SEO Tips: Ways to Stay Ahead in the Changing SEO Landscape

SEO trends, strategies and best practices are never constant. What worked in 2013 is quite different from what is required in 2014 and beyond.

Yet, search is at the heart of digital marketing. In a vast and busy online world, search is how consumers connect with each other – it is how they find products and services and how they connect with brands.

As such, success in online marketing largely depends on how well a brand is able to stay abreast with the fast-paced and relentless changes taking place in the SEO front.

Mobile is the new desktop

The number of mobile users is swiftly surpassing that of desktop users. More and more consumers are using mobile devices to search for products, services, brands and the physical location of businesses.

Mobile users are also utilizing their devices to access all sorts of content including video, blog posts, websites, and social media.

What are the implications for SEO?

First off, optimizing your website for mobile is absolutely necessary if you are going to cater to changing device usage from desktop to mobile. Not doing so, could lose you 50%+ of your potential customers/visitors. A responsive website allows different device users to easily access your content and to interact with your brand.

Mobile design and responsiveness, which affect the overall performance and usability of your site, will also impact on your SEO rankings.

The Hummingbird update also has significant implications for mobile search results. Whilst the update was primarily introduced to facilitate voice search, it also affects how mobile marketers structure and present content for mobile consumers.

Mobile search results are increasingly geographically oriented. Optimizing mobile content with location specific keywords is essential to supporting your mobile SEO efforts.

Going beyond Google

The prominence of social media is arguably one of the greatest online changes to have taken place in recent years.

Social media is now an indispensible aspect of online marketing, customer engagement and branding. Up to 68% of marketers are using social media, with many of them utilizing at least seven social platforms.

How does social tie into SEO?

Social is the most popular tool for sharing information and content. The more people share a piece of content, the more link juice the said piece is likely to generate, thus boosting its search ranking.

It goes without saying that making content more shareable is essential to your SEO efforts.

Although the relationship between social signals and SEO is not yet obvious, social signals do impact on related factors such as authorship and thought leadership all of which contribute to brand awareness and online visibility.

What’s more significant is that consumers are using social platforms as alternative search engines. Social sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide real time, up to date and contextually relevant search results. At the same time, YouTube is now the second largest search engine attracting over 100 million video views in a day.

As you optimize your website content, it has become important to also optimize social content to make it searchable and visible to social media users who are using social search engines to find pertinent and real time information.

Content marketing is the new SEO

Only recently, SEO meant building a website and sprucing it up with all the technical nuts and bolts that would make the website appropriate and legitimate according to Google standards.

While those technical details are still important, they do not impact on ranking.

It is no wonder that even large, established companies such as General Electric, Nike, Coca-Cola and small brands alike are dedicating a large amount of their marketing budgets to online content marketing.

The best ranking brands are simply the ones who are committing to producing high quality, consistent and remarkable content including textual, video and social content.

Google’s updates such as Panda and Penguin are evidence that excellent content will continue to be at the core of search ranking dynamics.

SEO Tips

A thorough understanding of different online assets and how they impact your search efforts is the key to remaining competitive in the ever changing SEO landscape. Failing to stay abreast with the unstopping changes could mean losing customers, banishing your brand to obscurity and bowing out of the online marketing game.