In spite of the skeptics’ opinions that SEO is about to go down, while paid advertising will monopolize the online environment, SEO practices become even more important in 2016.
How can you have quality ads if they aren’t optimized for the relevant public? And what’s the point of attracting a huge amount of traffic to your website if the users aren’t really interested in what you have to offer?
With every year that passes by, both the marketers and search engines develop a better understanding of the importance of using SEO techniques. Well-structured, user-friendly web pages with relevant content are essential for offering online users a pleasant search experience.
As we move forward into this new year, we will notice a lot of changes that are meant to make the search simpler and the answers even more relevant than before.
In this article, we will discuss the main SEO predictions that will help marketers and business owners promote their websites easier and more efficiently.
Here are the top 5 predictions for 2016.
1. Real-Time Penguin Update will have a big impact on websites
We all know that off-page SEO is mainly based on link building. However, the quality and relevance of those links is now more important than ever. Links are the core of search engines and Google wants them to be obtained using white-hat techniques only. This way, everyone can get a quick, relevant answer to their search.
The Penguin Update will come into operation starting March 2016. It is designed to update immediately after a change has been made, which is why it is called a „real time algorithm”. Although this is meant to catch those sites that use black-hat link building techniques, it also has a few flaws.
One of the most important flaws is the fact that penalized sites may quickly regain rankings, without too much effort. Therefore, be careful about the Penguin Update and make sure that all of your links are in order.
2. The focus will continue to be on mobile devices
Since Google made it clear that everyone who wants to have a successful website must make it mobile-friendly, almost everyone obeyed. As more and more people search the Internet using smartphones and other smart mobile devices, it is important to keep the optimization as advanced as it is for desktops and other larger screens.
Those who will go around mobile optimization will have a lot more to lose than just a few ranks.
3. Structured data and voice search
Although many of you might think that this has nothing to do with the way SEO works, it actually does. The way the search works has changed since structured data and rich snippets have become important tools that make finding the right answer way faster.
If you want your website to be found in the top results of Google’s first page, then you should start thinking about optimizing it for voice search.
4. Local SEO
If you think about it, the importance of local SEO is obvious. How many times have we not searched for something, hoping that we would get info about a service that was actually located across the country? The answer is: dozens of times.
If everyone would optimize their websites using geo-targeted keywords, phrases, Google Maps info, Google Now integration and many more, then we would be able to get the answers we are looking for in no time, without visiting irrelevant websites.
This year, Google wants us to go local and focus on the things that can bring us closer to the customers or visitors. If you want your website to show up everywhere by optimizing it for random keywords, Google will treat it as ‘irrelevant’. You don’t want that, do you?
5. Combined SEO
If you’ve heard a few times in the past that “SEO is dead” and other similar expressions, it is because SEO alone isn’t a strategy that you can count on if you want leads. SEO can’t exist without content marketing anymore and the other way around. They are co-dependent, which is good, because we are moving towards an era of quality data.
“Digital marketing will, therefore, encompass SEO, content marketing and more fields, soon. What used to be a chaotic link-building and article writing process that didn’t make any sense to anyone slowly becomes a well-established routine that every website must adapt to.”
John Smith founder TenBestReviews.com
Other predictions bring into discussion the importance of website optimization for Bing, a great focus towards video content, content aggregation and social media content indexing. The apps haven’t been left on the outside this year, either. Deep links in apps will be of great importance this year.
In conclusion, website owners and developers must focus on high-quality content, links, mobile optimization, structured data and local SEO. All these factors will play an important role in a website’s rank and the traffic that it will obtain.