What's Your SEO Strategy for 2015?
Small business, in particular, must make a New Year's resolution to understand that SEO and buying links are simply a thing of the past. That being said, much of the SEO building blocks of 2014 will not change going into 2015.
Social Media and SEO
If your social media is dead or dormant, it will be difficult to increase organic traffic. The nature of the social media encourages participation and sharing, which would lead to sharing links. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a number of relevant inbound links. This is also the intent of offsite SEO. Of course that's a best case scenario. Unless you are a teenager posting about 5 Seconds of Summer or posting about Six Pack Abs, you will likely not get extraordinary popularity. But you will definitely get some mileage. And as Wayne Gretzky said, "you will never score, if you don't take a shot, 100% of the time." So learning good posting behaviors is essential, not only to feed your following, but for your SEO program.
"While Matt Cutts and the Google team have admitted that “likes” and comments may not affect SEO rankings at all, social signals still create links that help in overall link-building efforts. This means that instead of trying to buy followers and create contests for “liking and commenting,” your social efforts should be focused on engaging and connecting with your followers. The more engaged a community is, the more likely they are to share the content you post. They’re also more likely to visit your site, increasing traffic and overall search rankings. Engage your community in 2015." According to Adrienne Erin of SiteProNews.
Long Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are more conversational in structure, they include full phrases like “how do you…” and “where to find…” along with specific items and actions. In 2015, web marketers need to keep tabs on how clients and customers are using search, and to update your strategy to reflect those long-tail phrases. Managing long-tail keywords is a matter of establishing better lines of communication between your business and the target audience using search engines. To do this you need to understand the nuances of your business and clients. Our client, Island Training, is a great example - they will never out-rank IBM for the IBM keyword, but they are highly competitive for their long-tail keywords, like IBM Rational Training Course (which puts them at number 3 on Google.
Going Mobile – Responsive Web Design
Smartphone and tablet searches are steadily increasing, so the importance of a mobile friendly (responsive web design) will be essential in 2015. A lot of businesses live or die on the web. Just ask the businesses that went under after Google’s algorithm changes. Simply put - a responsive or mobile website makes search easier and that's what Google is about. Google will rank mobile-friendly sites higher for mobile search results. It is only a matter of time before search engines begin to penalize sites that are not responsive. If your website is not mobile-responsive yet - make it your goal to do so for 2015. We finally did it here at Momentum 18 and the results in increased traffic are already notable.
Other Search Engines
Google isn't the only player and some time should be spent trying to increase both Bing and Yahoo! results. Bing is a growing search engine and Yahoo! just partnered with Firefox to be the default search engine. So in 2015, consider expanding your reach beyond Google.