15 Predictions About What SEO Will Mean in 2015

I have already started making my New Year’s resolutions.  Maybe that’s a bit early – but I like to get a head start on things.  2015 is going to be a great year for our company and one of the key things I am doubling down on this year is SEO.  That used to be a very black and white answer – you say, “I’m doing SEO” and people just knew what you meant. But, now it is blending with all of the other marketing disciplines.  We are being pushed and molded into T-shaped marketers – and I couldn’t be happier about it.  So in 2015 – I wanted to be ready to take the full package of SEO and make it so effective that it knocked the socks off our investors.  In order for me to do that – I reached out to 16 SEO experts that knew way more than I did so I could figure out what their predictions were.  I want to share those predictions with you so you can crush it this year too.

Prediction 1: Don’t Break Up With Google

“SEO is already hard to define: It will get even harder ultimately meaning “Anything that helps online visibility”:

1. Companies are going to invest more and more in promoting content pages (versus landing pages). The conversion types are going to get more varied, the conversion funnels are going to get more complicated.

2. With huge brands investing more in creating content assets, it will be more difficult to stand out. Experimenting with different types of multi-media and interactive content types may be the answer, for now. Building your own community of listeners (who are ready to spread your word) is a necessity.

3. Links are going to still be the big thing in 2015. We see no signs of Google moving away from that signal. We see no signs of Google stopping the link-removal and link-disavow madness (fueled by manual penalties in the first place). As a result, more and more companies will need link-building and especially link-removal help. Hence, unfortunately, 2015 will not be the year of “natural links”…

4. Companies are going to look for “other” way to build online visibility beyond search. Depending on Google is not a reliable business model and we’ve seen lots of examples of that. I don’t mean breaking up with Google. Nor do I mean that you need stop caring about SEO best practices (no way!) I mean: balance and diversify. Google traffic is neither free nor reliable and losing it may be too drastic. Invest in building your email lists, creating your communities, turning customers into brand advocates and bringing up in-house niche celebrities: Anything and anyone you can rely on for promotion, branding awareness and word of mouth.” — Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) – Owner, viralcontentbuzz.com

Prediction 2: Build Up Your Reputation

“It will mean what it has always meant. You’ll need a website that’s search engine friendly, you’ll need content that is relevant and useful for your customers, and you’ll need to build up your reputation in your industry. It’s the reputation part that Search Engines find the most tricky to Police but they will continue to improve which means businesses can focus more on building a good product and marketing it well online, and less on implementing the latest SEO trend or link building tactic. One of the ways Google will improve the reputation part of its algorithm is by making PageRank more topical. Matt Cutts hinted about this earlier in the year but I haven’t seen convincing evidence of it yet. Expect it to come in 2015 and it will be a big talking point among SEOs. It will make the art of link building much more genuine and harder to spam.” — Joe Williams (@zenoptimise) – Managing Director, zenoptimise.com

Prediction 3: Marketing Diversification For the Win

“I think marketing diversity will be a key SEO component in 2015. As SEO’s we’ve always had to wear a lot of hats but they’ve tended to be “SEO” hats and not hats from disciplines like advertising and social networking. Now to be a successful SEO you need a strong working knowledge of how all the online platforms work and how you can take advantage of them. Here are three examples I believe will be key in 2015:

1. It is important to know when and where people are looking to buy. Having an insight into the technology behind retargeting will be important in this regard, learn about how it can help tap into your customer base. Once you do, you can focus your marketing spend on developing content and promotions that bring in visitors and links.

2. Develop strategic partnerships, sometimes you just can’t do it alone. Find a company in an ancillary niche and work together swapping email lists, promotions, social outreach and advertising dollars. You’ll broaden your outreach and stretch your marketing budget.

