What key trends will shape 2015 search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) strate­gies? Is it all about mobile? Smarter con­tent? Per­son­al­iza­tion? Deliv­er­ing amaz­ing user expe­ri­ences? How can you best reach, grow, and engage your audi­ence? How can you make sure your brand is found at those moments when peo­ple are search­ing for a prod­uct you sell or a top­ic you know lots about? To find out, Momen­tol­ogy reached out to 45 expe­ri­enced SEO experts. Here are their insights into SEO trends and their pre­dic­tions for 2015.

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Here is the full list of SEO experts who con­tributed to this post:

• Jonathan Allen, Pres­i­dent at L&T Co.
• Loren Bak­er, Co-Founder, VP at Foun­da­tion Dig­i­tal
• Daniel Bian­chi­ni, Direc­tor of Ser­vices at White.net
• Chris Bog­gs, Founder of Webtrafficadvisors.com
• Will Critchlow, Founder & CEO at Dis­tilled
• Brent Csu­toras, Social Media Strate­gist at Kairay Media
• Dave Davies, CEO at Beanstalk Inter­net Mar­ket­ing
• Stoney deGeyter, Pres­i­dent of Pole Posi­tion Mar­ket­ing
• Eric Enge, CEO at Stone Tem­ple Con­sult­ing
• Erin Ever­hart, SEO Man­ag­er at Home Depot
• Glenn Gabe, Pres­i­dent of G‑Squared Inter­ac­tive
• Ashutosh Garg, Co-Founder & CTO of Bloom­Reach
• Casie Gillette, Direc­tor of Online Mar­ket­ing at Komar­ket­ing Asso­ciates
• Mike Gre­han, CMO & Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at Acronym Media
• Chris Hart, Head of Client Devel­op­ment, U.S., at Linkdex
• Bill Hartzer, Senior SEO Strate­gist at Globe Run­ner SEO
• Krist­jan Hauks­son, COO at SMFB Engine
• Jim Hedger, Part­ner and Co-Founder, Dig­i­tal Always Media
• Jon Hen­shaw, Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer and Co-Founder of Raven Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Tools
• Simon Hes­el­tine, Senior Direc­tor at AOL
• Rae Hoff­man, AKA Sug­ar­rae, CEO of Push­Fire
• Bill Hunt, Pres­i­dent of Back Azimuth Con­sult­ing
• Mark Jack­son, CEO at Vizion Inter­ac­tive
• Ammon Johns, Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Con­sul­tant
• Dixon Jones, Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor at Majes­tic
• Ryan Jones, Man­ag­er Search Strat­e­gy & Ana­lyt­ics at Sapi­ent­Ni­tro
• Julie Joyce, Own­er of Str0ud LLC and Link Fish Media
• Krista LaR­iv­iere, Cofounder & CEO at gShift
• Matt McGee, Edi­tor-In-Chief at Search Engine Land & Mar­ket­ing Land
• James Mur­ray, Search Adver­tis­ing Lead, Microsoft
• Chuck Price, Founder of Mea­sur­able SEO
• Matt Roberts, Chief Strat­e­gy Offi­cer at Linkdex
• Dave Rohrer, Domes­tic SEO Lead at Covario
• Kris­tine Schachinger, CEO & Founder of The Vet­ters
• Grant Sim­mons, VP of Search Mar­ket­ing at Domin­ion Enter­pris­es
• Aley­da Solis, Founder at Orain­ti
• Char­i­ty Steb­bins, Senior Con­tent Strate­gist at Con­duc­tor
• Nichola Stott, Founder & Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at the­Me­di­aFlow
• Kaila Strong, Senior Direc­tor of SEO Ser­vices at Ver­ti­cal Mea­sures
• Brett Tabke, CEO at Pub­con
• Mar­cus Tan­dler, Part­ner at Tandler.Doerje.Partner
• Pur­na Vir­ji, Direc­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Pet­plan
• Fili Wiese & Kas­par Szy­man­s­ki of Search Broth­ers
• Mar­tin Woods, SEO Con­sul­tant at SALT.agency

Note: You can see an overview of the trends in our SlideShare pre­sen­ta­tion at the bot­tom of the post.

Jonathan Allen, President at L&T Co.

I can’t help think­ing back to some­thing the Wall Street Journal’s Jack Mar­shall once said to me: It’s “bet­ter to own an audi­ence than rent one.”

Google showed who is real­ly in con­trol of mar­ket­ing data with “key­word not pro­vid­ed” and Face­book has fol­lowed suit by imple­ment­ing social algo­rithms that dimin­ish brand page expo­sure. In short, both com­pa­nies have made it hard­er to com­pete for organ­ic vis­i­tors than ever before. That means brands have to step up their efforts and adopt the aggres­sive mind­set nec­es­sary to com­pete for traf­fic every sin­gle day.

To suc­ceed in SEO in 2015, com­pa­nies and brands need to start build­ing dig­i­tal assets that they — and only they — tru­ly own. Sta­t­ic sites can no longer reli­ably grow your audi­ence, yet brands can take the many suc­cess­ful strate­gies that search engines and social media have taught them and exe­cute them on their own dynam­ic por­tals.

While search engine and social giants used to pro­vide a clear chan­nel between com­pa­nies and con­sumers, they are now essen­tial­ly demand­ing that we cre­ate very spe­cif­ic con­tent, or worse, join the near break-even PPC mar­ket­place, in order to retain their favor. This cre­ates the false notion that the only solu­tion is for com­pa­nies to become ide­al pro­duc­ers on the plat­forms they want to suc­ceed on. More specif­i­cal­ly, some have dis­sem­i­nat­ed the belief that on social media our brands need to “be more human” and on search engines our brands need to “be more open.”

That advice might be rel­e­vant in prin­ci­ple, but it comes at a hefty cost of adapt­ing your busi­ness oper­a­tions. Fur­ther­more, this strat­e­gy may end up only con­sol­i­dat­ing a weak­er mar­ket posi­tion if you can’t piv­ot effec­tive­ly.

Final­ly, fol­low­ing that path will only hold you back from devel­op­ing your own unique voice to com­mu­ni­cate with your audi­ence. And should you fall behind as a result, your prob­lems will only be com­pound­ed by the oppor­tu­ni­ty cost of miss­ing out on build­ing an audi­ence that you real­ly own.

Brands need to cul­ti­vate and rep­re­sent a per­sis­tent, con­sis­tent, and intel­lec­tu­al­ly expan­sive pres­ence online now, rather than sim­ply find­ing new ways to shout through a bro­ken mega­phone. If you’ve not built a brand voice for your busi­ness yet, now’s the time to do it. And there’s no bet­ter place to start than on your own web prop­er­ties.

PR and tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ers have roles to play in this cli­mate, as they can real­ly ampli­fy a company’s voice — regard­less of indus­try or top­ic. Their chal­lenge — to com­pete for organ­ic audi­ences on search engines and social media — essen­tial­ly par­al­lel those a brand faces on a day-to-day basis. As inde­pen­dent, ad-sup­port­ed web pub­lish­ing prod­ucts can’t sup­port the cir­cu­la­tion-based busi­ness mod­els of yes­ter­year, brands have a real oppor­tu­ni­ty to rethink those old-school con­tent prod­ucts with­out the pres­sure of gen­er­at­ing ad rev­enue.

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Loren Baker, Co-Founder, VP at Foundation Digital

My pre­dic­tion for search and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing for 2015 is on the mobile and local­iza­tion side of things, which will be an expan­sion of trends we’ve been fol­low­ing and con­sult­ing our clients on for the past 2 years. We have some clients who’s mobile device traf­fic has increased by 400 per­cent in 2014 alone, in some cas­es becom­ing the major­i­ty of their traf­fic and refer­rals.

The two largest changes we’re expect­ing will start with Google serv­ing dif­fer­ent rank­ings based on the device that the user is search­ing with. We’ve seen this with local­iza­tion over the past 3 years, as Google serves dif­fer­ent results based on the city or ZIP code a user is search­ing from.

Google also recent­ly rolled out Mobile Friend­ly test­ing and label­ing with­in mobile SERPs, I do not expect to see sites that are not mobile friend­ly in Google’s iPhone or Android device results next year. Google Now, and human behav­ior on Google Now, will dri­ve the dif­fer­ences in SERPs, along with geo para­me­ters and per­son­al­iza­tion.

From an SEO per­spec­tive, this will con­tin­ue to dimin­ish the val­ue of tra­di­tion­al rank­ings reports, as vis­i­bil­i­ty met­ric changes will more or less become infi­nite based on geo, device, and per­son­al­iza­tion. If com­pa­nies in 2015 are still using “Google USA” to track rank­ings, they will be a decade behind in suc­cess met­rics.

The sec­ond fac­tor that must be con­sid­ered with mobile growth is the enhanced call to action options on the mobile device. With Google cur­rent­ly serv­ing CTA’s to call a loca­tion, get direc­tions to a loca­tion and last­ly vis­it the web­site of a loca­tion in mobile list­ings, the com­mand to ‘call’ becomes the top action amongst mobile searchers. If prop­er call track­ing num­bers are not set up, prop­er lead and click chan­nel attri­bu­tion back to these mobile list­ings can be lost; off­set­ting SEO or Google dri­ven leads.

