What’s Trending in SEO for 2015?

(December 18, 2014) – With only two weeks left in 2014, chances are that you have already been preparing for the new year.  The start of the new year means the start of new business opportunities, goals, relationships, and more.  What do you hope to accomplish?  What do you hope to improve upon?  Where do you hope to take your business?  2015 is nearly upon us, and if you haven’t already started, it’d be best if you looked at what everybody was talking about in regards to the trends of the coming year.

What’s Trending in SEO for 2015?

Experts and professionals have all been discussing the possibilities for SEO in 2015, and while some of it may be speculation, what’s being discussed does matter.  If you’re looking to get your foot in the door early, take note of some of the topics that have been trending in SEO in 2015:

• The decreasing importance of keywords: there is expected to be a gradual shift away from keywords and towards more conversational and query-based answering.
• Increasing importance of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): this plays into the decreasing importance of keywords.  There is a decreasing focus on particular words and an increasing focus on every single word, taking the entire meaning of sentences into account.  This will reward content with meaningful content and penalize pages with a focus on keyword-baiting.  See our post on Google’s Penguin 3.0 update.
• Mobile queries outgrow desktop queries: if you don’t optimize your site and content for mobile, you will get left behind.
• Visual content replacing text/greater focus on multimedia content: visual content is more easily digestible than text and is expected to become more important in any savvy business’s content strategy (from video content to infographics and beyond).
• The rise of machine learning: Google’s ability to interpret natural language is only getting better with time, becoming more “human” and conversational (see: the decreasing importance of keywords).
• The rising impact of social media: it’s becoming easier and easier to track the impact and return of social media spending (which sites drive the most clicks/traffic, e-commerce on social media, customer service opportunities, etc.).