Now that most of us have our footing back after Penguin 2.0,
what’s ahead for SEO and social media marketing in the year to come?
It’s clear that Google’s focus is on eliminating spam and enhancing the
user experience through better content. Evidence has shown that both
site quality and link relevancy are going to be big players in the next
twelve months. But comments from Google and forecasting from a number of
different SEO experts suggest that other changes are on the horizon.
Here’s my best guess of where we can expect SEO to go for the rest of
2013 and throughout 2014 – and my top tips on how to prepare. Just to
add a standard disclaimer: prediction posts are at best guesses. I’ll be
updating this post periodically as more information becomes available,
and look forward to your thoughts and insights as well.
1. Content continues to be important, but requires more depth and detail
The days when you could publish 500-word pieces on your blog a couple
times a week and achieve authority status are fading away. While high
quality, shorter pieces still have value, I predict we’ll see a
migration toward “super articles.” Longer pieces that are a minimum of
1,000 words and more likely upwards of 2,000 will become increasingly
valuable.
It’s what Neil Patel has called “epic content.” There’s several ways
to approach this. If the best articles in your niche offer 50 ideas,
your round-ups could offer 100. You could get access to experts, develop
detailed tutorials, or supplement your content with high quality videos
or images. The key is going to be to follow an approach that sets you
apart from the most basic content in your space, and grabs people’s
interest for the long-term. The focus is on depth, quality, and ultimate
value to the reader.
2. Different kinds of content help you get traction
Whether you’re looking at creating video, developing infographics, or
launching interactive quizzes, thinking beyond blog posts and free
reports will give you a distinct advantage. As buzzwords like guest posting and content strategy
become more and more ubiquitous, it’s important that you do whatever
you can to rise above the noise. In addition to committing to do what it
takes to write sticky, authoritative content, another strategy will be
diversifying the type of content that you publish.
Of course, this connects to your ability to disseminate content in
creative ways. There’s only so many ways to share a blog post. But a
video can be syndicated to dozens of different sites, added to a branded
channel on YouTube, embedded on Pinterest, and more.
Another important factor is your ability to appear in different
verticals of search — for example, videos or images — as overall search
architecture moves in that direction. A more diverse content base will
help you rank more effectively for your target terms.
3. Author authority matters
It’s not just the quality of a single piece of content that matters, but rather your entire body of work. By using Google Authorship
and other behind-the-scenes techniques, Google is developing better
mechanisms for learning about everything you write. This develops an
overall picture of what you’ve accomplished, and what subjects you’re
qualified to speak on.
The overall number of social signals your content is generating, how frequently you’re posting,
and the quality of sites you’re connected to, this will impact the
rankings of the content that you post going forward. To establish your
authority, make sure you’re leveraging Google Authorship not only with
your regular core content, but also with guest posts that you contribute
to other sites in your industry.
4. Links remain critical, but the bar for quality keeps going up
In a video in May, Matt Cutts suggested that Google’s continuing to
develop more sophisticated adjustments to the algorithm to measure link
quality and thwart link spammers. This evokes the idea of link wheels –
creating networks of hub and spoke sites, along with many levels of
intermediary sites, in order to build links. The idea is that if they’re
dispersed and deep enough, that the connections between them will be
masked. It a nutshell, these approaches aren’t effective anymore and
will become less so moving forward.
While Google’s already focused on this, ever more sophisticated
versions of this approach – from paid advertorials to private blog
networks – will continue to be important targets in the war of spam. Not
only will we all be taking a retrospective look at our link profiles,
but strategizing how to build links in the future will require more
ingenuity and planning. Link building is moving in the direction of a
relationship-based process.
5. Diversifying link text is ongoing
One of the areas t hit by Penguin 2.0 was sites where anchor text was
too optimized. Experts estimated that if more than 30% of your anchor
text was identical, it was easy to see that you were actively building
links in a way that might be manipulative. Instead, now and going
forward, it’s more important to think about linking from an organic
perspective.
For example, say your site is currently focused on the topic of
Twitter marketing. People discussing your site and linking to it are
likely to use a variety of terms: Twitter marketing, marketing on
Twitter, Twitter for business, social media marketing on Twitter, and
more. There are a number of terms that are all within the realm of a
reasonable anchor text choice.
