It has been an
incredibly eventful year in terms of updates from Google. Major 2013 changes
included further releases of Penguin and Panda, Hummingbird taking flight, and
the shift away from providing keyword data thanks to encrypted search.
Many have gone so far as to ask whether SEO as a profession is
dead: for one interesting perspective, see my recentForbes interview with Sam Roberts of VUDU Marketing.
My own take is less alarmist: Google has taken major spam-fighting steps that
have shifted the playing field for SEO professionals and anyone trying to get
their site on the map in the year ahead.
At the same time, the
need for an online presence has never been stronger, while the landscape has
never been more competitive. The potential to make a real ROI impact with your
company's online marketing initiative is greater than ever. But defaulting to
so-called "gray hat" tactics no longer works. Instead, SEO
professionals need to step up and embrace a more robust vision of our area of
expertise.
You might call it a
move from tactician to strategist: the best and most successful players in our
space will work to anticipate Google's next moves and respond to them with
laser focus. In a sense, the infinite digital game of chess that is SEO will
continue, but the rules of the game have become more complex.
Through a mix of what
I'm observing and reading and what I'm seeing working out in the field today
for my clients, here are some suggestions for companies and SEO professionals
that are thinking ahead to 2014 for their digital strategies.
Everything You Learned in 2013 is Still Relevant, Just Amplified
When you look closely at the targets of the 2013 updates (ie,
websites that cheat their way to the top of the rankings or provide no value to
visitors), I anticipate seeing these carried forward throughout 2014. We can
continue to expect micro adjustments to Panda and Penguin that continue to target both link quality and
content quality.
Smart marketers will
benefit from keeping a close eye on their link profiles, and performing
periodic audits to identify and remove inbound links built unnaturally. High
quality content investments will remain critical.
A solid SEO performance in 2014 is going to be built on a
foundation of really understanding what happened in 2013, and what these
changes mean both strategically and tactically for SEO. SEO really has changed in
critical ways.
Content Marketing is Bigger than Ever
Content marketing will
move from buzzword to mature marketing movement in 2014. From an SEO
perspective, Google will be looking at companies that have robust content
marketing efforts as a sign that they're the kind of business Google wants to
support.
·
Regular, helpful
content targeted at your audience.
·
Social signals from
regular sharing and engagement.
·
Freshness or signs
that your site is alive and growing.
·
Increasing authority
connected to your body of work.
Sound familiar? It's
the very approach to SEO that all of Google's recent updates have been designed
to shape.
What changes you need
to make in 2014 depends largely on where your company stands now in relation to
an active content marketing strategy. Companies with existing content
strategies will need to assess the role of mobile, specifically.
If you've just begun to move in the direction of content
marketing, it's time to really commit and diversify. If you haven't started
yet, it's time to take the plunge.
Social Media Plays an Increasingly Visible Role
Social media has been
a major player in the digital marketing landscape for the last few years. First
we saw the rise of mega platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In the last couple
of years, visual content from networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and various
micro-video services haa swept through.
Today, diversification is a major trend: depending on who you're
targeting, it's no longer enough to be active on a single network. In fact, The Content
Marketing Institute recently released a
study that the most successful B2B marketers are active on an average of seven
networks. Companies and SEO professionals will need to be asking the following
questions in the year ahead:
·
Are we taking our
social media seriously? Are we employing the pillars of strong profiles, good
content, reciprocity, and engagement?
·
Is easy social sharing
enabled for all of our content?
·
Does our content
strategy include a dissemination phase that includes maximizing its potential
for distribution through social networks?
·
Are we active on the
social networks that matter in our industry?
·
Are we active on the
social networks that matter to our customers?
·
Are we active on the
social networks that matter to the search engines? (See below for more thoughts
on making that strategic investment).
·
Does our social media
marketing strategy stimulate the level of social signals required to achieve
our goals?
Google's updates are
likely to increasingly rely on social signals as active human curation of good
content.
Invest in Google+
In addition to
strengthening your overall social media marketing position, it's going to be
absolutely critical that you are investing in your Google+ presence.