Mobile usage is grow­ing faster than a lot of sites and busi­ness­es can keep up with, so pre­plan­ning to address this behav­ioral change by Google mobile users will become crit­i­cal in ear­ly 2015.

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Daniel Bianchini, Director of Services at White.net

2015 will be anoth­er year of change in the SEO indus­try, with more of a shift towards user-focused cam­paigns. Under­stand­ing the tar­get audi­ence of a busi­ness is a key ele­ment to any mar­ket­ing dis­ci­pline, and search is no dif­fer­ent.

With the recent algo­rith­mic changes, con­tent has become an impor­tant focus for many busi­ness­es, with increased bud­gets for areas such as con­tent mar­ket­ing. Mov­ing into 2015, this will con­tin­ue to grow, but there will be greater focus on the user. Under­stand­ing who they are, how they behave online, what type of con­tent they con­sume, how they con­sume it, and on which device, will be the dif­fer­ence between good and great SEO cam­paigns.

With the main aim of mar­ket­ing gen­er­al­ly to pro­mote prod­ucts, ser­vices and gen­er­at­ing rev­enue, uti­liz­ing data that is focused on your core audi­ence will enable you to gen­er­ate qual­i­fied traf­fic, lead­ing to an improved ROI.

To ensure that your SEO cam­paign will be a suc­cess in 2015, ensure that your deci­sions are based on user data.

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Chris Boggs, Founder of Webtrafficadvisors.com

One of the biggest trends we will see in 2015 is a con­tin­ued ret­ro­spec­tive and pos­si­ble oblit­er­a­tion of past SEO imple­men­ta­tions, espe­cial­ly for sites that have been at it for 8–10 years and longer. Although I am no phi­los­o­phy expert, I would say most brands don’t need to go as far as anar­chy, but that many exec­u­tives over­see­ing the SEO func­tion (and also the broad­er com­mu­ni­ty) could cer­tain­ly ben­e­fit from some healthy decon­struc­tion.

Every unique indus­try and com­pet­i­tive sit­u­a­tion demands decon­struc­tion of the true pri­ma­ry vs. sec­ondary nature of user expe­ri­ence to con­tent, and buzz/links to tac­it author­i­ty, in order to grow per­for­mance at all lev­els of the fun­nel. This means, in my opin­ion, not every­one needs to be sexy! Be like those that per­form around you, where you want to per­form.

SEO means being there through­out the cycle. Each busi­ness mod­el needs to look care­ful­ly at the unique envi­ron­men­t’s gran­u­lar region­al lev­el as well as where they can be rel­e­vant broad­ly across regions and through­out the user’s path to con­ver­sion.

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Will Critchlow, Founder & CEO at Distilled

As we move into 2015, we are obvi­ous­ly going to see key trends con­tin­ue from 2014, such as Google’s bias to “mobile first” think­ing as well as the ongo­ing evo­lu­tion of the search UX to include more knowl­edge graph and “answer graph” infor­ma­tion.

In my opin­ion, the biggest dif­fer­ence this com­ing year is going to be the increas­ing promi­nence of Google’s machine learn­ing capa­bil­i­ties. This will man­i­fest itself in two key areas:

1. Increas­ing deploy­ment of machine learn­ing algo­rithms in the rank­ing fac­tors — lead­ing to both more gran­u­lar “top­ic-spe­cif­ic” algo­rith­mic effects and the whole thing gen­er­al­ly appear­ing from the out­side to be more and more of a black box. My most con­crete pre­dic­tion in this area is that 2015 will see the first clear exam­ple of a rank­ing bug caused by unin­tend­ed side effects of a machine learn­ing deploy­ment where even Google engi­neers them­selves aren’t quite sure what dials to turn to rem­e­dy the sit­u­a­tion
2. Greater cov­er­age of nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing-based answers and query refine­ments. We will start see­ing mea­sur­able fall-out as the com­mu­ni­ty iden­ti­fies win­ners and losers from the ensu­ing shake-up of the search results.

My best action­able tip is to con­sid­er CRO as a search tech­nique in 2015. The clos­er Google approx­i­mates users’ pref­er­ences, the greater the reward to exper­i­ments used to dis­cov­er how users would pre­fer to inter­act with your site.

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Brent Csutoras, Social Media Strategist at Kairay Media

Here are three key trends for brands to con­sid­er build­ing into their 2015 strate­gies:

1. Qual­i­ty Over Quan­ti­ty

We have preached the whole “con­tent is king” con­cept for years, but in 2014 and going into 2015, qual­i­ty over quan­ti­ty has become a real­i­ty every per­son and com­pa­ny is going to have to embrace… and right­ful­ly so. Con­sumers are no longer impressed by sim­ple avail­abil­i­ty of con­tent, but rather are start­ing to require bet­ter high­er qual­i­ty con­tent, of which they feel it is worth the ded­i­cat­ing their time to con­sum­ing.

The plat­forms them­selves, like Face­book for instance, have shift­ed much of their focus to the qual­i­ty of the expe­ri­ence and the con­tent peo­ple are view­ing through their site. So if you do noth­ing else going into 2015, you should be focused on mak­ing sure the qual­i­ty of what you are cre­at­ing demands the respect of your read­ers.

2. Red­dit Red­dit is one of, if not the last, suc­cess­ful social aggre­ga­tion sites around today and has con­tin­ued to grow in size, expo­sure, and brand every sin­gle year. Red­dit boasts the largest Secret San­ta pro­gram, has some of the biggest celebri­ties, politi­cians, and busi­ness­men as users, brand­ed and made famous the con­cept of AMA and Memes, recent­ly raised $50 mil­lion on a $500 mil­lion val­u­a­tion, and has become one of the largest chan­nels for direct to con­sumer mar­ket­ing on the entire web.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Red­dit also takes the most work, under­stand­ing, patience, and ded­i­ca­tion of any oth­er social site today. Com­pa­nies have real­ly start­ed to pay atten­tion to Red­dit in 2014, but I think 2015 will be the year that a wider audi­ence will real­ize Red­dit’s val­ue and start mak­ing stronger efforts to have a mean­ing­ful pres­ence with­in the site.

Red­dit is my num­ber 1 most rec­om­mend­ed social site for clients who are ded­i­cat­ed to suc­ceed­ing in social media.

3. Info­graph­ics

Info­graph­ics are not new, but they will con­tin­ue to grow in val­ue and pop­u­lar­i­ty through 2015 and beyond. Info­graph­ics are extreme­ly effec­tive in allow­ing read­ers to eas­i­ly digest and retain infor­ma­tion, result­ing in a num­ber of mar­ket­ing ben­e­fits. Com­pa­nies should con­tin­ue to look at cre­at­ing both reg­u­lar and inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ics, but real­ly make sure they fit their brand and goals, have a sto­ry and path they take their read­er through, and stand out above the com­pe­ti­tion.

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Dave Davies, CEO at Beanstalk Internet Marketing

There are going to be two major areas of change in regards to organ­ic search in 2015: mobile and Google updates and their broad­en­ing of scope.

1. Mobile

With­out a doubt, we’re going to see a big push in how mobile sites are expect­ed to be opti­mized in 2015. With the addi­tion of Mobile Usabil­i­ty in Google Web­mas­ter Tools, it’s pres­ence in Google’s Page­Speed Insights and the addi­tion of the “Mobile Friend­ly” men­tion direct­ly in Google’s search results when search­ing on mobile devices it’s clear that Google is putting a lot of effort into insur­ing that the mes­sage  that “mobile is crit­i­cal.”

Tak­ing gen­er­al mobile usage stats out of the equa­tion, one can assume that the fine folks at Google are mon­i­tor­ing trends to a degree that vir­tu­al­ly no oth­er enti­ty can. The efforts Google is putting into mobile is a clear indi­ca­tion that hav­ing a good mobile mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy in 2015 is crit­i­cal, rather than being just a good idea.

2. Google Broad­ens The Scope Of Algo­rithm Updates

I expect to see fur­ther updates and man­u­al actions tar­get­ing spam aggres­sive­ly and like­ly sur­pass­ing any­thing we’ve seen thus far. Google’s focus is like­ly to be on a con­tin­u­a­tion of the Pan­da and Pen­guin fla­vors. That said, they will be expand­ed to con­sid­er aspects of onsite expe­ri­ence much more strong­ly than they do cur­rent­ly.

In addi­tion, their under­stand­ing of link manip­u­la­tion will improve, mak­ing link build­ing increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult. This will give a ben­e­fit to brands with large sites but like­ly only to those sites that con­tain a large amount of sol­id infor­ma­tive con­tent and not just large brands in-and-of them­selves.

