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 recent
Forbes
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.
Think of all the advantages of a
good content strategy:
- 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?
source :
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2308896/SEO-in-2014-How-to-Prepare-for-Googles-2014-Algorithm-Updates 
