Qamar Zaman a leading SEO Expert. He goes over seo tips and best practices for 2015. He also covers attorney marketing tips for 2015 in his video and Twitter marketing using twitter tool.
While many traditional businesses are still grasping the basic foundation of online marketing, those who have already leveraged greatly from it are constantly adjusting and adapting to the technological side behind it. The ever changing technology behind online marketing, more specifically in search engine optimization (SEO), brought consistent challenges among marketers and online entrepreneurs. These challenges change from time to time, thus the need to be in the know of the latest trends and updates is of utmost importance.
As we are still in the early part of the first quarter of 2015, let’s take a look on what are the top SEO strategy changes we will encounter in the coming months ahead.
5 SEO Changes and Challenges in 2015
SEO is probably one of the most challenging subsets of online marketing to date. Thus, the need to keep up with the ever changing trends in this field is quite important. The year 2015, just like all the years that passed, brings changes and challenges in the SEO industry every marketer and web entrepreneur should know, learn, and adapt.
1. Increase in mobile users, thus must exert more effort and time in optimizing content for mobile platforms.
According to Global Web Index, smartphone (80%) and tablet (47%) are the two of the most popular devices used by people these days to browse the internet. Even though PC (91%) is leading the survey, mobile usage is still leading when smartphone and tablet are combined (127%). These figures show that if you are not serious in optimizing your content for mobile platforms yet, then you are most likely tailing behind your competitors.
Optimizing your content and website for mobile basically needs more focus on simplicity of design, increasing the speed of your page load, make it responsive and conversion-friendly.
2. Google getting more serious in implementing semantic search, thus focus more on optimizing content that can answer users’ intent.
Even though they released their Hummingbird algorithm over a year ago, it is worthy to note that they keep on revamping it to ensure that only web pages that answer a user’s intent are returned every time a search is being done.
Hummingbird is almost a complete overhaul of their old algorithm thus those who don’t get yet how crucial it is in SEO should now take a closer look so that they will know what kind of strategies they need to prioritize.
3. Decrease value of links, thus exert more effort on building relationships over link-building.
This is still in connection with number 2. Despite the emergence of semantic search, it is alarming to note that there are still a lot of entrepreneurs and even marketers who are so focus with the traditional approach of building links. Although traditional link-building doesn’t lose its overall value, it is important to take more effort now in doing relationship building over the former.
Relationship building is the now and future of building links because it resides in the premise that you garner high quality links when you establish non-transactional relationships with webmasters and influential bloggers in your niche. Also, due to the rise of semantic search, even a mere mention of your brand in those websites can help you gain more search visibility and authority.
4. Increase importance of brand mentions and citations in search, thus give more effort in building the image and reputation of your brand.
In your SEO campaign, always keep in mind that every content you produce should be consistent with your branding. Creating spammy content can damage the image and reputation of your brand as well as doing unethical practices just to get on top of the SERPs. This won’t last and it would taint your brand forever.
Brand-building (through establishing brand authority) via SEO and gaining citations through relationship building can help not only to increase trust and credibility but also on how search engines assess the quality of your content and web pages.
5. Increase in ROI should be the most important metric in measuring SEO success.
Ranking on top of the SERPs is not anymore the most convincing metric to measure the success of ones SEO efforts. The best metric is to measure if you gain ROI or increase it over the time of your SEO campaign. Telling your clients that you rank them for a specific keywords is not that convincing compared to telling them that after publishing a content you get (for example) 20 successful conversions and $100,000 in revenue.
There’s no absolute way to gain successful results when it comes to search engine optimization. But, these are a few ways that can guide you achieve your goals and gain more profits. Don’t forget to always incorporate social media into your SEO agenda. These two always go well when properly put together. Cheers and good luck!
Other Resources for Small Businesses
User Generated Content
Read my recent post on user generated content and watch the Google Hangout here http://youtu.be/1A8RRz-REPY
Twitter Marketing Tool for Realtors (Real Estate Agents) on a Budget
Another great interview I did this week with Jason Dove of SocialCentiv. SociaCentiv is a Dallas based technology venture. Their SAAS based Twitter Marketing Application is a great swiss army knife for checking user intent based on keyword searches in Twitter. Watch the video here. Twitter Marketing Tool for Real Estate Agents using #SocialCentiv Twitter App
Attorney Marketing Trends 2015 by Lawyer Marketing Expert Rene Perras https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdGpHndRt1k
