3 SEO Predictions for 2016
Search Engine Optimization Meet 2016
Happy New Year everyone, I hope everyone had a great 2015 like I did, but it’s time to start looking into 2016 now that it’s here. I thought I would start the year on some search engine optimization predictions and advice to start moving forward with what to look for down the stretch of the year.
Mobile & Wearable focused SEO
Everyday more people are adopting their mobile devices as their primary source of the internet. It just has that convenience factor that you can pull your phone out of your pocket and have a world of information at your finger tips. With the introduction of wearables you don’t even have to pull your phone out of your pocket, just look something up on your watch. In my opinion that not the greatest way to get info but people do it.
Sites today have to be able to easily scale down for mobile devices and still provide a decent user experience. There are frameworks that help with that such as Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation. Thanks to the April 2015 update to Google’s algorithm, “Mobilegeddon”, this becomes even more important. Web developers like myself are trying to keep up with ways to serve websites in a consistent and practical manner and we’ve pretty much mastered mobile, wearables are the new challenge to figure out how to display information without sacrificing experience.
Raising Brand Recognition
What SEO’s have seen throughout 2015, is search engines are putting more emphasis on brands that relate to the searchers query. What does that mean? If you were to search for “cheap flights” you would probably see results for Orbits or Expedia or a site similar that’s known to correlate with cheap flights.
2016 will more of the same, but there will be a more focused approach to brand awareness and correlating your brand with the search terms you’re targeting. I do want to point out, that this does take time and big businesses already have a hold in many markets but you’re going to have to focus on those long-tail search terms for local searches. Social media will help with this over all but do not expect to see great results within a short time-frame.
Companies Focusing on Local SEO
Thanks to mobile device features like Siri for iOS, Cortana for Windows, and “Google Now” for Android, many people are asking their mobile devices to do the searching for them. Some of the mentioned companies have partnered up with popular review sites, such as Apple and Yelp. For instance when you ask Siri, “Where’s the best coffee shop in Houston?”, it pull reviews from Yelp and makes a recommendation. This is powerful for company owners to reach their target audience, and every company’s target audience is the same, anyone looking for what they are selling and are actively ready to buy.
Local SEO provides this opportunity, commonly just managing long-tail keywords, and optimizing sites for these long tail keywords. This is great for non-mobile searchers, but usually non mobile searchers are doing research, mobile searchers are actively looking to buy. I am predicting that SEO’s are going to start doing the work for companies on taking ownership of their unclaimed business pages on sites such as Yelp, YP, and Google Business. These sites have such huge a value in mobile search that it has to become part of every local SEO strategy. It will fall on the businesses to push for reviews because people are more likely to go to places with good reviews than not.
Wrapping Up
With the predicted trends in mind, never forget that content is king. Make sure you’re also producing good, relevant, sharable content and your website will climb in the search engine result pages. I look forward to your comments below and let me know what you think will be new trends in SEO in 2016.