I find very little value in trying to predict the future, but there is something about the beginning of a new year that brings out the crystal balls and tea leaves in all of us. We all want to prove our expertise by predicting new SEO trends. The thing is very few people go back and determine which predictions came true and which did not, but when someone did make an accurate prediction, you can bet that person will let you know about it – over and over.
These are not predictions. They are extrapolations on current SEO factors and issues. To put it simply, this is what I am seeing in terms of SEO right now and in the near future. These are the SEO issues Blue Magnet is addressing with our clients over the next few months to fully prepare their sites to take advantage of these trends.
The search environment will have no major disruptions.
I know many people desperately want SEO to be dead for a variety of reasons. Mainly, I think, so they never have to hear terms like “link juice”, “trust flow”, and “SERP” ever again.
We have to remember what the basis of SEO actually is – maximizing your website’s exposure to people doing searches where your website is a relevant result and doing this within the terms of service established by the search engine. This kind of optimization will never go away.
Yes, the search engines will get better at understanding the intent and context of the content, but at the end of the day, the search engine will have to make a judgment call on how to order the results on the search engine results pages, thus a need to optimize your content to align with criteria (also known as ranking factors) the search engine is using.
In the past, we have seen shakeups in the search ecosystem with Google updates like Panda and Penguin. The thing is we know Google makes over 500 updates to the search algorithm a year and most of these go unnoticed by most webmasters, yet a peek at Mozcast shows there is volatility in the SERPs. We will not see major disruptive changes by Google. We will see hundreds of tiny changes that may or may not affect our sites.