3. Start listening because people are talking up a storm. Voice search is huge and getting bigger as evidenced by the vast resources search engines are putting behind it. Know your trigger words and look to develop content around “where”, “how” and “when” type phrases. SEO will mean marketing diversity in 2015.” — Debra Mastaler (@debramastaler) – President, alliance-link.com

Prediction 4: Better Content Analysis and Mobile Web Rankings

1. “Less “SEO” Copywriting: This is a no-brainer as it’s already been happening for years. As Google’s sophistication at text analysis reaches new highs, webmasters are finally waking up to the idea of “write for humans, not for bots.” Smart SEOs will continue to perform sophisticated keyword research and on-page optimization to gain that a competitive edge.

2. Better Content Analysis Tools: I believe we’ll see a new generation of SEO content analysis tools that go beyond keyword usage. This includes advances in entity extraction, sentiment analysis page layout tools that are currently only readily available to search engines.

3. Faster Penguin Updates: Neither Google nor website owners likes once-a-year Penguin updates. Let’s pray the speed freaks at Google will figure out a way to process this data faster.

4. Mobile Web Rankings: Up to this point, mobile web rankings have mirrored their desktop siblings. While Google rolled out their “mobile friendly” label this year, I believe 2015 will be the year when mobile friendliness and experience becomes a ranking factor for mobile results.

5. Google Eats More Informational Queries: Google will continue to scrape more data and respond to questions via answer box results, much to the consternation of the websites that created that data. Free traffic will still flow.” — Cyrus Shepard (@cyrusshepard) – SEO & Strategist, cyrusshepard.com

Prediction 5: Diversifying Your Skill Set As An SEO

“In 2015, SEO will continue to mean what it’s always meant: optimizing web content for search engines. The methods by which we do so are constantly evolving, thanks to the ever-changing way search engines rank content and people search for information. For example, expect links to continue to become less important. We’re headed towards a linkless SEO; Google has needed links to gauge a site or piece of content’s relevance and authority, but they’ve been looking for alternatives. One could be a type of Quality Score for organic content, where click-through rate, social shares, time on page and other engagement factors are considered. The role of your typical SEO will continue to change, too, with huge emphasis on diversifying your skill set. A lot of what we used to consider the job of an SEO is now the domain of specialists in other disciplines, like PR, content marketing and even social media. Even hardcore technical SEOs are having to demonstrate some level of knowledge in all facets of digital marketing. Hey, we asked for SEO to be integrated earlier and better with marketing! As it becomes even more mainstream in 2015, SEO will be expected to play better with others, much in the same way IT departments have had to come out of their uber-techy shells and intermingle with other functions within companies. Does it mean the role of an SEO will disappear completely? Not in 2015, but opportunities for professionals who identify solely as SEOs will become more limited.” — Larry Kim (@LarryKim) – Founder and CTO, wordstream.com

Prediction 6: World Class Promotion

“It’s not just about ‘quality’ any more. It’s about world-class quality. World-class content is great, but that’s only 50% of the equation? What about promotion? Who should you reach out to? What e-mails should you be sending? How often should you be following up? Who will be doing this? What will you budget for promotion? People tend to forget about world-class promotion. Get both of these right and you’ll get all the links you’ll need to succeed. Forget all the hacks. Just do it right :)” — Eric Siu (@EricoSiu) – CEO, singlegrain.com

Prediction 7: Optimize For Discovery

“SEO in 2015 will mean less of a direct focus on every change to the search algorithms and more about optimizing your website and content for discovery by the people in your particular niche. Your content should be focused on helping answer key questions and concerns of potential customers and the individuals that interact with your customers on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean stressing over creating content for every major keyword your customer might search for anymore. Instead it’s important to understand how niche keywords are dispersed across the different parts of the sales funnel and how your organization can create quality content in the right format to best suit the customer’s needs at any stage.” — Brian Honigman (@BrianHonigman) – SEO Strategist, brianhonigman.com

Prediction 8: Bigger Emphasis on Long Tail Keywords

“Long tail keywords are going to be ever-more important as businesses the world over understand the value of content marketing. Gone are the days of creating a blog post titled “Workplace Trends” and expecting to see it rank on page one. But, something like “Workplace Trends in Australia’s Finance Industry” will strike a stronger chord. It might be a small segment looking for this term, but you can be sure you will be on page one when a prospect is looking for it.” — Laura Troyani (@LauraTroyani) – Marketing, tinyhr.com

