How important will SEO be in 2016 for Digital Marketing?
SEO will still be important, it’s just changing and digital marketers need to understand how SEO has evolved. “Old School” SEO doesn’t work as well and can get a site penalized. SEO is blending with social media and requires a strong content marketing strategy. Social signals (people sharing the content) and links from authority sites are the focus and can produce the best results.
Also, obtaining traffic from major sites where your target audience hangs out is more important than just achieving a page one ranking in Google. Total traffic is the new goal as opposed to just a page one ranking.
What we see becoming a major part is branded search – ranking for a business name as part of a keyword phrase. Customers are searching to see a business’ reviews, testimonials, social media activity and helpful content posted about their niche before they decide to do business with them. Creating an optimized branded network can provide a competitive advantage for your clients. It needs to be mobile responsive as well.
Also optimizing content specifically for keyword phrases is evolving into creating content that is topical and can rank for more broad terms. However, you still need to look at the competitiveness of the content in order to rank. However, even posting competitive topics to social media groups can get targeted traffic and can be shared.
Lastly, video is going to become even more important both individually, as well as part of media rich posting (video, images and text with links out to authority sites.) We have developed an interactive video platform for marketers to help them get more results from their video marketing efforts. In two years or so, the major of content posted will be video according to the latest statistics.
[easy-tweet tweet=”SEO was, is and will be important for Digital Marketing. ” hashtags=”#seo #google”]The only thing is now it must be smart and strategic.