I see Google pur­su­ing their advances into home automa­tion and man­age­ment and per­son­al infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing. This will include the devel­op­ment of devices sim­i­lar to Ama­zon Echo as well as the push into wear­able devices such as con­tact lens­es with dig­i­tal dis­plays. If you think that’s far-fetched you should read their recent patents. The pur­pose here will be to col­lect more and more data from users and on their behav­ior allow­ing for the more sophis­ti­cat­ed tar­get­ing of adver­tis­ing and a broad­er scope of where peo­ple can be adver­tised to.

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Stoney deGeyter, President of Pole Position Marketing

The biggest trend for 2015 will be the con­tin­ued emer­gence of mobile mar­ket­ing and the need to ful­ly inte­grate that into our web mar­ket­ing arse­nal. With more peo­ple using mobile devices to search, shop, and inter­act, and the seam­less way many move from device to desk­top and back to device, a ful­ly inte­grat­ed mobile mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy is nec­es­sary to not just com­pete, but to stay ahead of our tar­get audi­ence.

Any­one not ful­ly invest­ed in mobile mar­ket­ing today will begin to see their mar­ket­share erode. All oth­er areas of web mar­ket­ing will begin to suf­fer, even as all the key ele­ments are in place. There will be lit­tle oppor­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness­es to remain strong with­out that mobile com­po­nent in place.

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Eric Enge, CEO at Stone Temple Consulting

I think one big trend in 2015 will be the expan­sion of direct answers and the Knowl­edge Graph by Google. I expect that a lot will hap­pen in this area, and there is some chance that it will be quite dra­mat­ic. Cer­tain­ly, we will see more direct answers, and more step by step instruc­tions and oth­er ways of get­ting answers from 3rd par­ty web sites.

One obser­va­tion is that Google cur­rent­ly eas­i­ly ren­ders quite a bit of infor­ma­tion about rel­a­tive­ly famous places, such as the Empire State build­ing or the Eif­fel tow­er, but they do not offer much up for a lot of oth­er real­ly well known places such as the Pru­den­tial Cen­ter here in Boston. This just one exam­ple of an area where there is a lot of room for expan­sion.

Anoth­er big area will be the con­tin­u­ing impact of mobile. For one thing, I bet that the mobile rank­ings boost, which is cur­rent­ly an “exper­i­ment” will become per­ma­nent, and its impact may get increased. But, we should not over­look the oth­er impacts of mobile as well. In 2014, Google began to let the needs of the mobile UI dic­tate the over­all search UI. We saw that in the form of remov­ing author­ship pho­tos and reduc­ing video snip­pets. We will prob­a­bly see more.

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Erin Everhart, SEO Manager at Home Depot

I think (well, I hope) the biggest SEO trend of 2015 will be bet­ter man­age­ment and report­ing of our data. As dig­i­tal mar­keters, we are so for­tu­nate to have so much data avail­able to us, but we need to be more respon­si­ble in how we report on it.

What KPIs real­ly mat­ter to our stake­hold­ers? How do you tell the dif­fer­ence between junk data and real action­able met­rics? What do those num­bers mean? What are we going to do because of it? S

EO does­n’t exist in a vac­u­um, and frankly no dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nel does. Users inter­act with so many dif­fer­ent types because a pur­chase – from find­ing a link on Twit­ter, vis­it­ing the site, leav­ing to check Face­book, see­ing an ad for that prod­uct, using Google to find said prod­uct the next day – and the only way to get a clear pic­ture of how dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is real­ly impact­ing your pur­chas­ing fun­nel, we need to get smarter at first and last-touch attri­bu­tion mod­el­ing.

We’re close, and we have made tremen­dous strides in the last year alone, which gives me rea­son enough to believe that 2015 is going to be key.

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Glenn Gabe, President of G‑Squared Interactive

I think one of the biggest trends we’ll see in SEO in 2015 relates to how brands iden­ti­fy and fix prob­lems on their web­sites (in an effort to improve over­all site qual­i­ty). It’s what I’ve called “the nuclear option”.

In the past, major algo­rithm updates were launched on spe­cif­ic dates and often con­firmed by Google. For exam­ple, Pan­da might have rolled out on a cer­tain date and Google would give us a heads-up that it actu­al­ly rolled out. But cer­tain algo­rithms have matured and roll out more fre­quent­ly now. That can lead to a lot of con­fu­sion, espe­cial­ly when mul­ti­ple major algo­rithms roll out around the same time (and can over­lap).

When that hap­pens, it becomes hard­er to iden­ti­fy which algo­rithm update actu­al­ly impact­ed a web­site. Was it relat­ed to con­tent qual­i­ty, links, or some oth­er fac­tor? And now that Pen­guin 3.0 has been rolling out for more than sev­en weeks, and Pan­da updates fre­quent­ly, we are quick­ly approach­ing a time when major algo­rithms roam the web in near-real time. Talk about con­fus­ing.

This con­fu­sion, with the poten­tial of extend­ed rank­ings demo­tions, has led some busi­ness own­ers to push the giant red but­ton and choose the nuclear option. That’s when you tack­le all prob­lems rid­dling a web­site, and not just issues that might be caus­ing a spe­cif­ic algo to tar­get your web­site. Those changes could include both on-site and off-site refine­ments (con­tent, links, becom­ing mobile-friend­ly, etc.)

For exam­ple, I was help­ing an ecom­merce com­pa­ny in 2014 that had been hit by Pan­da and Pen­guin mul­ti­ple times. Their trend­ing from Google organ­ic looked like a roller coast­er ride from hell. After per­form­ing a deep audit, I rec­om­mend­ed a boat­load of changes. The busi­ness own­er looked at me, and then at the reme­di­a­tion plan, and chose to revamp every­thing. It was a bold move, but a smart one. The site absolute­ly surged back dur­ing Pan­da 4.0 and has seen even more improve­ment dur­ing sub­se­quent algo­rithm updates (includ­ing Pan­da tremors and Pen­guin 3.0).

So, as we move into 2015, with more major algo­rithms matur­ing, rolling out more fre­quent­ly, and with new sig­nals added tar­get­ing more fac­tors, I think we’ll see more peo­ple choose the nuclear option. And that’s a good thing. Brands can Pan­da-proof their web­sites, but they can also tack­le Pen­guin and oth­er algo­rithms while they’re at it. In addi­tion, they won’t have to wor­ry about man­u­al actions either, as oth­er seri­ous prob­lems will be iden­ti­fied and fixed along the way.

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Ashutosh Garg, Co-Founder & CTO of BloomReach

The past few years have rapid­ly changed the way SEO pro­fes­sion­als oper­ate in their day-to-day job func­tions. The most impor­tant thing to note is that SEO should be a byprod­uct of user expe­ri­ence. Every­thing that they do should revolve around the cen­tral ques­tion, “Do my site vis­i­tors receive a rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence.”

How­ev­er, the most notable trend is that searchers have gone mobile sig­nif­i­cant­ly more, which changes what you should expect out of organ­ic search. Many site man­agers have seen mobile traf­fic increase, but haven’t attract­ed the same vol­ume of mobile traf­fic from organ­ic search that they’ve lost from the desk­top.

The prob­lem is that con­sumers are mov­ing quick­er than sites can change, which leads to poor mobile expe­ri­ences. It’s a dou­ble wham­my, because more peo­ple are com­ing through organ­ic search on mobile devices only to receive poor mobile expe­ri­ences, and that leads to declin­ing traf­fic and over­all site qual­i­ty.

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Casie Gillette, Director of Online Marketing at Komarketing Associates

First and fore­most, brands should make sure they have a con­tent pro­mo­tion strat­e­gy in place. We are at the point now where peo­ple are actu­al­ly cre­at­ing con­tent but they may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be think­ing about what they are going to do with that con­tent.

A Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute report not­ed 93 per­cent of online mar­keters are using con­tent mar­ket­ing but only 44 per­cent have a strat­e­gy. Yikes! If you are going to take the time to do the research and craft the con­tent, make sure you get the most bang for your buck.

The sec­ond thing brands need to do more of is inte­grat­ing their search and social teams. More often than not, I see the com­mu­ni­ca­tions team run­ning the social accounts and the SEO team doing their own thing. There is just so much ben­e­fit to the teams work­ing togeth­er! The search team knows which key­words peo­ple are search­ing for and the social team knows what peo­ple are ask­ing about. Those are two real­ly impor­tant con­cepts that every­one on the mar­ket­ing team should know. Get them work­ing togeth­er.

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Mike Grehan, CMO & Managing Director at Acronym Media

Two words for 2015: Mobile/Video Pre­dic­tions:

Mobile will han­dle the largest num­ber of search queries (beat­ing desk­top) and google.com will become the num­ber two search engine after youtube.com (mar­gin­al­ly – not a huge gap).

The biggest tip for any­one in SEO for 2015 is to ensure that con­tent is opti­mized per­fect­ly for mobile devices. And you need to think every­thing from smart­phone, to phablet and tablet. Google will reward mobile friend­ly sites. So be sure to send a clear sig­nal to Google to get that lit­tle extra boost in rank­ing for mobile search­es.