Prediction 9: Be the Authority in Answering Questions

“I can’t stress enough the importance of dialing in On Page, the content and group of influential factors that are controllable. Other factors that are easy to game now have less relevance. At the same time, hard to game factors such as click-through rates become more influential. Attempts at gaming the SERPs in general, will continue to draw penalties. For 2015 and beyond, keep in mind that the end goal for any Search Engine is to provide the user with an answer, a resolution to their problem as quickly and easily as possible. It’s no secret, Google has been saying this for years, focus on the user, on providing value, on answering questions, be the authority! Algorithm updates will aim to award those that do while leaving the rest to fend for the scraps.” — Matt Greener (@realmattgreener) – SEO Strategist, mattgreener.com

Prediction 10: A Great Content Strategy

“SEO will continue to become marginalized. Other than basic SEO tactics to help search engines read content, most SEO tactics and strategies will become ineffective. As Google continues to update their algorithms, the only reliable path to growth in organic search traffic will be building great content. Going forward, a great SEO strategy is just a great content strategy.” — Lars Lofgren (@LarsLofgren) – Director of Growth, kissmetrics.com

Prediction 11: Quality and Diversification

“In 2015, SEO is going to mean quality and diversification. Most web and content people know that the days of pure metadata optimization and link building are gone, but it’s still less clear just how many facets there are to SEO now — and how quickly they’re growing. Social reach and impact, on-page content quality, how recent or timely your content is, and advanced data like geolocation, reviews and other Schema protocols all play a role. The biggest change is how search engines now focus on the concept of “quality,” which I call education, to be more specific. What it means, conceptually, is that they’re getting better at learning how useful a page is to the user. That’s why recent updates have hurt sites like Ebay in a major way. Ebay used to rank well organically for hundreds of thousands of items, but now their search rankings have been replaced with pages that educate the searcher, often with lengthy, text-heavy content, about a particular item rather than simply having it available for sale. With all its resources, a site like that can’t overcome this fundamental shift in SERP rankings — the only way around it is to adapt to the new normal, which is to provide high-quality, highly relevant content about a topic rather than just access to a purchase or definition. That focus on educating the user, along with paying painstaking attention to staying “up to code” with Schema and other content extension strategies, will provide big returns in 2015 from both an SEO and a social media perspective, the latter of which is becoming more and more synonymous with traditional optimization strategies.” — Mark Casey @mark_casey – Director of Inbound Marketing, hanapinmarketing.com

Prediction 12: SEO Becomes Holistic

“In 2015, I think we will finally see people start to realize that SEO is holistic in nature. With constant updates to search algorithms, you can’t just attempt to “game the system” by packing a page with keywords and meta tag tricks. Marketers will begin to realize that the entire experience for the viewer will be key for driving SEO results. Questions like, “Is the imagery elegant to look at?” “How does the page incorporate responsive design across many screen sizes and resolutions?” “Is the content actually helpful at solving problems rather than just an online sales ad?” “How easy is it for a viewer to get more information if they want it?” All of these types of questions will have to factor into SEO planning and move SEO beyond simply matching words on a page with what you think people will type into a search engine.” — Mike Bernard @bernster – Director of Marketing Cloud Practice, relationshipone.com

Prediction 13: SEO and UX Become More Intertwined

“Google has started to index apps, or the content found in apps, and in 2015, apps will have a major emphasis on search and SEO as mobile usage continues to increase. How does it work? Content within Android apps can be indexed either through a sitemap or through Google Webmaster Tools (I believe that iOS apps will soon be able to be indexed if Apple and Google come to an agreement). This means when someone searches for content that has been uploaded to an app, and the searcher has that app installed, they will have the option to consume the option within the app or the website. As SEO and user experience becomes even more intertwined, SEOs will have to figure out how to provide a seamless mobile user experience when a user is alternating between websites and apps.” — Jason Delodovici (@justjasonjames) – SEO Strategist, jasondelodovici.com

