As 2014 draws to a close, we wanted to sum up the year in search for you and highlight our predictions for next year.
In a nutshell, 2014 saw a dramatic shift in focus to content marketing – which became an even more integral component of all online marketing strategies. The amount of content getting produced was vast, although the quality has been questionable from many vendors around the world.
Mobile and social continued to grow in importance – 37% of all black Friday sales were made on a mobile device and social is now very closely linked to SEO and content. More on that later.
Google authorship came and went – you may well have missed it completely - but link building still generates a lot of questions. Is it really dead or is there a new best practice approach? It looks to be a hotly debated topic way into next year.
So what’s in store for 2015?
We will soon publish a series of weekly blogs that detail all of the biggest trends for 2015, but in the meantime, here is a taste of what is to come:
Staying on the table will be
Content, but expect the variation and quality of content to increase dramatically – it’s getting harder and harder to get brand messages across with all the ‘noise’ around.
Technical SEO – still as important as it ever was, if your site isn’t set up to be found and indexed, forget all about your content; it won’t make the slightest difference.
User experience and conversion rate optimisation – understanding more about what is working and what is not on a data driven basis is fast becoming an accepted science separate from the more subjective approach to web design.
We expect to see a decline in the following areas
Newswire press releases
Google Authorship to be stamped out completely
Social following
And we’re looking forward to working these new methods into our campaigns:
Inferred Links
Mobile testing on Webmaster tools
Big brother marketing and artificial intelligence
As ever, working in such a fast paced environment, there will be other developments as we progress through 2015 that we’ll endeavour to report on, but for now, this is what is getting us geared up for next year.
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