How do you know that the year is slowly drawing to a close? Exactly, there are first reviews of the current year and, of course, also views on the year ahead. What will next year have to offer? What will change in our business? In this digital age, everything is changing so fast that a peek into next year is almost like a glimpse into the glass sphere. But some things are always remain the same. For example, Google along with Search Engine Land has already confirmed the core themes for SEO in 2017.

So what do we have to keep in mind in 2017 in order to continue to be well-listed on Google and receive a lot of traffic accordingly? If you are a little concerned with SEO, you will not be surprised at the three topics that will be the focus of the next year:

1. Structured data
Structured data is not an issue of yesterday. It is, however, to gain a new meaning in 2017. Only if you pay attention to this, the knowlegde graph can also record the data reasonably and thus also process it. In the adult business, the knowledge graph may be negligible, but in other areas, it can make a big difference whether you are normally represented in the SERPs or, so to say, landing at position 0 where the data from the knowledge graph is displayed.

2. AMP
Speed is everything today. We don’t want to wait for nothing and want to receive information immediately. This is especially true on the Internet. With Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), waiting is coming to an end. Anyone using AMP will cache their pages in the AMP cache so they can be loaded quickly. To do this, an asynchronous javascript is used that loads content quickly, but then reloads Javascript only later. For users, of course, this is a great thing and so Google wants to continue working on AMP in 2017, make improvements and insert new features.

3. RankBrain
With the Hummingbird update came also RankBrain. How RankBrain really works, probably very few insiders know on Google, the rest of the staff taps in the dark as well as we as a website owner. The fact is, however, that in the case of machine learning, the algorithm interprets the content in real-time. RankBrain is constantly developing itself. Already, it is used in every search query by Google and interprets search queries that no one has asked. As a result, connections between old and new data are then established. How to optimize for RankBrain? Actually not at all – but it is a good idea to work with synonyms in the content. Then you are well placed for 2017.