Moz's most recent study of ranking factors confirms that Google+ is playing an
increasingly significant role in a solid SEO ranking. The immediate areas to
focus on include:
·
Establishing Google
Authorship of your content, and tying it to your Google+ account. Authorship,
which brings your body of content together, will play an important role in the
SERPs as well as strengthening your Author Rank.
·
Those +1's add up. It
isn't clear exactly how much Google +1's directly contribute, but it's fair to
say that it's a major factor in the "social signals" component of
Google's algorithm. I expect this to increase in the year ahead.
Hummingbird Was Just the Tip of the Mobile Iceberg
2014 will be the year
of mobile SEO. Hummingbird was just the very small visible tip of a very large
iceberg as Google struggles to respond to the rapidly shifting landscape where
half of all Americans own smartphones and at least one-third own tablets. Those
statistics will probably shift upward, maybe dramatically, after the 2013
holiday season.
As a result, your
site's mobile performance matters to your SEO rankings. Properties that you're
trying to rank need to be designed first for mobile and then scaled up for the
big screen. If you don't have a mobile-optimized website, this needs to be your
top priority in terms of SEO and design investments for 2014.
Some underlying
changes that happened with Hummingbird, including the increasing importance of
both semantic search and Knowledge Graph, will continue to grow in influence.
Practically speaking, this is to help prepare the search engine for the rise of
voice search associated with mobile. But it also has direct implications (which
we're still learning about) for broader SEO. This is one area that you should
pay close attention to, from how you structure your content to what content you
choose to put out.
The Long Versus Short Debate
Which is better, long
content or short content? The answer depends on who is creating the content,
who is reading it, what it's about, in what context it's being consumed, and
how you define "better."
For the purposes of
this argument, which form of content will help you best prepare to rank well in
2014? Frustratingly for some, the answer is more "both/and" than
"or."
Vocus recently cited a study that showed that the top
10 results for a specific keyword search tended to be more than 2,000 words in
length. The validity of that study has been debated, but it's probably fair to
say that length is a proxy for depth of expertise and value delivered to the
reader.
Google values both
expertise and value. As a result, we've seen a trend where the "minimum
desirable length" for text-based content has shifted from something in the
range of 550 words to articles in the range of 1000-plus words.
Yet we're also
confronted with the reality of the mobile device: if I'm reading about
something I'm only moderately interested in, there's a high probability that I
won't want to scroll through 2,000 words on my iPhone. That leaves content
marketers faced with the challenge of producing mobile-friendly content, which
tends to be (in a sweeping generality) much, much shorter.
Proposed solutions
have run the gamut from content mixes to site architectures that allow you to
point readers to specific versions of content based on their devices. This is
great for the user experience, but where it all comes out on the SEO algorithm
front remains to be seen. For now, I'll just acknowledge that it's an area of
concern that will continue to evolve and that it's something you should keep
your eye on.
Advertising and PPC has a Shifted Relationship with SEO
Since Google made the
decision to encrypt the vast majority of its searches, our ability to access
keyword data for research purposes has been restricted. However, there's a
loophole. Keyword data is still available for advertisers using PPC on Google's
platform.
More SEO budgets may
be driven toward PPC simply because access to the data may otherwise be
restricted. It's also possible that we'll see the release of a premium Google
product to give us access to that data through another channel from Google in
the year ahead.
Guest Blogging Remains One of the Most Effective Tactics, With a
Caveat
Guest blogging has exploded in the past year, and it's going
to remain one of the most effective means of building quality inbound links,
traffic, and branding exposure in 2014. However, it's absolutely critical that
you're creating high quality content, and using extremely stringent criteria
when selecting your target sites.
In other words, you
need to apply the same high ethos approach to guest blogging that you do to the
rest of your SEO efforts. If you dip a toe into spammy waters where guest
blogging is essentially scattershot article marketing with a 2014 update,
you're likely to be penalized in a future Penguin update.
Conclusion
This has been a year
of significant change in the SEO industry. Even contemplating strategies for
2014 can feel staggering.
The good news is that
looking back, it's easy to see which direction the trends are heading in terms
of the years ahead. Staying the course on solid white hat tactics and paying
attention to a few priority areas that are shifting rapidly should give you the
insights needed to improve your organic search visibility in 2014 and beyond.
What trends do you
anticipate seeing from Google in the year ahead? How are you preparing?
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