One lit­tle tip I can give is to give a “hint” to Google­bot. When serv­ing dynam­i­cal­ly (serv­ing dif­fer­ent code from the same URL depend­ing on the device) the mobile con­tent is actu­al­ly hid­den from Google­bot when crawled as a desk­top user agent. By using the Vary HTTP head­er, you can send a “hint” to Google to be sure that Google­bot for smart­phones crawls the page too. In fact, Google devel­op­ers have an excel­lent mobile guide that explains a ton about how to opti­mize for mobile.

In thou­sands of cas­es a video result is often bet­ter con­tent (as long as you under­stand the user intent). For instance, for many queries it’s bet­ter to show-and-tell than tell-and-tell. That means, a video show­ing some­body how to do some­thing is often more use­ful than a text page telling some­body how to do some­thing.

Google is very, very smart at under­stand­ing intent behind a query and there­fore will want to choose the most rel­e­vant type of con­tent to return. Be sure to have enough options by trans­form­ing the con­tent on pages that already rank for cer­tain queries and make it avail­able in video for­mat too. In fact, do an inven­to­ry check on all of your con­tent and try and eval­u­ate which of it could be bet­ter served in a video for­mat.

2015 – for SEO – think video to go!

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Chris Hart, Head of Client Development, U.S., at Linkdex

Look for per­son­al­iza­tion to increase. Design and UI/UX will con­tin­ue to grow in impor­tance to the user’s over­all expe­ri­ence and their con­ver­sion rates. An exec­u­tive will con­vert dif­fer­ent­ly than a house­wife, so why do they get the same expe­ri­ence?

Your users and poten­tial cus­tomers want to receive con­tent (text, images, video, etc.) that they feel is per­son­al­ized and tai­lored to their needs. It is not just about con­tent is king or more con­tent is more of a king. It is about the right con­tent at the right moment for the right users.

Big data is only going to keep get­ting big­ger. Dig­i­tal mar­keters will need to look at more data and make sig­nif­i­cant­ly more deci­sions on a dai­ly basis. Plat­forms and tools that col­lect big data and enable dig­i­tal mar­keters to ana­lyze that infor­ma­tion will grow in neces­si­ty. Automa­tion will grow in val­ue to a point, but those who are look­ing for a “set it and for­get it” solu­tion will fail.

The user jour­ney will con­tin­ue to grow into being chan­nel agnos­tic. Users will move between organ­ic, paid, social, etc., at their own pace and make choic­es as they col­lect infor­ma­tion, engage with brands, and final­ly make some form of deci­sion.

We are well with­in the Age Of The Cus­tomer. Brands and agen­cies that can quick­ly tie togeth­er mul­ti­ple data points from dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing chan­nels, and focus on the good of the cus­tomer, are going to win.

Final­ly, mobile “click to call” track­ing will be an impor­tant engage­ment met­ric, as cus­tomers and poten­tial cus­tomers are increas­ing more inter­est­ed in speak­ing to some­one before mak­ing a pur­chase deci­sion.

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Bill Hartzer, Senior SEO Strategist at Globe Runner SEO

There are a few things brands should focus on dur­ing 2015:

• Mobile will con­tin­ue to be a big issue – so mak­ing sure all of your brand assets are mobile-friend­ly is going to be imper­a­tive. When I say “mobile”, I’m refer­ring to not just cell phones/smart phones but also tablets, as well. 2015 will be the year that we see more and more web­sites final­ly move to respon­sive designs.
• Mak­ing plans to move more online assets to HTTPS from HTTP should be built into your brand strat­e­gy. Not only is HTTPS a search engine rank­ing fac­tor now, users tend to trust secure web­sites more. Mak­ing sure your web­site’s vis­i­tors feel secure when they are on your web­site is key. That should include mov­ing to HTTPS and hav­ing all of the appro­pri­ate pri­va­cy mea­sures in place, as well.
• Focus­ing on link earn­ing rather than link build­ing as a strat­e­gy. Focus on cre­at­ing con­tent and work­ing in a pub­lic rela­tions strat­e­gy as part of your link earn­ing efforts. The old link build­ing tech­niques of the past are now out­dat­ed.

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Kristjan Hauksson, COO at SMFB Engine

You don’t have to be Nos­tradamus to pre­dict this one: fur­ther rise of mobile as a dri­ving force of SEO traf­fic.

I am still wait­ing for Facebook’s search engine 100 per­cent based on social media sig­nals, and I sus­pect we might see some­thing like that in the lat­ter half of 2015.

Some have said that SEO is dead, I don’t agree it just has been stig­ma­tized by those with heavy inter­est in paid search I am hop­ing that this will cor­rect itself in 2015 and that main­stream mar­keters will final­ly under­stand that sim­ple things like title tags of a web­site mat­ter and that there is actu­al­ly an ROI of cre­at­ing good con­tent.

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Jim Hedger, Partner and Co-Founder, Digital Always Media

Google has recent­ly made a lot of changes favour­ing web­sites designed for mobile browsers. While they say they don’t give added weight to respon­sive design sites, it is clear Google very much wants web­mas­ters to think about how a web­site or page acts in the mobile envi­ron­ment.

New fea­tures found in Google Ana­lyt­ics (or Uni­ver­sal), and in Google Web­mas­ter Tools make work­ing toward mobile friend­ly design much eas­i­er. If you’re suc­cess­ful, Google will dis­play a “mobile friend­ly” notice in search results gen­er­at­ed on mobile devices thus increas­ing your like­li­hood of earn­ing the user’s click.

Some­time in mid-April 2014 the num­ber of search­es con­duct­ed on mobile devices exceed­ed the num­ber of search­es con­duct­ed from a desk­top com­put­er. For retail and ser­vice busi­ness­es, mobile and local search are amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that should be high­ly ben­e­fi­cial mov­ing for­ward into and past 2015.

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Jon Henshaw, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Raven Internet Marketing Tools

The over­all trend for SEO has been to expand into oth­er mar­ket­ing prac­tices with the inten­tion of pro­vid­ing a more inte­grat­ed approach. For exam­ple, SEO has crossed over into con­tent mar­ket­ing, PR and even social. How­ev­er, the most recent addi­tion to SEOs’ tool kit is user expe­ri­ence (UX). I think in 2015 we’ll con­tin­ue to see more and more SEOs focus on UX.

The key area of UX they will insert them­selves into is con­tent pre­sen­ta­tion.

How users inter­act with con­tent direct­ly affects its search engine vis­i­bil­i­ty, traf­fic and con­ver­sions. In 2015, expect to see SEO focus more on the fol­low­ing:

• Increas­ing dwell time to sig­nal rel­e­vance to search engines.
• Improv­ing page deliv­ery and ren­der­ing speeds.
• Imple­ment­ing respon­sive, mobile-friend­ly designs.
• Test­ing and opti­miz­ing calls to action (CTAs) and con­ver­sions.

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Simon Heseltine, Senior Director at AOL

In 2015 we’re going to see more of the same from Google as we’ve seen in 2014. There’ll be refine­ments to Pan­da and Pen­guin (which they’ve said may now be a con­tin­u­al­ly rolling update), and oth­er tweaks that will, as far as they’re con­cerned, con­tin­ue to pro­vide rel­e­vance to users, and there­fore keep them com­ing back. There’ll be updates that will leave some smil­ing and oth­ers curs­ing, and Google will con­tin­ue to take some of your basic data and pro­vide it to the searchers with­in their SERPs, rather than direct­ing them to your site.

As mobile con­tin­ues to grow, I can see there being more of a focus on reward­ing those sites that have opti­mized for mobile, so make sure that your mobile page speed is as close to that sub 1 sec­ond ide­al as pos­si­ble.

All of this means SEO prac­ti­tion­ers are going to have to con­tin­ue to adapt, to be ready for change, to look at the next thing when it’s announced, deter­mine what makes sense for them to actu­al­ly imple­ment, to keep on top of what’s being talked about in the indus­try, to keep an eye on what’s work­ing for com­peti­tors, and to test and try out sce­nar­ios on their own sites.

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Rae Hoffman, AKA Sugarrae, CEO of PushFire

Mobile was huge in 2014, but it’s only going to get big­ger in 2015. Google spec­u­lat­ed that mobile search­es will out­num­ber desk­top search­es before the end of 2014. Smart­phone con­ver­sions expe­ri­enced a 26 per­cent increase in Q3 over Q1 this year – and that’s a trend that ecom­merce retail­ers can’t afford to ignore.

Inter­net Retail­er reports that less than 25 per­cent of the top 500 mobile retail­ers have respon­sive web­sites. That’s a huge win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty for retail­ers will­ing to make mobile a pri­or­i­ty in the com­ing year. Posi­tion­ing your site for mobile search should be the num­ber one gener­ic pri­or­i­ty for com­pa­nies who val­ue their online pres­ence.

Addi­tion­al­ly, despite the pre­dic­tions year after year, link build­ing still isn’t dead. But the days of uncre­ative, lazy, cheap, and “SEO val­ue only” loop­holes are gone.

