http://www.momentology.com/3523-seo-trends-2015-45-experts-on-the-future-of-search/
I read it and took some highlights on what the various people had to say. Some of it is interesting, some of it is repetitive. A lot of people are obsessed with mobile.
Jonathan Allen
build digital assets
PPC marketplace is near break even and growing -- presumably will get worse
build and maintain an audience
(basically learn how to survive without SEO)
Loren Baker
G to serve different results depending on device
only 'mobile friendly' sites in SERPs for iphone and android
traditional rankings reports heading towards junk
proper call tracking most important in mobile
mobile growing too fast for many businesses
Daniel Bianchini
content creation and marketing will continue to grow
user behavior will be studied more
focused on core audience to generate qualified traffic
Chris Boggs
expect lots of blood to be spilled
copy other businesses in your space
Will Critchlow
google to put 'mobile first'
google to display more content in search results
more granular "topic-specific" algorithmic
bugs from google using AI to display SURPs
more natural language processing
Conversion Rate Optimization -- google will mimic users behavior
Brent Csutoras
Quality Over Quantity -- "content is king"
Reddit may be the last successful social aggregation site -- give it some attention
make infographics
Dave Davies
Mobile Usability & PageSpeed important
more updates and manual actions targeting spam
more Panda and Penguin
onsite experience to be a growing part of rank algo
link building to be increasingly difficult
Stoney deGeyter
mobile marketing growing importance
use a fully integrated mobile marketing strategy
those who aren't doing mobile will suffer
Eric Enge
G's direct answers and the Knowledge Graph use to grow
mobile rankings boost to become permanent
mobile UI dictate the overall search UI
Erin Everhart
better SEO reports
Glenn Gabe
sites will fix problems and improve overall site quality
continued & accelerated rolling major algorithm updates
Ashutosh Garg
SEO should be a byproduct of user experience
mobile
Casie Gillette
promote your content
integrating search and social teams
Mike Grehan
Mobile will trump Desktop
optimize for mobile
use Vary HTTP header for mobile and desktop so googlebot sees the difference
(ref developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/dynamic-serving)
video content is good
Chris Hart
personalization to increase
SEO will become more data driven
"set it and forget it" solution will fail
mobile "click to call" tracking will be important
Bill Hartzer
Mobile & tablets
move to HTTPS
focusing on link earning rather than link building
Kristjan Hauksson
mobile
a FB search engine based on social signals
SEO is not dead
Jim Hedger
added weight to responsive design sites
mobile growing importance
Jon Henshaw
SEO to continue to integrate with other marketing practices and user experience
SEOs to:
- Increasing dwell time
- Improving page delivery and rendering speeds
- Testing and optimizing calls to action (CTAs) and conversions
Simon Heseltine
more Panda
more Penguin
mobile to keep growing
Rae Hoffman
mobile
link building isn't dead but move inhouse, & be linked to content creation
Bill Hunt
SEO more tied to web and content development
Mark Jackson
content marketing and usability key
SEO to be part of the marketing team
advertise in social to get links
'Vince' update to make brands more important
Ammon Johns
integration of multi-channel, multi-touch strategies
make searches for your brand names and brand terms a top priority
cultivate customer loyalty
Dixon Jones
Website analytics are struggling to provide any coherent picture.
Big data will give answers
Ryan Jones
the future of search is verbs
mobile
user experience across all kinds of devices
Julie Joyce
mobile
usability
Krista LaRiviere
use your sales funnel to make keyword-driven content
seek influential people/businesses/sites to distribute content
Matt McGee
mobile
James Murray
think about how voice search will impact queries
- will make queries longer
voice and semantic search will drive more search personalization
Chuck Price
content and backlinks most important
effective link building program should be the cornerstone of any enterprise
mobile
searcher intent and the contextual meaning of searched phrases will play a larger role in search results
use schema.org
Get into the Knowledge Graph
Matt Roberts
SEO to influence content writing, partnerships, affiliate deals
Dave Rohrer
companies will listen to their SEO team more
align content creation with intent and solving a problem for the user.
content needs to be good quality
Kristine Schachinger
mobile is over-hyped for many verticals - know your market
Google will pull back from the severity of the Penguin update(s)
new algos will focus on quality
privacy will become more of an issue
Grant Simmons
"context content marketing" - micro granular way of selecting and segmenting audiences, device agnostic, location-aware, and behaviorally adept
Build out key customer profiles
Aleyda Solis
optimize for mobile
optimize your app -- google has app search
Charity Stebbins
personalized web ecosystem will make SEOs focus on targeted content
algorithm shift that serves content based on relevance to a searcher's persona
Nichola Stott
SEO to be seen as more credible channel of promotion
creative agencies and content marketing agencies muscling in on SEO
Kaila Strong
look for micro opportunities to optimize websites and see improvements
Brett Tabke
mobile
facebook's Atlas ads may get big
Virtual Reality....
