SEO Trends In 2014 And Beyond

As technology evolves, the online experience keeps getting more advanced and SEO services have to live up to the general expectation. Last year the SEO world underwent a significant evolution in terms of content as everyone sat up and took notice of what marketers had been spouting for years; the benefits of quality content.
Hummingbird, Google birthday update, made 2013 a game-changer as they provided the confirmation required to develop the web into bigger, better and smarter content.
You may have surmised this yourself after coming across the phrase “content is king”; which has been doing the rounds all over the internet for a while now.

The online playing field is virtually unrecognizable and quite a number of the less web-savvy are playing catch-up: what does this mean for the larger SEO landscape in 2014- and further ahead? Let’s take time to look into our SEO crystal ball and get some answers on the world of future IM.

Semantic and conversational search

Hummingbird didn’t make much of an impact back in September when it went live but over time this algorithmic update has had incalculable impact. Google describes it as a “platform”, and what do smart people do with platforms? They don’t go disco dancing on them no: they build on them.
Hummingbird has indeed developed semantic and conversational search and made it more accurate and you can bet your typing fingers this feature is only going to get more sophisticated in coming months. The time of slapdash SEO has passed. The only way to establish yourself as an authority in your field is to actually come up with smart, useful and holistic web-based content.

Here’s the basic layout:

Establish an effective, engaged, and well connected social presence across all major platforms
Create useful content on every single page of your site
Fill your site with pertinent, useful and/or entertaining multimedia material; which blends with your target audience- then use social media to distribute the content
Develop and expand user generated content, visitor interaction and blogger outreach
Learn to handle online PR and use it to your advantage but remember its not a link-building operation
Learn more about your target audience; who they are, their lifestyles, what they want, questions they may have, their interests, etc.

All these factors have to be reviewed in order to deliver the complex, next-level search results that Google is aiming for. For a long time SEO was essentially about gaming the system but now the system ensures that the only way for anyone to win is to play fair.

See More - Seo Consultant Tips: Five Most Essential Things You Can Do With Google Webmaster Tools

Death Of The Primary Keyword

Last year the keyword was finally laid to rest. Google searches are all encrypted via HTTPS so there’s no way to view the keywords which bring traffic to a specific website. Try searching the in the old format and you get the obstinate “not provided”. All internet marketers knew this day would come, but still it was a funeral sort of week at most SEO agencies in the country and the world over.
This and other changes have only underscored the rise of semantic and conversational search, and more importantly, it underscores the need to produce high quality natural content, which now draws in those long tail searches.

Different Set of Data

As your wisest senior family member may have told you, every end signals the start of something new. It’s a constant cycle of life. In this case as marketers laid keywords to rest, a new angle on data was emerging and it involved gaining accurate insight into site visitors- location, device, browsing history, date, etc. Analytics picks up all sorts of signals and you can use this information for your advantage: you only need to start looking at your data more carefully and analyze this information more scientifically.

Be good- principle

It’s interesting- when you look at the bigger picture for SEO services in 2014 and beyond, it actually seems to boil down to a deceptively simple principle: Just be good.
Solid online marketing is no longer about exploiting loopholes or devising clever tech tricks to get a product moving; the process is more involved than that. It’s about taking time to understand your market and finding a way to deliver compelling lures and a banging online experience. To some it may sound like SEO just died, but as far as we’re concerned, it’s only just begun.

This post is written by Larry Smith, Director of Internet Marketing at Neueseo, Larry is an expert in SEO, Web Development, Online Advertising, and a specialist in the management of Google AdWords Advertising Campaigns. For more news, please follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Featured images: License: Creative Commons image source

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