I think one of the biggest trends we will see start in 2015 is that com­pa­nies will begin aban­don­ing the out­sourc­ing of link build­ing to agen­cies and instead begin to bring the process in house. Hir­ing the wrong firm can bring about dis­as­trous results in the post-Pen­guin era. And in 2015, the links that rank you defen­si­bly come from cre­ative cam­paigns, amaz­ing con­tent ini­tia­tives and try­ing to serve the user – and those cam­paigns are hard to out­source and hard to scale.

I’m not say­ing “just build great con­tent and you’ll get links.” That’s pro­pa­gan­da Google likes to pitch. The “new” link build­ing still requires that acquir­ing links be a part of the strat­e­gy behind – and how you work, cre­ate and pro­mote – each cam­paign.

The new link build­ing is sim­ply a byprod­uct of busi­ness build­ing. And most com­pa­nies will get the best, long-term results on that end from invest­ing in hir­ing and train­ing inter­nal resources.

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Bill Hunt, President of Back Azimuth Consulting

I believe, well, at least hope, that in 2015 com­pa­nies will bet­ter inte­grate SEO into their exist­ing web and con­tent work­flows. At the last few con­fer­ences there have been more ques­tions about scal­ing the web con­tent work­flow and how to iden­ti­fy and hire peo­ple to strate­gi­cal­ly approach the com­plex­i­ties of mod­ern SEO.

We will see more inter­nal cen­ters of excel­lence cre­at­ed to edu­cate across teams to ensure sites and new con­tent is opti­mized at the time of cre­ation rather than being fixed lat­er. Dig­i­tal agen­cies need to wake up and see this change. I have talked to a cou­ple of mul­ti-brand com­pa­nies that have put their agen­cies in notice that non-opti­mized con­tent will not be accept­ed. They have added this not only to the brief but in con­tracts an in accep­tance test­ing check­lists.

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Mark Jackson, CEO at Vizion Interactive

Some­thing that I believe is the big­ger pic­ture ele­ment of SEO that will be addressed in the com­ing year is a more sophis­ti­cat­ed, strate­gic approach to con­tent mar­ket­ing and usabil­i­ty.

SEO prac­ti­tion­ers will become more val­ued mem­bers of the wider “mar­ket­ing team,” and hence brought into projects involv­ing the devel­op­ment of tar­get audi­ences and/or “per­sonas.” From this research, more time (bud­get) will be pushed toward the cura­tion of con­tent rel­e­vant to each core audi­ence, and more research will be done to ensure that the right con­tent is reach­ing the right peo­ple at the right time and place. Part of this “SEO” effort will involve paid means to pro­mote con­tent (Face­book promotion/ads, etc.), so that con­tent is ampli­fied to the appro­pri­ate audi­ences, and so that con­tent can build upon a company’s brand, cita­tions and – yes – links.

While Pen­guin, Pan­da, Pigeon, and any oth­er “P” ani­mal may be impor­tant to understand/track and mon­i­tor, the biggest update that Google has pushed in recent years has been Vince. Google sees “brands” as the solu­tion, and not the prob­lem. Build­ing a brand online requires reach/frequency, just as it does in the tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing world.

As has always been the case for reach/frequency mar­ket­ing to build brand, it’s not enough to sim­ply “buy eye­balls” (impres­sions). You must reach the right eye­balls, hence why iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the tar­get audience/personas is so vital to the process.

Cre­at­ing the right con­tent for the right peo­ple is a very impor­tant ele­ment of usabil­i­ty.

With many tools that are now wide­ly avail­able, we can iden­ti­fy these demographics/target audiences/personas and under­stand the influ­encers for each of these tar­gets. By curat­ing con­tent that “speaks to” these groups, and pro­mot­ing it (PR/social media/outreach), you will be build­ing the sig­nals that the search engines will be look­ing for in 2015, and – my guess – well beyond.

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Ammon Johns, Internet Marketing Consultant

There are the three big trends, lack­ing in the cool buzz­words of the moment, but the ones that will actu­al­ly dri­ve the most results on the bot­tom line:

1. Inte­gra­tion of mul­ti-chan­nel, mul­ti-touch strate­gies with appro­pri­ate struc­ture inter­nal­ly.

More and more, both seman­tic search and peo­ple use a wider vari­ety of sources, data streams, and aware­ness than was pre­vi­ous­ly tar­get­ed. This means that inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing, mak­ing all of your diverse chan­nels work togeth­er, holis­ti­cal­ly and rein­forc­ing each oth­er, is a core trend for actu­al results.

Nat­u­ral­ly, this is a lot eas­i­er to talk about than to actu­al­ly achieve. Larg­er com­pa­nies strug­gle with issues of own­er­ship, inter-depart­men­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and mul­ti­ple inputs, includ­ing from out­source ser­vices.

Inte­grat­ing mul­ti-touch, mul­ti-chan­nel strate­gies is com­plex and almost impos­si­ble until the shift in mind­set need­ed is accom­plished. Much of the shift is in ana­lyt­ics and cred­it­ing a sin­gle source with suc­cess. We have to move away from wor­ry­ing about get­ting the cred­it, and move toward empow­er­ing oth­er depart­ments to get the result. Team­work above glo­ry, and bonus­es that under­stand the mul­ti-touch, many hands strate­gies.

2. Brand-build­ing as a core focus where your most impor­tant key­words are your brand terms and cre­at­ing more search on them.

Seman­tic search is not a trend, it is a real­i­ty. The trend you need to focus on is the trend toward brand aware­ness and brand­ing as core strate­gies. Brand is not just a strat­e­gy for larg­er busi­ness­es, and brand­ing is not just about your col­or scheme and logo. Brand is a small word for the big con­cept of “how peo­ple think about you and your prod­ucts”.

As we have less and less free or reli­able data about the key­words each vis­i­tor actu­al­ly uses, we have to rely a lot less on mir­ror­ing their lan­guage, and a lot more on mak­ing a deep­er con­nec­tion – that is brand. Ide­al­ly, your entire online strat­e­gy today should be about dri­ving peo­ple to not just see your prod­uct or offer, but more impor­tant­ly, to make them search direct­ly for your brand the next time they are look­ing.

Make search­es for your brand names and brand terms a top pri­or­i­ty not to win, but to increase peri­od on peri­od.

3. Improv­ing CLV (Cus­tomer Life­time Val­ue) through bet­ter reten­tion and engage­ment and evan­ge­liza­tion of cus­tomers already attract­ed.

Final­ly, accept that cus­tomer loy­al­ty is a fick­le thing. If we were inher­ent­ly loy­al crea­tures there would not be any ecom­merce, as peo­ple would still be loy­al­ly using the stores they had before. Work­ing on your cus­tomer life­time val­ues, on cre­at­ing loy­al­ty pro­grams that work and incen­tivize loy­al­ty, and increas­ing engage­ment are all core trends that have been talked about for years but still have a long, long way to go.

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Dixon Jones, Marketing Director at Majestic

2015 is going to see a shift in how dig­i­tal mar­keters see and mea­sure their world.

Until now, mar­keters have had to rely on ana­lyz­ing who and how peo­ple come to their company’s web­sites, and start­ing to mea­sure their return on mar­ket­ing spend in terms of con­ver­sions on the web­site. The alter­na­tive until now has been to accept that the con­ver­sa­tion in the wider world is hard­er to track. But two things have changed:

• The entire fun­nel from brand aware­ness, through cus­tomer trans­ac­tion and onto cus­tomer reten­tion and final­ly advo­ca­cy is now hard­ly ever tracked on the web­site, except, per­haps, at the moment of pur­chase. All the oth­er aspects of build­ing a loy­al cus­tomer base take place else­where – from social net­works, to bars and events, to third par­ty Face­book apps. Web­site ana­lyt­ics are strug­gling to pro­vide any coher­ent pic­ture.
• The rise of Data Exchange tech­nol­o­gy and vast improve­ments in the abil­i­ty to inter­ro­gate ter­abytes and petabytes of infor­ma­tion, makes it pos­si­ble to start see­ing nee­dles in haystacks. Already, inex­pen­sive tech­nolo­gies exist to inter­ro­gate sin­gle sources: Twit­ter feeds, Links to web­sites, Face­book con­ver­sa­tions for exam­ple. Appli­ca­tions are spring­ing up that are try­ing to har­ness mul­ti­ple big data sources and cre­ate not just a view of the busi­ness in that ecosys­tem, but store com­plete ecosys­tems, record­ing every tweet, every men­tion, ever search engine list­ing, every link, every TV advert, every prod­uct pur­chase, every mobile app down­load and the social influ­ence of every per­son involved in the chain. Once the data is all laid down, new ways to ana­lyze a brand’s world will be avail­able to peo­ple in new and excit­ing cloud based dash­boards.

The amount of mon­ey being piled into this area is vast. Some com­pa­nies are build­ing the dash­board inter­faces, oth­ers are work­ing on the stor­age solu­tions and oth­ers are work­ing on own­ing their part of the big data sources.

What’s clear is that the moment of Momen­tol­ogy will arrive only when these com­pa­nies make the deals need­ed to share each other’s exper­tise. I think 2015 will be the year.