Marcus Tandler
mobile optimization
Purna Virji
focus on users:
faster and more user friendly websites
Persona-driven, relevant, high-quality content
semantic search means less doorway and thin content
SEO will become more influential
Branding and reputation important as trust metrics grow in weight
Fili Wiese & Kaspar Szymanski
User experience marketing - web marketers will invest significantly more time into building audiences and relationships
Martin Woods
SEO, social media, and PR lines of responsibility to become less blurry
SEO also means maintaining [existing] traffic, optimizing platforms, and content
SEO agencies will be required to be more open and transparent about how they get links
Wow! Thanks LM. I looked at the article but am racing around like crazy without time to read the whole thing.
On mobile and schema and speed - Pierre Far harped on these every chance he had at Pubcon, not just when speaking, but even from the audience during Q&A.
Two comments he made
RE Mobile: "If you don't have a mobile strategy, it's not just late, it's too late" (which is patently false because sites that haven't been built yet have no strategy at all, but I think the point being that you are already suffering the consequences, not that you will be suffering soon).
RE Schema: "Mark up everything"
I consider myself reasonably tech savvy, but not a server person at all except to run a VPS (poorly)... I had never heard of the Vary header and had to look it up. This is good for being straightforward
http://www.fastly.com/blog/best-practices-for-using-the-vary-header/
And this for the SEO implications
http://searchengineland.com/mobile-site-configuration-the-varies-header-for-enterprise-seo-163004
Thanks again LM
Mike Grehan is Fing everywhere and listening to many MFs
### MOBILE ###
[TY 4 the summary LM]
Thanks for the summary.
>Virtual Reality
This is how you know it's starting to get interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT_b5gqCG_c
yes thanks (both for original and summary)
I am most depressed by the amount of people saying 'seo will become part of marketing its no longer stand alone' and 'rankings reports suck'. What have they been doing for the past [insert your preferred number between 5-15 here] years?
Or just spam.
>'seo will become part of marketing its no longer stand alone'
I tend to agree with the above sentiment but with a huge caveat; seo is the apex of the marketing pyramid. That is, all marketing must be approved as seo-compliant. There are some industries (movie marketing, perhaps) that this may not apply but for most products and services that are going to have an online presence, seo should rule from the git-go. A startup's 2nd or 3rd hire should be an seo consultant, a generalist who would help select brand names, domains, early anchor text, site design parameters, etc. I see new products and wonder what were they thinking when they picked the name.
If bounce rate and social signals are indeed making it into the ranking algo then it makes sense logistically for SEOs to work closely with content creators and marketing strategists. I don't really see this as a bad thing, it sort of gets us out of the fringe.
>social signals
And free PR and links when a new product or service is announced. I've been to more than a couple of kickstarter pages that don't even have a site ..so only the KS page gets the links from authoritative review sites. WTF are they thunking!!!
It has been my general observation that when you need to ask the question "What are they thinking?" the answer is "They aren't"
Jonathan Allen's been impressing me with some of the stuff he's been posting lately. Even these thumbnails he posted are loaded with meaning.
>>>build digital assets
I take that to mean thinks people will link to. Things people will refer others to. Things people will keep coming back for.
>>>PPC marketplace is near break even and growing -- presumably will get worse
Saturation of advertising space. Pretty much the entire Internet is based on free. That's not sustainable. Advertising isn't going to give EVERYONE free ride forever.
>>>build and maintain an audience (basically learn how to survive without SEO)
That's been a goal of mine, to just say screw referral traffic and cultivate a life outside of search. Buzzfeed and the likes are working that side of the street but really they only changed pimps, from Google to Facebook. They're still selling advertising and they are NOT a destination. It's still referral base. I knew a site that had huge audiences behind a member wall, can't recall if it was a paywall. Regardless, I think they were able to become a non-search destination by leveraging their huge UGC database of information that was useful to their members, including product and vendor reviews. They hid it from Google and made it a private resource. Digital Assets as Jonathan says and they learned to prosper outside of referral ecosystem. How well they did with AdSense though, I don't know.
Nobody mentioned it, but is email marketing dead?
> is email marketing dead
I bloody hope not, I have most of my irons in that fire for the next few years....
And this (although biased) seems to infer more growth although huge changes in how it's consumed. Email is now a 2 device channel. See it on mobile, if important, re read on desktop.
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/guides/email-marketing-trends/
Great Email read >>> MOBILE!!!
>>See it on mobile, if important, re read on desktop
Absolutely. I've noticed that I actually prefer to do triage on my phone and read on my desktop. If I'm sitting there with both available, I'll literally choose to go through and delete everything in the simpler mobile interface, then go read the important stuff on my computer.