December is often the month when you’ll probably start to see many SEO’s and SEO companies start making predictions about what the next year (2014) holds for search engine optimisation. Now anyone who writes anything as fact you really need to ignore as we all know the only people who truly know what changes there will be in the seo industry are of course Google themselves, well Bing too although we all know that the market share that Google hold mean that they have the ultimate say. (If you don’t believe me just read my 2014 SEO facts post)
So I thought it was about time I made predictions for next year, now as you can expect I will only be making educated guestimates as to what will change, what will stay as a factor and what may stop being a factor when it comes to increasing your search traffic in the next year.
Social will become even bigger
We all know that people are sharing more links, content, products and so on with each other via social networks, turn the clock back 8+ years and the amount of stuff that would be shared ‘socially’ in proportion to internet usage would be much lower. You’ll have noticed this on sites such as Facebook where your newsfeed used to be full of people’s statuses and photos but it’s now full of shared content, news stories and quite often links to Buzzfeed. It’s my belief that the weight of social shares, likes, Tweets etc will have an increasing effect in 2014. It’s not only the links and it’s effect on your natural search positions but social sharing can bring you targeted traffic so it’s something that people need to make a priority next year.
Don’t be thinking though that a post you make on your companies site that goes viral and gets you thousands of shares on Facebook for example will directly influence your rankings, social will still be used as a signal and needs to be part of an overall seo strategy that gives search engines all the right signals.
Content is still king
It’s been said for years that content is king and it’ll be just as true in 2014, people need to make shareable content as this will directly link to the importance of social (see above) effects. Good content can create links, increase traffic, social signals, interest visitors and turn them into customers.
I think that the style and type of content that will start to be written will become less focused on a keyword and more on an area or topic. For example a company selling fans for offices will move away from writing articles such as ‘the best small office fans’ to writing content such as ‘Keeping your office cool in the summer’ where they will focus on tips not entirely surrounding fans but various different methods. This is not only more natural and readable for the visitors but is something I believe Google will appreciate much more.
Rich Snippets
2014 should see more sites start making use of rich snippets and other such features that you can achieve when combined with schema data, for those unaware they are mark ups that you can use on your site which Google can then read and provide more information to users in the search engine listings itself. Gone will be the days when you search and simply see search results with a title, url and description, you’ll start to see more ratings, prices, date and more (see example’s below).
Fewer natural results
Google will continue to reduce the amount of natural listings shown on a page and introduce more sponsored/adverts such as comparison results. This will come into effect on some of the most competitive industries on an increasing number of search terms, just check out a search for ‘flights to new york’ and you’ll see how few natural results there are and how Google are getting involved in this area too.
Increase in Negative SEO
Well this is sad to say but I think there will be an increase in negative SEO, for those not sure what it is, it’s basically when a competitor or someone does bad and naughty link building to your site with the aim of triggering Google to give your site a ‘Google Slap’. In basic terms they build enough bad links that you site suffers massively in the search engines. Now Google have tried to overcome this issue with them giving you the ability to tell them about these links via the disavow tool in Google Webmaster Tools however it can still take a long time for the effects of a negative seo campaign to be recovered from. Additionally it’s very hard for Google to know if someone has had a negative SEO campaign against them or it’s simply they have done some bad link building themselves and are trying to get away with it and recover. Why do I think it will increase in 2014, simply because the natural results market will become more competitive as the space reduces and people find that they can do negative link building easier than building good links their own website.
Hello Google Plus
As I’ve written before Google plus is something any business online should be using or at least looking at. 2014 will see Google pushing people to use it even more and in recent months Google has started making all the comments on YouTube videos to be made via people’s Google Plus profiles so you can see they are really trying to push it.
Make sure that you are writing blog posts and sharing them on your Google plus profile, try and interact with people who are influencers in your industry and make sure that you keep your profile nice and up to date. You can also make sure you mention your profile on your site or your blog to make sure users know you have a Google Plus account.
Brand Signals
Google will be making big brands rank higher than smaller brands and this will not only be to do with the seo of these bigger brands but the signals that are all around the internet, these ‘signals’ will be things such as mentions, social shares, brand searches, reviews and brand mentions in content (not specifically links), these will not only give Google an indication that this brand is something people are wanting but that it’s worth them putting them higher in the rankings in order to improve the search for the user.
Website Optimisation
If your website is slow or not as fast as your competitors then expect your site to drop in the rankings in 2014, Google wants to give it’s users good websites and if a user visits one and it’s slow to load, hard to navigate or doesn’t fit in the browser, be it their phone, tablet or laptop then they won’t be getting the best experience. So 2014 will see sites improve the speed, navigation and user experience as a whole as a more important priority over how it was in 2013.
So you’ve seen my predictions for SEO in 2014, I’d love to hear your opinions on it as well as your own predicitons.
If you’d prefer to read exactly what SEO will be like in 2014 then you can read this: What SEO will be like in 2014 – The Facts
The post SEO predictions in 2014 appeared first on SEO Sheffield | The Digital Marketing Agency In The North.