Prediction 14: Bing and Yahoo Are More Relevant

“Mobile: Making websites work well across devices is hugely important today, and in 2015 this importance will grow even more as mobile searches outpace desktop searches. As a result, the breadth of searches where mobile friendliness matters to ranking will increase, too. For SEO this means:

1. A need to drive web and content development strategies that deliver mobile friendliness to users and b) ensuring that search engines can crawl and evaluate websites not just using traditional “text-based” crawlers, but also using “browser-based” crawlers that understand how web pages behave on different devices, can execute script, interpret CSS, and so on.

2. Knowledge, Data & Your Markup- In 2015, search engines will continue to grow their capabilities to aggregate and express knowledge about people, places, and things as well as their relationships, attributes, and actions as part of search results. For SEO, this means that, more than ever, sites that share and structure their data through markup will be able capture an edge that goes well beyond rich snippets.

3: Bing & Yahoo- In 2015, SEO means a world in which Bing will continue its growth trajectory — both as the search engine powering Bing.com and other places (such as Yahoo!, Spotlight Search in iOS, and Windows search) as well as the “intelligence engine”, powering and differentiating many other services and applications. For SEOs, this means understanding what works on Bing by checking in with Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places for Business more often and tracking traffic from these various surface areas to gauge their efforts in “optimizing for Bing” as one.” — Vincent Wehren @vincentwehren – Senior Program Manager – Bing Webmaster Experiences, Bing.com

Prediction 15: Big Changes For Mobile Search

“The SEO community has talked about mobile search becoming more important the last few years, but looking back, Google has not really made any big changes to mobile search. After focusing on things such as local (venice update, local carousel, pigeon update) and quality (panda updates, penguin updates, manual link penalties, hummingbird), this is the year that big changes finally come to mobile search. Google has already hinted at this late in 2014 with their mobile-friendly label and various other tests involving the look and feel of mobile search results, so don’t be surprised if we see a mobile search algorithm change that shakes up the SEO community similar to the first Panda and Penguin algorithms.” — Danny Tran (@dannyt316) – Online Marketing Manager, Quinstreet

BONUS Prediction: SEO For Everybody Else

“2015 will be the beginning of SEO for everybody else. The smaller and more conservative B2B businesses will be getting involved. My clients have been gradually trending from restaurants and consumer facing services who live and die by their website to industrial, agricultural, and B2B services. I believe this is happening for two reasons. The first is because of business owners taking notice of what is going on in the consumer world, probably just from being inundated by social and traditional media. The second reason is more fundamental; more and more people are asking Google instead of picking up the phone. The biggest advantage that a distributor had was their customer service and the ability to answer any questions a customer had. But now if a customer goes online just to look up the phone number of their distributor, they’re going to see the very product that they are researching being sold right there just like when they are shopping for a new tv or blender at home. How people shop personally is going to eventually affect how they purchase at work. Every industry is starting to take notice, not just tech or consumer sites. It isn’t as sexy or exciting but it is a much bigger pie up for grabs and still very little competition. Fortunately for new entries into SEO, I believe that it will be getting easier and less technical. With each update to Google’s algorithm, they attempt to plug all the loopholes and technical aspects of SEO and make it more and more about reputation and content. This is better for people who are searching and I personally believe this is better for the business owner as well. Owners will be hiring less web guys and more writers, giving the owner more control and understanding of what is happening, putting SEO within reach of more and more people.” — James Browning @jamesbrowning – SEO Strategist, jamesbrowning.me

What do you think SEO will mean in 2015? Leave a comment for me below. I’d love to hear from you!

William Harris is the Marketing Manager for When I Work, an employee scheduling app that is changing the way businesses schedule and communicate with their employees. He also writes about SEO and Digital Marketing at Elumynt.com. When he is not busy being a marketing mad scientist, you can find him with his family, playing random musical instruments, solving pointless math problems or reading physics magazines.