SEO Predictions and Strategy Breakdown for 2015

Over the years SEO has been evolving rapidly. Doing SEO the “white-hat” way and earning yourself lasting results has turned into something that takes time, strategy, planning and a decent budget. Being on the first page of Google is something that involves a lot of effort and planning. Buying half decent links and stuffing keywords here and there will only get you so far until Google comes out with Zebra 7.0. It’s only a matter of time before traditional link building such as “guest blogging” (for the pure purpose of getting a backlink), “web 2.0”, 301 redirects, blog networks etc… become completely useless. If you want to get ranked and you want to drive a high volume of qualified visitors to your website then you need to take the following 4 points into consideration as part of your SEO strategy for 2015.

Customer Satisfaction:

Having a business that gets a lot of traffic with bad reviews online might work for you now, however, the game is changing and people ARE paying attention to reviews. Being a business that provides a quality product or service is important for your online and offline presence.

Google does see reviews as a ranking factor and if you aren’t engaging your clients to leave a review on your website, then you are missing out on maximizing your potential.

Reviews give people a sense of quality control and trust to use your products or services. We recommend offering your clients some sort of deal or discount to drop a quick a review for you online.

http://www.inc.com/michael-fertik/online-reviews-make-big-difference-small-business.html

Social Media:

Did you know that there were 1.79 billion social media users in 2014? These numbers are growing at a fast rate and having a social media presence builds authority in your business.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/

Mobile User Experience:

1.75 billion people are using mobile phones as of 2014. This means that you should consider to make your website responsive or at the very least to be mobile friendly.

Most people shop for products and look for services online today, you should be at the forefront to provide them with what they are looking for.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Smartphone-Users-Worldwide-Will-Total-175-Billion-2014/1010536

User Engagement:

Engaging your audience online is becoming a ranking factor. 90% of all small and medium sized business blogs online are pointless. They are not interesting to the person who reads them and the only reason people have these so called “blogs” is because they “add content to your website”.

A blog should be engaging, people should be interested to share your blog and link to it.

60% of Your SEO Initiative Should Be On Site:

• Perfectly optimized title and description tags.
• Regularly updated content.
• Content strategy.
• Improving bounce rate and conversion rates.

40% of Your SEO Initiative Should Be Off Site:

• Citations.
• Social Media Engagement (sponsored content, increasing a following and branding).
• Community Engagement (Interacting with your industry communities online, answering peoples questions, branding your business and acquiring a reputation of a business that helps people solve problems).

5 Tips For Success in 2015

1. Social Media:

• Share your blogs and pay to sponsor your content.
• Build different audiences based on your demographics data shown on Google analytics.
• Collect as much data as possible on the different demographics that convert on your website and run targeted campaigns for each audience group.

2. Content Marketing and Strategy:

• Divide your keywords into the different landing pages on your website in which they will appear. Your content strategy should not revolve around keywords. The most important part is to have useful and informative content. Keywords need to be strategically placed throughout your content without stuffing them.
• Make sure that your blogs are engaging. The easiest way to do this is by finding content that had already been shared a lot of times. Find content that is already trending and make it more informative. Finding content on reddit, topsy.com and Google News will do the trick.
• Share your content on social media and set a budget aside to have it sponsored.

3. Blogging:

Your blogs need to be interesting, sharable and engaging. You need to focus on the audience you are targeting while drafting the blog post. Provide information that will have them keep reading it because its exactly what they were looking for.

4. Community Engagement:

• Set up Google alerts to send you an email every week for all the different results popping up on Google for that week in your industry. Engage with people, answer their questions and become involved in the community.
• Find out which websites are the top websites in your industry such as forums, blogs, magazines etc…. Join the community and interact with people on a daily basis. Be the voice of your company online and provide useful information.

5. Backlinks:

• Don’t beg for back links. Earn them.
• Find out about the biggest listing websites in your industry and create a business profile.
• Contact sites that might want to use one of your pages or posts as a resource.
• Leave reviews on other peoples services that you have used with your company logo and website details.
• Contact all your relationships and businesses that you have worked with. Ask them to link to your website from a resource page or one of the internal pages. Don’t just ask them to link to you but explain to them the value of citing other related sites throughout their content.

What We Do Works.

7 Step Strategy From Start to Finish:

1. Duplicate content check, competitive analysis, setting up social media profiles that would benefit the business and checking the backlink profile.
2. Start to draft out a content strategy throughout the website with your copywriter.
3. Perform on site SEO and remove any bad links if needed.
4. Build citations and approach your relationships for backlinks.
5. Start your content marketing initiatives (blogs and content on social media streams).
6. Begin your sponsored content on social media and engage with your different audiences.
7. Engage with industry related communities online.

DO’s and Don’ts

Challenges:

• The cost of SEO is increasing drastically.
• Low quality SEO companies are still giving false promises.
• There are a lot of websites still ranking with spammy back links.
• The time it takes to execute an SEO strategy is rising.
• There is a ton of misinformation on the web about SEO (What worked yesterday might not work again today).

Questions to ask when choosing an SEO company:

• Can you show me some of your work? Ask to see examples.
• Can you give me a few references? Call the references and ask what they have done for them.
• What is my strategy going to look like? See if they check your competitors, content, back link profile etc….
• How much is it going to cost me? If someone is offering you a “complete SEO package” for just $200-$500/month, STAY AWAY!!!