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Ryan Jones, Manager Search Strategy & Analytics at SapientNitro

As we move into 2015 and beyond there’s a cou­ple of trends we need to keep at the fore­front of our mar­ket­ing strate­gies.

The par­a­digm of search is shift­ing. Search is no longer about typ­ing key­words into a com­put­er. We speak to our phones and watch­es and we search by tak­ing pho­tos. As wear­able com­put­ing grows it will become more depen­dent on search and con­tin­ue to change the par­a­digm of how we search.

Bill Gates said it best years ago when he said “the future of search is verbs.” We’re search­ing less for fac­toids and more for help accom­plish­ing some sort of task. We use search to help us solve prob­lems. We don’t just type in key­words any­more, we ask the search engine a ques­tion – lit­er­al­ly, using voice search.

We need to shift our focus to one that puts mobile-first, remain cog­nizant of how the user expe­ri­ence across all kinds of devices affects search, and most impor­tant­ly train our­selves to think less about key­words and more about enti­ties.

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Julie Joyce, Owner of Str0ud LLC and Link Fish Media

The biggest trend for 2015 will involve mobile every­thing. If your site does­n’t do well on mobile devices, you’re going to get left behind. With more and more peo­ple using mobile instead of desk­top search, rank­ings are not going to save you if your site takes a full minute to load or cer­tain func­tion­al­i­ty isn’t avail­able on an iPhone.

Usabil­i­ty is not some­thing any of us can ignore. Much of the time, when we think about online mar­ket­ing, we don’t pay near­ly enough atten­tion to mobile. F

rom a link per­spec­tive, if you get a great link on a high author­i­ty site but that site does­n’t load prop­er­ly on an iPad, you’ve just lost your chance for some great mobile traf­fic. That link might help you rank high­er but if no one sees it when they’re search­ing on mobile, you’re out of luck.

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Krista LaRiviere, Cofounder & CEO at gShift

The pri­ma­ry trend in SEO in 2015 will be con­tent mar­ket­ing and the dis­cov­er­abil­i­ty of that con­tent in search and social. There are two relat­ed sec­ondary trends that smart mar­keters will rec­og­nize that will set their strate­gies and out­comes apart from com­peti­tors. Those sec­ondary trends are:

1. Key­word-dri­ven con­tent for the sales fun­nel.
2. Con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Smart dig­i­tal mar­keters are already using data to inform their con­tent mar­ket­ing work­flow process. Often­times con­tent cre­ation is unknow­ing­ly focused on only the aware­ness stage of the sales fun­nel. There is an oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to more deeply under­stand, through key­word research, how their prospects’ search terms change as they progress through the sales fun­nel and where their con­tent gaps are.

Cre­at­ing con­tent for each stage of the sales fun­nel based on key­word pro­gres­sion and under­stand­ing con­ver­sion of con­tent through the fun­nel will become key in 2015.

Strate­gic and thought­ful dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­tent is one of the most over­looked aspects of the con­tent mar­ket­ing work­flow process and mar­keters will start to pay more atten­tion to it in 2015. Many resources are spent cre­at­ing con­tent but not enough on dis­trib­ut­ing it at the right time in the right chan­nels to the right audi­ence.

Con­tent, even a blog post, that is only distributed/published to a web­site and min­i­mal­ly social­ized through an organization’s social chan­nel, is real­ly only scratch­ing the sur­face. Brands need to seek out social influ­encers and think of each influ­encer as a dis­tri­b­u­tion point for their con­tent.

With con­tent mar­ket­ing con­tin­u­ing to be at the core of owned and earned dig­i­tal strate­gies, the acronym SEO in 2015 deserves to evolve from Search Engine Opti­miza­tion to Strate­gies for Earned and Owned.

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Matt McGee, Editor-In-Chief at Search Engine Land & Marketing Land

Mobile, mobile, mobile. I think it would be a huge mis­take for brands to ignore mobile SEO.

Google has been hint­ing for a while now that your site’s mobile friend­li­ness will become a rank­ing fac­tor soon, and that seems like­ly to hap­pen in 2015. They’re already test­ing it, in fact. And aside from chang­ing how sites rank, Google is already telling mobile users when a site is mobile friend­ly and when it’s not, and that’s bound to impact click-through rates from the mobile search results.

Beyond the Google fac­tor, mobile mat­ters for con­sumers across the board. I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed to see how much traf­fic is shift­ing to mobile devices even in indus­tries where you don’t expect it.

Obvi­ous­ly, indus­tries like trav­el and enter­tain­ment and restau­rants are see­ing big increas­es in mobile traf­fic in the last cou­ple years. But I’ve seen the same in indus­tries like real estate and insur­ance and oth­ers.

Brands don’t have the excuse any­more where they can say, “Our cus­tomers aren’t real­ly doing much search­ing on mobile devices.” Mobile search is a trend that’s here and not going away.

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James Murray, Search Advertising Lead, Microsoft

One of the trends we’re expect­ing to see in 2015 is a greater adop­tion of voice search, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the rise of mobile per­son­al assis­tants like Siri, Cor­tana and Google Now. For SEO prac­ti­tion­ers, this means think­ing about how voice search will impact the type of queries that are being made and there­fore what they need to opti­mize for.

The impor­tant thing to remem­ber is that peo­ple are gen­er­al­ly less con­cise when they’re talk­ing than when they’re typ­ing – so we could see a return of long query search­es that were promi­nent ten years ago like “nice fam­i­ly hol­i­days for 4 in the Bahamas” rather than “cheap Bahamas hol­i­day”.

Voice also means that seman­tic search is going to become a lot more pow­er­ful. Try typ­ing “I’m hun­gry” into a search engine right now and the results you will get will be dread­ful because they’re dri­ven by key­word rather than seman­tic search. As search engines start to under­stand what we mean by these nat­ur­al lan­guage queries sud­den­ly “I’m hun­gry” could be best con­vert­ing query for any restau­rant or take­away ser­vice, because the intent behind that search couldn’t be clear­er – I need food, show me some­where to sat­is­fy my hunger.

Per­son­al assis­tants have the great­est poten­tial to lever­age the strengths of both voice and seman­tic search, as they can under­stand the con­text of the query and match that with the infor­ma­tion they know about the user, such as their likes, loca­tion, habits, etc. This com­bi­na­tion of voice and seman­tic search will ulti­mate­ly deliv­er a more per­son­al­ized and rel­e­vant search expe­ri­ence which will enable peo­ple to be more pro­duc­tive.

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Chuck Price, Founder of Measurable SEO

Smart mar­keters will need to fol­low a dual track to ensure suc­cess in 2015 while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly plan­ning for the future. There may be 200+ sig­nals incor­po­rat­ed into the Google algo­rithm, but right now, two com­po­nents car­ry more weight than all oth­ers com­bined: con­tent and back­links.

That’s not con­jec­ture – just look where Google has invest­ed their resources. In addi­tion to per­pet­u­al refresh­es and updates, Google has devel­oped two stand­alone algo­rithms, Pan­da and Pen­guin. One mea­sures qual­i­ty of con­tent and the oth­er mea­sures qual­i­ty of links. (Not to men­tion exe­cu­tion of man­u­al link penal­ties)

A com­pre­hen­sive con­tent mar­ket­ing plan sup­port­ed by an effec­tive link build­ing pro­gram should be the cor­ner­stone of any enter­prise lev­el dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing plan in 2015. A well thought out social media plan for mes­sag­ing and brand build­ing should also be woven into these activ­i­ties. Being mobile friend­ly is a giv­en. Done prop­er­ly, these activ­i­ties alone, will keep you ahead of the pack, today.

Look­ing for­ward, searcher intent and the con­tex­tu­al mean­ing of searched phras­es will play a larg­er role in search results. Seman­tic search will like­ly be accel­er­at­ed by the explo­sion of mobile devices and the accom­pa­ny­ing jump in con­ver­sa­tion­al search.

Every­one should be uti­liz­ing schema.org for adding struc­tures data and rich snip­pets to their sites. Get­ting events into the Knowl­edge Graph should become a pri­or­i­ty item, if it isn’t already.

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Matt Roberts, Chief Strategy Officer at Linkdex

SEO. A Busi­ness Intel­li­gence Team.

I pre­dict that intel­li­gence gath­ered about the organ­ic search ecosys­tem will be request­ed, adopt­ed, and val­ued by oth­er stake­hold­er teams inside busi­ness­es.

This will include insights on the con­tent that needs to be writ­ten, the wider media and influ­encer ecosys­tem that needs to be man­aged, the affil­i­ate deals should be cre­at­ed, and com­mer­cial part­ner­ships need to be pri­or­i­tized.

The impor­tance of these insights is not being dri­ven by SEO prac­ti­tion­ers want­i­ng to carve out a new more influ­en­tial role, it’s being dri­ven by con­sumers. Con­sumer turn to organ­ic search all the way through the pur­chase fun­nel. Much more than social and paid media. Man­ag­ing this chan­nel in a much smarter way is the only way for­ward.

Our clients are there now and exploit­ing their com­peti­tors blind spot. The rest will edge towards this mod­el in 2015.