It’s important to develop campaigns that help you post links with a
range of different anchor text. Diversifying your link text takes time,
especially if you have a significant body of links to your site. I
anticipate that we’ll see many website owners working on this in the
year ahead. For an overview on proper anchor text strategy in a
post-Penguin 2.0 environment,
6. Great design matters
Great design is a key piece of the user experience. Top-quality
design helps overcome the trust barrier that comes up when people first
visit your site. If your site looks professional, they’re more likely to
believe that your business is legitimate and give you the time and
money you’re working hard to earn. Another key factor is driving
conversions. Good design helps drive users in whatever direction you
want them to go – signing up for your email list, buying your products,
or reading and sharing your content.
Design is also a very effective tool for helping build both your
authority and your epic content backlog. Is your picture on your
website? Do people associate your name and face with high quality
content? If so, you’re on the right track. Is design supporting the
quality of your tutorials? You can instantly upgrade people’s
perceptions of your work by integrating screen shots, videos, and more.
It’s a simple way to increase the value of your content.
7. Guest posting comes under increasing scrutiny
One of the most popular means of building links right now is guest
posting. It’s a great way to build links, cultivate relationships with
other thinkers in your field, and get your material in front of new
audiences. The challenge with guest posting is when it’s treated as the
“new method of article marketing.” I think we can expect increasing
scrutiny from Google on guest posts.
What this means for writers and website owners is that it’s important
to pay attention to the quality of the sites where you post. PageRank
and Domain authority are two metrics to measure quality. Another is to
look and see if these sites have the kind of human signals that make a
reputable site – an engaged audience, social shares, and links from
other high quality sites. When you do guest post, it’ll be important to
put an extra emphasis on developing valuable contributions that really
resonate with the target audience.
8. Social continues to exert a powerful influence
Social media isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s gaining a great deal
of traction. With the introduction of Google Plus two years ago, it was
easy to see that social signals were becoming more important to search.
As one expert said, “human rank is hard to game.” By increasing the
influence of social media signals, the search engines are essentially
outsourcing the manual evaluation process of content to a large extent.
For companies working to rank their content, it’ll be important to
ensure they have branded accounts for their sites. Plugins or other
mechanisms need to be used in order to make content easily sharable, and
to measure social shares. Social media promotion needs to be a
front-line priority in your individual content promotion plans, and
overall innovative approaches (for example, experimenting with exclusive
social content or competitions) used to increase your social reach and
influence.
9. Mobile performance and compatibility matter
During an interview with Search Engine Journal, Matt Cutts noted the
importance of having a lean mobile site that loaded quickly. Building on
that, mobile is no longer optional. Half of all people in the U.S. own a
smartphone; one third of internet users own a tablet. Soon, more people
will routinely access the Internet via a mobile device than the number
of people who do so via a desktop computer.
Having a mobile compatible site is the new minimum threshold.
Important aspects include cross-device compatibility and optimizing
your designs for mobile conversions. Thinking about mobile productively
requires a mindset shift. Mobile isn’t just about making sales. Instead,
it’s about a broader set of potential conversions – visits, gathering
information for in-store visits, signing up for more information – that
require you to focus on the mobile channel.
Besides mobile-ready design, website speed is becoming more
important. As the average internet user expects faster speeds, they have
less patience. Frustration over slow-loading websites leads to a poorer
user experience, which is why website load speed is one of the growing
factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. Cloud CDN (content delivery network) hosting solutions are seeing a rise in popularity due to this trend, and for good reason.
10. SEO is less tactics, more strategy
It’s fair to say that this has been the direction of SEO for a long
time now, but it’s becoming increasingly true. Tactics – specific ways
to build links or to write code – are becoming less and less valuable.
Instead, the focus is shifting to your long-term strategy. What’s your
content strategy? What’s your link building strategy? What’s your
authority strategy? What’s your social strategy? These individual pieces
all link together to create the foundation a successful site presence
is built on.
It doesn’t mean that tactics don’t matter. After all, tactical moves
are how you implement a strategy. Your choices between different kinds
of tactics, such as white hat link building or black hat link building,
can make all the difference. But if tactics aren’t driven by an overall
strategy that’s implementing multiple approaches at the same time,
they’re less likely to work. Approaches to SEO need to be cohesive.
Conclusion
I’m sure that there are critical trends that I’ve missed. I’d love to
hear from you. What’s working for you right now, and where are you
focusing your efforts in the next year? Let me know in the comments
below!
