Each and every year, search engine optimization strategies shift and change with the ebb and flow of the modifications that sites like Google make to their algorithms. In the recent past, there’s been a bigger shift towards inbound tactics, as businesses are finding more success with online marketing strategies like content publication, rather than embedded advertisements.
As 2013 comes to a close, many wonder what changes the field of SEO will undergo in 2014. Here are some of the most likely SEO marketing trends for the next year.
Image Content Will Play a Bigger Role.
Several image-centric social media sites exploded in popularity this past year. Sites like BuzzFeed, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and apps like SnapChat and Instagram all clearly show the power images-based content can have. If you look at some of the more successful blog posts from this past year, you’ll see that they’re broken up with images, which not only improves the readability of the article, but also gives the readers’ eyes a break. This doesn’t mean that these articles will go by the way side at all. It simply means that images are going to play a bigger SEO role in 2014.
Mobile Marketing Will Become a Necessity.
A few years ago, it was predicted that mobile Internet access will become more popular than traditional access by 2016. While it’s not quite there yet, this prediction is proving fairly accurate as mobile Internet usage gets more and more popular. Any site that utilizes SEO, but still lacks a mobile platform, will need to either design a mobile version of their site, or (as Google recommends) switch to a responsive web design approach to their site.
Social Media and SEO Signals Will Intertwine.
Search engines want to provide their users with the best, most relevant results for their search queries, so it’s only natural that they’d start factoring how many social media shares a blog post or an article received. According to Forbes, the more people that share a piece of content, the more likely it’ll be high quality. It’s no coincidence that the top results from search queries tend to have more social shares than those that are ranked lower.
Keeping these SEO trends in mind, you can start to plan what your next SEO marketing campaign might look like in 2014. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.