SEO UPDATES - 2015

Going forward, specificity of content will continue to become more and more important. Also, search engines will reward the “teacher”—in other words, not the piece of content that is looking to sound smart, but rather the piece of content that has the goal of communion with the reader/searcher. In a quick nutshell, I see the following SEO factors becoming VERY significant in the coming years:

1. Time on Site: Time is man’s greatest resource. It’s also going to be one of Google’s greatest judges of the best content the web has to offer.
2. Bounce Rate: If they quickly come and go, you’ve got a problem
3. Freshness of Content: It better be up to date
4. Meaty/thorough Content: Searchers don’t just want answers—they want GREAT answers
5. Mobile: Your content better look great on every screen, no matter the size
6. Transparency/Honesty: People don’t want to read biased content. They want honesty and transparency, and search engines will get better and better at giving it to them.
7. Multimedia: Content that shows in multiple forms (like a blog post that includes text and video) will outperform content that uses just one means of communication.
   
   

   Create and optimize for mobile traffic

   Back in 2012 ComScore predicted that mobile traffic would exceed desktop traffic in 2014, and they were correct. Google has always said that it feels responsive websites provide the best user experience, and recently starting including a “mobile-friendly” notation next to websites in mobile search results that are indeed mobile friendly.
   You can see if your website passes Google’s mobile-friendly test by clicking here. Bing has also stated it prefers a single responsive URL.
   Related: Why Every Entrepreneur Should Focus on Local SEO
   

   2. Optimizing for Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo

   Could 2015 be the year that some other search engines begin to take more market share? It seems like this is the million-dollar question every year, but some recent developments suggest that it could be possible.
   Firefox kicked Google to the curb and Yahoo will now be the default search engine for the browser. Google’s deal is also up with Safari in 2015, and reports have both Bing and Yahoo trying to secure that spot. The option to switch default browsers in iOS 8 and OS X from Google to DuckDuckGo also exists.
   With options other than Google becoming more popular and accepted it will make it important to have visibility across these search engines in addition to just Google.
   

   3. Switch your focus from keyword rankings to ROI metrics

   If you or your SEO company is still putting an emphasis on keyword rankings and determining the success of the campaign based on keyword positions, then it is time for a major wake up call. Ranking reports can be made to look pretty and some SEO companies will even target useless keywords just to say, “Hey look -- you are ranking number one!”
   If you are a business owner spending money every month on SEO, what would you rather hear from your SEO agency?
   
   • “Congratulations, you are ranking number one for ‘buy blue widgets online’ but we aren’t sure what that translates into dollar wise.”
   • “The infographic that we published last month resulted in earning 67 links and it was also responsible for 45 conversions and $22,480 in revenue.”
   Do you want a fancy PDF ranking report or do you want to know what your return on investment was?
   

   4. More focused social-media approach

   Social media was once just a platform to share content, so businesses would sign up for every social platform under the sun and blast their content everywhere. Social media is now a marketing channel as well as a customer-service channel. Your social audience expects your brand to engage with them on a more personal level.
   Related: How to Improve Your Google AdWords Campaign This Holiday Season
   It is more effective to focus on two or three social-media platforms and be very active and accommodating. This not only helps you generate more leads, sales and revenue, but it also helps to build a very loyal following that will share your content. This can introduce new people to your brand and even present opportunities to earn links.
   

   5. Earning links rather than building links

   Through all of the updates and algorithm changes over the years one thing remains the same: inbound links are the most influential signal of trust and authority. This isn’t going to change -- not in 2015 or anytime soon.
   The days of building links on irrelevant blogs and chasing large quantities of links to game the search results are over. Earning a single link on a high-quality relevant website is valuable for multiple reasons including SEO, attracting referral traffic, leads, sales and branding exposure. Look for traditional PR and SEO to work closer together in 2015.
   

   6. Targeting more precise keywords and search phrases

   The days of targeting broad keywords are coming to an end. While they tend to have a huge search volume, they don’t attract highly targeted traffic and they are expensive to rank. Targeting long-tail search queries not only attracts qualified “buyer” traffic, but these terms will typically have much less competition. Keyword research along with understanding the shopping and purchase patterns of the target consumer can help to identify search terms and phrases to go after.
   Businesses will always crave organic search traffic, and search-engine optimization is the vehicle to drive that highly coveted traffic. What are some SEO changes that you foresee in 2015

So there you have it folks—Factors that will (and will not) play a major factor in SEO going forward. What do you agree or disagree with? What else would you add to these lists? Feel free to add your thoughts below…

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SEO and Google’s Search Algorithm in 2015

4 SEO Factors that will Become Less Important Over Time

1.  Page Rank/Domain Authority: More authoritative (PR) sites will not (automatically) dominate search engines in the future as they often do today. Why?

Just because a website has a high page rank doesn’t mean it should automatically be given more love by a search engine. Giving too much credit to high Page Ranking sites is the classic example of “The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Poorer.”
To make an analogy, if SEO was a team sport today, based on the existing algorithms, almost all the starters would be the team veterans. And the rookies, despite their (potentially) superior abilities, would play much less– simply because they’re rookies. This, as you might imagine, makes no sense in the sports world and it shouldn’t happen in the world of SEO either—but it does, a LOT.

2. Site (Domain) Age: This goes hand-in-hand with Page Rank but it comes down to this: New and future websites should NOT be punished because they weren’t around during the golden age of SEO and search engines. This “first mover advantage” shouldn’t hold so much weight, but unfortunately, it does.

Take as an example my swimming pool company. Because we dominated search with our “They Ask, You Answer” content marketing philosophy starting in 2009, we now stand on top of the SEO mountain for our industry and it’s going to be very, very hard for anyone in the future to knock us off this mountain. That being said, if I were a new swimming pool company I would hate to be punished simply because my business didn’t exist during the early days of SEO.
Hopefully you see my point. This first mover advantage is flawed, as it punishes every new business going forward, and somehow, Google and the rest of the search engines are going to have to address this issue.

3. Social Signals: Many SEO pundits think social will play a bigger and bigger role on search rankings going forward. I do not share this belief. Sure, it may happen for a time, but eventually it will be eliminated because social shares can be too easily manipulated to make a piece of content “appear” worthy of a higher ranking. Furthermore, platforms like Facebook and Twitter come and go, which makes building metrics around said platforms problematic. And finally, because Google and Facebook are becoming massive competitors, do you really think Google will want any part of their algorithm to be impacted by a competitor??
4. Inbound Links (Backlinks): Although I think the number of Inbound Links/Backlinks a webpage has pointing to it will always be somewhat relevant to SEO, I foresee it becoming less and less of a factor. Why? For starters, it can be manipulated. Also, as stated above, inbound links favor older content, and as searchers seek out the “latest and greatest” info within any field, search engines will be forced to give less and less weight to inbound links in an effort to keep content as fresh and up to date as possible.

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