SEO Best Practices and Trends for 2015

What SEO Best Practices will be HOT in 2015?

The Internet is a huge factor in how marketing is performed nowadays, and keeping up with the latest SEO trends is important to keeping your marketing edge. This is because traditional push marketing is being replaced by more cost-effective inbound marketing strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), that drives targeted audiences to you as apposed to out bound marketing where you are marketing to the masses and hoping you reach the right people. Make sure to bookmark this page as your SEO best practices checklist and don’t let up! Here are the top 8 SEO trends to watch for in 2015.

1. Content is King. Google’s latest search engine algorithms focuses more and more on content, which means there is less focus on keyword saturation and more focus on whether or not the content is actually relevant to the keywords. You should continue to generate high-quality content that uses appropriate, relevant keywords and synonyms for those keywords, but focus more on the content than the words themselves.

2. Social Signals Will Be Even More Important. Changes within the search engine algorithms have not just placed greater importance on the content, but they’ve also begun to rely more upon social signals to elevate results up the ladder in search ranking importance. Eventually, we expect to see content and social signals integrated, with content of higher quality getting more social shares and thus rising higher in the search engine results.

3. Online Security Will Become More Important in Rankings. If your website deals with online payments and sensitive customer information, you need to make sure you are using proper security measures to safeguard that information. For example, using security certificates and https instead of http will help your website grow in search engine rankings in 2015. If you want to confirm the security of your website, check out WordPress Support.

4. Mobile-Friendly SEO will grow. The mobile user experience is rumored to be another important ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithm, since the mobile Internet has surpassed the desktop Internet and will continue to grow in 20125. Estimates say that in 2015, there will be as many as 50 billion local searches using mobile devices—wouldn’t you want to be found in those searches?

5. Increased focus on conversations instead of keywords. Semantic search became a big deal in 2013, with Google’s Hummingbird update. Search engines are now using context, meaning, and intent of the words in a search query, instead of just focusing on matching up keywords. This means long-tail, or more “conversational,” keyword phrases will grow in importance for SEO, and you should begin to tailor some of your SEO efforts towards engaging in a conversation with search engine users.

6. Link Building Will Focus on Brand Mentions. In 2015, proper link building will continue to be important. What’s changed, though, is how the search engines will interpret those backlinks coming to and from a website. The content will get more of the focus, so you need to think about relevance and social popularity. Brand mentions, relevant information the source website is discussing about your brand or website, might not require a hyperlink but will still factor into SEO.

7. There Will Be More Visual-Based SEO. High quality, original content featuring visual media elements like graphics, images, and video are becoming high performing assets for the top-ranked web pages in 2014, and this is expected to continue throughout 2015. Rich text with visual elements gets priority in SERPs over web pages with just text, and video marketing on YouTube can generate a huge amount of link and social sharing traffic for your site. Here is an example below:

Are we coming to the end of SEO?

8. Say So Long to Keyword Rankings, and Hello to Return on Investment. The primary focus in 2015 will switch from keyword rankings to more important elements that would impact your ROI. If your top-ranked web page doesn’t generate conversions and sales, that top ranking doesn’t matter. You will need to apply new SEO strategies that focus beyond link building and keywords, and account for how your content engages with your audience and convinces them to convert into leads or sales.

2015 is on us, so start paying attention to these trends and best practices now and you’ll be ahead of the game all year.

SEO Best Practices and Trends for 2015