Why It’s Time To Clean Up Your SEO

In our most recent blog, New Year Resolutions For Your Online Business, we touched on the importance of updating your SEO. A key takeaway was that businesses should update the keywords on their website each month to ensure they still match the terms consumers are using to search for their product or service. But, for businesses to grow and maintain search visibility in 2016, one must embrace new, sophisticated search patterns that are emerging. The future of SEO is being shaped by mobile, social, and voice search. And, businesses should draw attention to these new search patterns, especially as we get further into 2016.

Mobile Search
More and more searches are occurring on mobile devices and the influence mobile has on search is only intensifying. In fact, just this past year mobile surpassed desktop search for the first time. Mobile friendliness is predicted to increase this year. So, businesses that are not optimized for mobile may suffer. Having a strong mobile presence is key to maintaining and improving search rankings. Mobile pages need to load quicker and the content should be structured for audiences on the go. So don’t risk potentially alienating over 50% of your site visitors by ignoring mobile optimization this year.

Social Search
If your business is active on Facebook, you may have noticed more content, search, and trend features popping up this year. Social media networks have spent a lot of time developing their social feeds and also investing in social search. Google already has deals in place with Facebook and Twitter. Just do a Google search for a trending news topic and you will see a tweet or two will appear in your results. It is important to note that it has been predicted that social media platforms will become more heavily indexed in search engines this year. Social media posts are also predicted to carry a similar ranking value to any website or landing page.

Voice Search
Over the last few years, Siri, Google Now, Cortana and Alexa have been introduced to us. Today’s consumers are searching on their phones by asking questions to these voice activated personal assistants. Last year, Apple revealed that Siri was receiving 1 billion requests a week and this was growing by the day. But, voice search is much different than traditional search because it is actually changing consumer’s behaviors. To consumers, voice search is much faster than going through the hassle of opening up their mobile browser and typing into a search bar. This has lead to more than half of all search queries being four words or longer. Which means long tail keywords are just as likely to be searched as specific keywords. So, your business may want to consider implementing long tail keyword optimization into your SEO strategy this year if you do not already.

The fundamentals of SEO and performing keyword research are not changing. Businesses will still want to find words and phrases that consumers are using to seek out their products or services. Mobile, social and voice search are just changing the structure of search engine queries because the world of search is expanding. Take the time this year to clean up your SEO and prepare for this new era of search.