram and Snapchat. In 2017, we predict that live video will move past the social media realm, gaining popularity and becoming an asset for small and mid-sized businesses. Live video gives businesses a chance to instantly interact with consumers on a more personal level. It’s a great way to gain trust among your clients and grow your reputation as a relatable company.

Mobile video is becoming more and more mainstream. Our digital marketing experts believe that small businesses need to embrace live video and find ways to utilize it in their digital marketing strategy.

From what we can tell so far, 2017 has a lot in store for digital marketing trends. By keeping up with these and other marketing developments, your business will stay ahead of the game, continuing to make an impact on your local SEO. We’ll be keeping an eye on these trends to see if our predictions play out for better or worse.