How is SEO going to change in 2015?

Is this another "What will change about SEO in 2015?" post? Yes and no! Why? Because the answer to that question is as simple as disappointing for some: nothing.

:-O

"Are you crazy? Online marketing and especially SEO are as dynamic as they can be in 2015 and you want to tell me nothing is going to change?"

Yes! Let me explain why I think that SEO is not fundamentally going to change in 2015:

Mobile

I want to paraphrase Avinash Kaushik here:

If you weren't ready for mobile in 2009, you did a good job.

Is mobile important and becoming more and more present? Of course! But is this big news? No! Having a mobile version of your site with a great user experience is not new, it's what we've been preaching since 2010.

Tip: Strive to provide targeted content for your mobile audience. Ask yourself whether people would consume the content in the same way on mobile devices, as they do on their desktop devices. Even better: Make the comparison yourself.

Content

"Provide the best content". No phrase has been thrown around more often in the last three years. What the best content is, is another question. But in fact you still read the recommendation "provide the best content" in every "2015 SEO outlook" article. Most people haven't understood what "the best" content means, though. They think the more content you have, the better. Wrong!

Determining the best content demands more work than just writing longer text than your competitors. You need to collect as much data about user behavior for the page as possible and then drive (data driven!) conclusions about what the visitor really wants to see. Also, you need to find out as relevant aspects of a topic, which is not always as simple as you might think. One example: the topic is car. A car has a color, tires, a steering wheel, but it also has attributes like a price, horse powers, a manufacturing year and type, etc. Your job is to figure out what a user really wants to see when he uses a certain car related query, how to structure the content and how to display it (text, video, infographic, pictures, everything at the same time).

Tip: Use sources such as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics / your web tracking tool, Google trends, Keyword Planer, 3rd party platform (e.g. Searchmetrics) to gain insights about user behavior. What you finally want to accomplish is to find out the user intent ("what is the user really searching for?").

Backlinks

As a good SEO, you should have realized that the backlink game has changed "a little bit" by now. Google's penguin did a good job of not letting SEOs sleep at night.

Big brands are being punished for playing the backlink game too hard since April 2012 - but where is the news?

Announcing that backlinks are irrelevant now and one should only focus on content is wrong. Google's ranking algorithm is still based on backlinks, period. What has changed is the way companies "build" backlinks and what they look like, but again: we know this for almost three years.

Tip: Valuable backlinks always bring traffic. Ask yourself whether the backlink is really helpful for the user or doesn't make sense at this position / in this article.

BTW: As a professional company / SEO, you should also be aware of all the "black magic" you used in the past, which shouldn't make it too hard to clean up your backlink profile. Check your archives.

Social Signals

Everyone talks about how much you should focus on social signals and how they will become part of SEO. Fact is, Google has often pointed out that social signals are not yet part of the ranking algorithm and if you think about it thoroughly, it's not that simple to say e.g. "a page with > 20 tweets is better than a page with 10 Facebook Likes". Fact is also that the discussions about social signals reach back to 2011, as discussed in this post by Dr. Peter Meyers: "Do social signals drive traffic?".

If you have no social monitoring in place that supports and maybe even drives your content strategy in 2015, you might have to catch up. You have to realize that the place where people talk about "the hot stuff" is social networks! Once again: this is not new, this should be a standard.

Tip: Actively engage your audience to share an article or certain parts of it and make it as easy to share as possible. This includes simple measurements like sharing buttons. You can also highlight certain paragraphs or quotes and provide a "Tweet now" button right below.

Part of the strategy is to not only speak in one direction, but interact with your audience online! This allows you to also find out what the audience is interested regarding the topic.

Instead of trying to find out whether social signals are part of Google's ranking algorithm or not, ask yourself: does the content rank better because it has a lot of social signals, or does it have a lot of social signals because it's good content?

Bottom line, tl;dr:

What we need are not "fresh perspective" or the next big thing. What the industry really needs is to focus on good marketing, being creative and getting the basics in place. You wouldn't believe how many companies I've seen, even in Silicon Valley, which do not have simple basics in place: streamline technical issues, have a insightful monitoring and tracking in place, understand your audience, set up a working SEO team and processes and create content that helps search engines to understand your relevance for a topic and helps users to answer their questions.

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