SEO 2015: What to Look For in SEO

Your Customers Will Be Even More Mobile

As mobile phone technology continues to get exponentially faster and more useful, more and more customers are moving towards researching and buying products online from their mobile devices. Business owners absolutely must adjust their digital marketing spaces for this trend or they will be left behind. The biggest step you can take to adapt to this trend is to make sure that your website is mobile friendly. If it’s not mobile friendly, you will lose customers in 2015 if you did not already start losing them in 2014.

Note that the information in the infographic is from 2013. The information from 2014 is not available yet, because the year just ended, however, as you can see, this is an ongoing trend we have been watching for the last few years, and the numbers just keep going up. You can be assured that those numbers grew in 2014 and will continue to increase in 2015. If you’re website is not quickly accessible, easy to read and simple to navigate on a mobile device or tablet, you’re going to frustrate users that are trying to work in that spce.

Google Search Results Display is Changing

You can always count on Google to lead the charge in change. In 2014 we saw Google start making changes to the search results display and we can expect more changes to continue into 2015.

— Inc. Magazine

Don’t Give Up Organic Search

A study done by the folks over at Search Engine Watch in the summer of 2014 found that most websites are receiving more visitors from organic search traffic than originally thought. For some websites, more than half of traffic comes from organic search . This finding highlights why solid content strategy is important. Generating good, relevant content is the best thing you can do for your sites’ search engine results.

Stricter Regulations on Site Security

In a nutshell, Google likes Secure Sites. As of late 2014, Google is making a push to preference https secured websites. Google has updated best practices to prioritize sites that have taken extra security measures to protect their content and by proxy, their users. This change is not only going to cost businesses a bit more to implement, its going to make ongoing site maintenance just a bit more complicated and necessary. This security change isn’t relegated to certificates. It most likely reaches all the way in to your website’s analytic and strategic content plans.

Adjust Away From Keyword Rankings

This is not to say that you should not do keyword research any longer, but changes to the way Google is reporting means that we are going to be able to track the keywords that people are using to find websites less and less in 2015. This is thanks to Google’s encryption of keyword search data that started in late 2013. You can learn more about this update to secure search from this nice post from the folks at Search Engine Watch.

In adapting to these changes in 2015, businesses need to instead focus on where their customers can be found in the digital space, enhance visibility of their brand online, and use keyword research as a guideline for developing quality content on their site to match what customers would be using in searches to find their product or service.

Your Social Media Presence

Google+ is still important to Google. Business owners should be sure to establish their ‘Google Place’ making sure that their business information is correct and that all the information for immediate contact is entered. This means hours, phone number and brick and mortar address should be listed. In 2015, other social media such as Facebook and Twitter, will continue to fill in the search engine result options that should be filled with your business listing, so make sure these areas are working for you and not against you.

If you are new to setting up social media, here are some things that you need to keep in mind to help you show up higher in the search results:

• Make your social media information interesting and high quality
• Encourage people to interact and share your social media information
• Use images

Don’t forget to link your social media accounts with your website and your website to your social media accounts

Granted there will be many more changes in the year ahead, but the above SEO trends are ones that you can count on to be a solid base for website SEO in 2015.