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Dave Rohrer, Domestic SEO Lead at Covario

I know that this will be wish­ful think­ing, but in 2015 I see more com­pa­nies lis­ten­ing to their SEO team when it comes to con­tent cre­ation. I think we will see more com­pa­nies move from gen­er­at­ing con­tent for the sake of hav­ing con­tent to tar­get a key­word, and will instead think through the process of cre­at­ing that video, image, or text piece of con­tent.

For years SEO prac­ti­tion­ers have asked for con­tent on a page and for a long time we were told no. Then we moved to also want­i­ng to cre­ate arti­cles, blogs, video, images and even tell sto­ries with inter­ac­tive con­tent. When we did get con­tent pro­duced it often was in the voice of the brand or very salesy, and rarely was it edu­ca­tion­al.

Fast for­ward a bit and you see many brands get that they need con­tent, some to the point where they have become almost con­tent mills. The con­tent that is churned out is thin, unimag­i­na­tive con­tent because – “Well, you said we need­ed con­tent!”

SEO prac­ti­tion­ers have long past the premise of con­tent for the sake of con­tent and now are focused on qual­i­ty over quan­ti­ty. In 2015 those that want to suc­ceed need to con­tin­ue focus­ing on try­ing to align con­tent cre­ation with intent and solv­ing a prob­lem for the user.

Con­tent needs to be great and not filler. Con­tent needs to answer a ques­tion and not just tar­get a keyword/phrase. I already see some brands start­ing to think this way and in 2015 I think more will con­tin­ue to think of con­tent as not just some­thing that their SEO says they need to do.

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Kristine Schachinger, CEO & Founder of The Vetters

In 2015 we will see the con­tin­ued matur­ing of the mobile and social in terms of meth­ods, mea­sure­ment, and ROI. How­ev­er, I think it is pos­si­ble we will also see major shifts at Google and in the search mar­ket.

Mobile

I think the focus on mobile has been over-hyped as the types of search­es are pri­mar­i­ly con­tex­tu­al and lim­it­ed to ecom­merce and what I call “infonuggets”. Infonuggets are real time infor­ma­tion or knowl­edge bits (like the Movies, Prod­uct Reviews or Google Knowl­edge graph) that are spe­cif­ic to cer­tain ver­ti­cals and occur because your mobile device is with you many hours, even all hours of the day, mak­ing it con­ve­nient. This does not make it unim­por­tant or some­thing to be over­looked, but it does not make it a rea­son to shift all focus to mobile unless your mar­ket specif­i­cal­ly ben­e­fits from mobile search.

User intent, con­text of search and prox­im­i­ty are all key met­rics in dri­ving mobile, this means there are many ver­ti­cals where mobile should not dom­i­nate site design, mar­ket­ing or strat­e­gy. Know your mar­ket. That being said, your web­site bet­ter be mobile friend­ly. Google has made it clear that is not a choice any­more.

Google

I think Google will pull back from the sever­i­ty of the Pen­guin update (whether it is rolling or not). It is a resource inten­sive process for Google to keep up with dis­avow forms and link lists.

On a per­son­al note, I believe Google will even­tu­al­ly kill the Pen­guin process in the next year or so. While a spam algo­rithm may exist called Pen­guin, it will make no sense to con­tin­ue this process of killing sites and review­ing dis­avow lists indef­i­nite­ly. They got the data they need­ed (link sell­ers), now they need to find a way to grace­ful­ly exit as the data giv­en in the link lists has often become mean­ing­less as site own­ers dis­avow every­thing.

In addi­tion on the algo­rithm front, I think they will con­tin­ue in their addi­tion of algo­rithms that have noth­ing to do with web­spam, but site qual­i­ty. We have seen this change of focus in 2013 and 2014, there is no rea­son to think it will lessen in 2015.

Pri­va­cy

Final­ly, I think there will be a push back from not just the EU coun­tries on Google pri­va­cy issues, but with con­sumers. Con­sumers are becom­ing more aware of the poten­tial costs of track­ing and per­son­al­iza­tion as more and more data is con­sumed.

This aware­ness will open avenues for new meth­ods of search deliv­ery and I think Ama­zon with Echo and its exten­sions will be going after Google’s “we do it before you ask for it” search from the pull, not push per­spec­tive as they per­fect voice.

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Grant Simmons, VP of Search Marketing at Dominion Enterprises

There are still way too many brands that don’t under­stand their cus­tomers enough to tar­get them with the right mes­sage at the right time.

I spoke recent­ly at a con­fer­ence for the Mul­ti­fam­i­ly indus­try (apart­ment man­agers), and pre­sent­ed “The Renter’s Deci­sion Jour­ney” – demon­strat­ing the trig­gers, touch­points and influ­encers in find­ing an apart­ment – and it was quite obvi­ous that even the larg­er of the Prop­er­ty Man­age­ment com­pa­nies still weren’t bas­ing their mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy on their cus­tomer’s path to “pur­chase” and the con­tex­tu­al dif­fer­ences of each touch­point.

And there­in lies the mag­ic phrase for 2015 “con­text con­tent mar­ket­ing.”

Con­text neces­si­tates a micro gran­u­lar way of select­ing and seg­ment­ing audi­ences where­by one focus­es on the under­stand­ing of their needs at one par­tic­u­lar point in time. It moves dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing from key­words, chan­nels, and devices toward real­time solu­tions.

Con­text is device agnos­tic, loca­tion-aware, and behav­ioral­ly adept, deriv­ing insights from large data sets pow­ered by con­nect­ed devices.

Con­text in 2015 will help define and refine con­tent strate­gies based on non-desk­top search expe­ri­ences where SEO becomes about hyper rel­e­vance, hyper focus, and hyper val­ue.

Advice? Build out key cus­tomer pro­files, define and track met­rics that mat­ter, look for more con­nect­ed prod­ucts to inform search strat­e­gy (big, deep, and wide data), and then pro­duce rel­e­vant con­tent, in the most appro­pri­ate media, that will serve per­fect­ly on whichev­er device is con­tex­tu­al­ly rel­e­vant.

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Aleyda Solis, Founder at Orainti

I believe 2015 will be a year when we will see the growth of seman­tic search and opti­miza­tion, as well as mobile and mul­ti­de­vice SEO, which is final­ly a real­i­ty in 2014 and will become key in 2015.

With mobile search pre­dict­ed to over­come desk­top in 2014 and Google exper­i­ment­ing with mobile opti­miza­tion as an SEO rank­ing fac­tor now, com­pa­nies have been more and more look­ing dur­ing this year to tack­le this oppor­tu­ni­ty by invest­ing on pro­vid­ing the best mobile web expe­ri­ence to their users, cus­tomers, and search engines.

This will become a stan­dard in 2015 SEO plans for brands, which should also start tak­ing their app opti­miza­tion into con­sid­er­a­tion with app index­ing now pos­si­ble with Google.

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Charity Stebbins, Senior Content Strategist at Conductor

Con­sumers will make this demand more clear­ly than ever in 2015: their own per­son­al­ized web ecosys­tem. Cus­tomers feel enti­tled to a brand expe­ri­ence on their own terms, and will increas­ing­ly resist com­pa­nies that don’t cater to their per­sona or how buy-ready they are. As a result, we’ll see SEO prac­ti­tion­ers turn­ing their atten­tion from key­words toward tar­get­ed con­tent.

Nat­u­ral­ly, search engines will be react­ing to this demand, too. I would­n’t be sur­prised to see an algo­rithm shift that serves con­tent based on rel­e­vance to a searcher’s per­sona. When that hap­pens, brands who have already start­ed seg­ment­ing their con­tent by per­sona and stage will have a siz­able advan­tage.

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Nichola Stott, Founder & Managing Director at theMediaFlow

In terms of trends, we’re real­ly see­ing SEO take its right­ful place as a cred­i­ble mar­ket­ing dis­ci­pline next to PR, con­tent mar­ket­ing, and offline. At times in the past we’ve found it chal­leng­ing to posi­tion SEO as a strate­gic mar­ket­ing chan­nel to our clients, or to help our clients fight their cor­ner to share­hold­ers; when it comes to sta­tus, cre­dence, and bud­get.

Maybe it’s because of mar­ket mat­u­ra­tion, maybe past agents have obfus­cat­ed bad work, maybe it’s because of more good agen­cies doing a good job in edu­cat­ing their clients as to what they do and how they do it? Regard­less of why, we’re see­ing an ele­vat­ed sta­tus for SEO and more and more clients are pulling us in to col­lab­o­rate at board lev­el.

My big trend for 2015 is for greater inte­gra­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion between clients and all their mar­ket­ing agents. Under­pinned by some great cloud-based project and task man­age­ment tools that are out there at the moment, there’s no rea­son why these chan­nel spe­cial­ists can’t share some aspects of knowl­edge and cam­paign direc­tion.

