SEO is a must have activity in every each company, but it is not easy to stay updated in fast-changing world of it. Now, we have a great possibility to predict some of trends for 2017, that can refine your SEO strategy in the upcoming year. 
Stop for a minute and take a look at what matters in SEO in 2017.

Speeding things up with Google Accelerated Mobile Pages

Mobile devices have revolutionized the way we access the Internet. According to comscore.com mobile represents about 65% of digital time. In order to make the web more friendly and whole experience a bit easier Google created  AMP -  open-source standard for publishers. It enables creating lightweight mobile web pages, which according to google are loading 15-85% faster. Since it become possible to adjust WordPress sites to AMP using simple plug-in, it is predicted to become common standard for mobile pages in 2017.
AMP focuses on 3 categories

• Content - we observe growing popularity of  rich content, such as videos, carousels or data visualisations. It makes the site more interactive and draws attention of potential visitors. AMP helps it to load instantaneously on the website providing  positive experience.
• Distribution - the same code can work on different devices and platforms, so it really doesn’t matter who, where and using what is browsing your site. It will work the same. 
• Advertising - Accelerate Mobile Pages support different kinds of Ad Formats providing wide range of possibilities to your site. 

Considering the fact, that   speed is one of the key features of user-friendly experience and according to research provided by aberdeen.com every 1 second of delay results a 7% reduction in conversion,  optimizing your website will definitely have positive impact on your web traffic.  

Rank Brain - artificial intelligence in search engine

Rank Brain is a part of Google’s Hummingbird search algorithm helping it to determine how to rank webpages. Rank Brain was designed to interpret long-tail queries and translate them in order to provide the best pages for the researcher. It is able to see patterns between the words, that seem not to have much in common. As an artificial intelligence it has ability to learn and understand future complex queries. What can be really useful nowadays with the voice search getting more attention and the increase  of long tail queries. The best thing about it is, that  through associating  groups of searches with the results it can predict, which ones will be the most liked. 
How to make use of it in your SEO strategy? You should consider the fact, that Rank Brain focuses on phrases, that are put into the search box. So instead of concentrating  just on one phrase, you should pay more attention to words associated with it. More complex and diversified content will be better understood by search engine.
As competition on the Internet gets higher, content, that is not comprehensive and rich will likely be ignored by search engines. In opposite to websites  focused on user experience,that will be rewarded with higher SERP ranking.

Higher in search results with Schema Markup

Schema is effect of collaboration between Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex.This simple tool can easily boost your search ranking. 
What actually Schema markup is? It is a code, that added in your HTML web pages  helps search engines understand  content and  display more informative results. Marking your sites with structured data helps to categorize  informations on it, 
so users can see in SERP what the site is about.
On schema.org you can find different categories of schemas depending on the content, such as: product, place, organisation, or person.  
Organized content will be more likely to answer contextual questions and provide rich information through schema markup. That will help search engines choose your webpages, as the best answers to users queries, what leads to higher click through rate. Although schema markup has been around for couple of years, relatively small percentage of sites are using it. So if you want your site to stand out and draw attention of potential visitor, don’t hesitate to include schema microdata on your site.

Voice search

Another interesting feature with its growing popularity. Sundar Pichai - Google’s CEO announced during Google’s I/O 2016, that about 20% of queries are voice searches. How does it actually work? Voice search is a combination of NLP - natural language processing  and TTS text to speech - which interprets the phrase. 
Why is it so important for SEO? It definitely changes the way people look for the informations on the Internet. To follow this trend we should pay attention to different kinds of queries. The spoken ones are more conversational - they are usually longer and begin with question words. When it comes to content - it should provide direct answer to the questions. The other thing is meaning of queries and the growing role of  semantic search. 
According to comScore.com predictions in 2020 the Voice Search will make about 50% of all searches in the Internet . True or not, it can’t be denied, that this trend is not going to quickly disappear. 

In general now during 2017 we should prepare ourselves for growing importance of speed, mobile adjustment and Google-responsiveness. Although there is big number of other factors, that can influence SEO, keeping in mind these 4 trends will definitely have positive impact and make your strategy more adjusted to quick evolving digital world.