At the start of every year, SEO experts everywhere weigh in on their ideas for what may be big in the next few months. These predictions often include on-page, off-page, mobile, and social media ideas. In order for you to be able to tweak your search engine optimization strategies, you need to know what to expect.
Even though these things are just what people in the industry may think may happen or should be done, people take these ideas seriously enough. They often take such suggestions from the experts and run with these to see if these do help with their websites. To give you an idea what these predictions are, here are a few of them:
Real-time Penguin Algorithm – this is one of the updates that many webmasters have been waiting for, and this is because of the fact that previous updates were too slow or too delayed to have any positive effects on the sites that they have been cleaning up. When Penguin was first rolled out to help fight black hat practices, people found it rather frustrating that the recovery they were expecting from cleaning up their websites were delayed due to these late roll-outs. The transition of Penguin into a real-time algorithm is an update that is long awaited, and has been slated for roll-out early this year.
Videos will be as useful as ever – the past couple of years have seen videos as a great way to capture and engage the website’s targeted audience, and this year seems to be no different. This year however, see websites utilizing videos more due to the fact that these seem to help raise a site’s ranking on SERPs. Not only do these help a site rank better, but these will also increase the visibility of your site and your company. This is with the use of your targeted keywords showing both your site’s pages and your videos on the same SERPs.
Voice Searches will increase in volume – this prediction is probably why it is important for sites to have a usable voice search function. First, mobile needed to be paid attention to, now voice is following in this trend. The number of people who are beginning to use voice searches for their needs is increasing, with teens leading the pack, followed by people who are doing other things while launching a search, such as watching TV, driving, using the bathroom, and cooking.
Local SEO is expected to get more attention – local SEO gained a lot of attention the past year due to the Pigeon update, which made businesses begin to focus more on their local efforts than they ever did before. Using location specific content and keywords helped businesses who wanted to get to their local markets better to achieve these goals admirably. This helped audiences find the stores they needed to find within their area faster, and increased the occurrence of local ads for searchers who used these search terms.
These are just a few of the rising trends for SEO this coming year, with a lot of other predictions being added to the list week after week. Some of the other things to look out for include more focus on mobile SEO, content aggregation and marketing, more social media attention, and the increasing use of deep links.