My tips to brands would be as fol­lows:

• Present your vision and focus for your whole mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy to all agents and stake­hold­ers togeth­er.
• Get each agency lead (or in-house lead for that chan­nel) to present their company’s role in the above, explain­ing how their strat­e­gy fits and sup­ports that vision and focus.
• Inves­ti­gate cloud-based col­lab­o­ra­tion and work­flow tools like Base­camp, Asana, and even Google Docs. Any­thing that will help facil­i­tate agile cam­paign evo­lu­tion and peer feed­back for key mile­stones.
• Con­sid­er strate­gies for own­er­ship and account­abil­i­ty. Make these cross-func­tion­al teams feel val­ued and in it togeth­er.

Final­ly, one word of cau­tion for 2015. We’re see­ing a lot of brands move towards cre­ative agen­cies and con­tent mar­ket­ing agen­cies to ful­fill their SEO, which in so many cas­es means that the tech­ni­cal aspect is com­plete­ly ignored or just plain wrong. With­out a robust tech­ni­cal SEO set-up under­pin­ning your web­site opti­miza­tion, any­thing else you spend on cam­paigns and con­tent is inef­fi­cient at best.

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Kaila Strong, Senior Director of SEO Services at Vertical Measures

In 2015 I think one of the biggest trends myself and my team will be focused on is micro-opti­miza­tion. As SEO prac­ti­tion­ers we need to slow down and real­ly dive into micro oppor­tu­ni­ties to opti­mize web­sites and see improve­ments in the com­ing year.

Let’s face it, for clients and our own sites a list starts to build of the activ­i­ties essen­tial for SEO and “nice to have”. Rang­ing from serv­er lev­el opti­miza­tion to reduc­ing page load speed, these are the projects that require more in depth research, test­ing, and invest­ment. This year I think we’ll see more of the “nice to have” items final­ly addressed.

You’re sure to have a list of projects you know would help improve SEO, but just don’t have the time to invest. Maybe it’s as sim­ple (or not so sim­ple!) as final­ly rewrit­ing those meta titles of your prod­ucts or final­ly set­ting up a canon­i­cal map for your web­site.

Look­ing for­ward to the com­ing year I feel that the indus­try will start to see this shift hap­pen­ing more and more, for brands of all sizes. Even the best of the best have improve­ments that can be made.

Find what you can improve and do a lit­tle bit to get there every day. It only takes 1 per­cent every­day to add up to remark­able improve­ment, and SEO is no dif­fer­ent.

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Brett Tabke, CEO at Pubcon

I see three major trends over the next year:

1. The con­tin­u­a­tion of mobile expan­sion and adop­tion by con­sumers. Phone func­tions are replac­ing their desk­top coun­ter­parts at a brisk pace. The trend lends itself to “app” and “thing” or “device” opti­miza­tion. The trend is that we are mov­ing away from SEO as “search engine” opti­miza­tion and towards “user/device/app/space/presence” or expe­ri­ence immer­sion opti­miza­tion. We want our con­tent to be opti­mized and present where ever poten­tial clients are look­ing at con­tent.
2. Face­book Ads. We’ve been wait­ing, plead­ing, hop­ing and beg­ging for it for years. I once again hope this is the year Face­book gets over it’s ner­vous­ness and launch­es Atlas as avail­able to all web­site own­ers. If that hap­pens, Google may have to wake up and actu­al­ly treat web­site own­ers as human beings for once.
3. Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty 2015. It begins with Ocu­lus, Gear VR, and Sony Project Mor­pheus as they hit the mar­ket in 2015. VR is going to con­sume mar­ket share of “every­thing.” Every device, every plat­form, every­thing is bet­ter in VR. The time­line is yet-to-be-seen, but it is com­ing, and mar­keters need to stay informed. I can’t say it any bet­ter than good old Mor­pheus from The Matrix: “No one can be told what it is – you have to see it for your­self”.

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Marcus Tandler, Partner at Tandler.Doerje.Partner

The biggest SEO trend I’m pre­dict­ing for 2015 is def­i­nite­ly mobile opti­miza­tion.

There’s more peo­ple access­ing Google via mobile devices now then via desk­top search, so Google has real­ly become a mobile first com­pa­ny. There­fore, the mobile friend­li­ness of web­pages is becom­ing more and more impor­tant.

There´s even a new “Mobile Usabil­i­ty” report in Google Web­mas­ter Cen­tral to make web­mas­ters aware of these new mobile chal­lenges. There´s also a new “mobile friend­ly” label pop­ping up in mobile SERPs to high­light pages that are opti­mized for mobile use.

So if lots of your users are com­ing through mobile search, you should real­ly focus on get­ting your web­site prop­er­ly opti­mized for mobile to not get over­run by mobile savvy com­peti­tors.

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Purna Virji, Director of Communications at Petplan

A very pos­i­tive trend I see for SEO in 2015 is the focus shift­ing back square­ly on the user. This means:

• Web­sites will be forced to be faster and more user-friend­ly, with a focus on mobile design first in order to com­pete.
• Per­sona-dri­ven, rel­e­vant, high-qual­i­ty con­tent will be cre­at­ed, based on very rel­e­vant audi­ence insights, with an equal focus on on-site user engage­ment met­rics in addi­tion to link earn­ing poten­tial.
• With seman­tic search becom­ing more pow­er­ful, door­way pages and thin-con­tent pages will lessen, as the focus is more con­tex­tu­al as opposed to key­word-relat­ed, mak­ing for a more nat­ur­al user expe­ri­ence on the site.
• The SEO’s role and sphere of influ­ence with­in an orga­ni­za­tion will con­tin­ue to expand. In order to bet­ter serve the cus­tomer and be more vis­i­ble, SEOs will have to work much more close­ly with PR, brand, social, cus­tomer ser­vice, copy­writ­ing and paid adver­tis­ing teams.
• Brand­ing and rep­u­ta­tion will be even more impor­tant as trust met­rics will con­tin­ue to increase in impor­tance.

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Fili Wiese & Kaspar Szymanski of Search Brothers

User expe­ri­ence mar­ket­ing (UXM) is the big thing and it’s spread­ing fast. We are mov­ing fast from an indus­try obsess­ing for years over back­links, their actu­al val­ue hard­ly to be assessed objec­tive­ly towards peo­ple engine opti­miza­tion, a term suc­cess­ful­ly coined by Dan­ny Sul­li­van and even­tu­al­ly toward online-rela­tion­ship mar­ket­ing.

Under­stand­ing users, not mere­ly your prospec­tive tar­get audi­ence, already is the key to con­ver­sion traf­fic diver­si­ty. That does not mean clas­sic SEO ground­work will become obso­lete. By all means, mak­ing sure search engines and users under­stand your web­site and can access it remains a key ele­ment. But build­ing your busi­ness only on that foun­da­tion is a strat­e­gy of the past and as we know a reck­less one.

Going for­ward we as web mar­keters will invest sig­nif­i­cant­ly more time into build­ing audi­ences and rela­tion­ships, not just PageR­ank-juicy links. The future is UXM which cov­ers cre­ation of user tests, prod­uct design, inter­ac­tion design, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, inter­face design, copy­writ­ing, usabil­i­ty, acces­si­bil­i­ty, crawla­bil­i­ty and much more. Apply­ing UXM is not mere­ly man­ag­ing, but exceed­ing user expec­ta­tions.

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Martin Woods, SEO Consultant at SALT.agency

Over that past cou­ple of years, many spe­cial­ists in the field of online mar­ket­ing have gone on record tak­ing about the blur­ring lines of SEO, social media, and PR. While there is a lot of truth in this state­ment, espe­cial­ly around the pre­vi­ous­ly flawed silos between these chan­nels, they are now thank­ful­ly com­ing down.

I see a very positive/influential future in 2015 for search engine opti­miza­tion, as an impor­tant part in gen­er­at­ing trust­ed traf­fic, which is still very impor­tant for most com­mer­cial web­sites. As Andrew Isidoro reit­er­ates, organ­ic search is an essen­tial part of the pur­chase fun­nel, and this isn’t like­ly to change.

I think many peo­ple for­get the spe­cial­ist dis­ci­plines with­in the broad field of SEO. Many still see SEO as sim­ply gen­er­at­ing “free” traf­fic, when in fact SEO isn’t just about gen­er­at­ing new traf­fic, but also main­tain­ing traf­fic, opti­miz­ing plat­forms, and con­tent.

The major­i­ty of com­pa­nies and brands we are work­ing with have been using SEO com­pa­nies for many years, but with­out know­ing what they are get­ting for their month­ly retain­er fee. This has been espe­cial­ly con­tro­ver­sial with spam algo­rithms like Pen­guin, (which fights link spam) bring­ing to light the meth­ods used by SEO agen­cies to increase rank­ing, which have dis­as­trous con­se­quences – Google penal­ties.

We are still see­ing many big brands approach us with issues relat­ing to sup­pli­er SEO agen­cies building/buying links which are in clear breach of the Google Web­mas­ter Guide­lines. If you are in doubt what manip­u­la­tive links are, here’s a guide. 2015 will be the year SEO agen­cies are required to be more open and trans­par­ent about the meth­ods which are used to increase rank­ings and traf­fic from organ­ic search.

SEO Trends 2015 — Expert Opin­ions On The Future Of Search from momen­tol­ogy

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