With the New Year now upon us what better way to start 2016 than with some SEO & web marketing predictions on what you should and should not to be focusing on in 2016. The best way to beat the competition is to stay one step ahead of them so spare few minutes to go through our list of SEO & web marketing predictions and see how well you are able to beat your rivals in 2016…
1. Mobile is Growing
If your site has not yet embraced mobile then you are for sure losing a lot of traffic. Google has announced that nowadays there are more searches performed on mobiles than on desktops, so, without a doubt mobile search cannot be overlooked in 2016. A simple visit to a coffee shop or a restaurant can prove how mobile phones have grown to become an addiction in recent times; these devices cannot be ignored any longer. With that in mind and the simple fact that mobiles are surely going to continue to capture more share of the market in comparison to desktops, website owners need to come up with robust mobile strategies in their online efforts.
2. Conversion Rate Optimization
Anyone who’s not running Conversion Rate Optimization along with your Search Engine Optimization is certainly losing money, as simple as that! What is the point of driving high traffic on a site which is full of conversion blockers or a site that is not converting to its full potential?
The significance of CRO in your digital marketing strategy is recognized by very few people, yet it can be the last piece of jigsaw which can bring added revenue for a website. Make sure that more and more number of visitors get converted into customers, isn’t that exactly what every website owner strives to achieve?
3. Local Search
It is obvious that, local search is going to be more significant in 2016 particularly for bricks and mortar stores, attributable to the sudden increase in usage of mobile devices to access the internet.
Ensuring that your website is optimized for local search is going to be rather crucial for the success of your search campaigns. Make sure that the basics like name, phone number and address are correct and are marked up properly by schema markup this will be very helpful in local searchers finding you.
With the release of the Google My Business API and the latest update on their Search Quality Ratings Guidelines to incorporate local searches it surely looks like Google is going to place more attention on local search in recent future.
4. Personalized PPC
PPC is all about targeting the right keywords to locate people who may be interested in your services and/or product. A recent study done by Adobe discovered that personalization tops the list of features that will be most significant to marketing in future. Recently, Google initiated Customer Match which is in essence the same as Facebook Custom Audiences and permits you to target PPC and display ads across Youtube and Gmail by means of email addresses. This feature allows digital marketers to target those people who are in a particular stage of the purchase funnel and provide more targeted and personal ads with messages which can cater explicitly for them.
5. Social Ads
There has been an evident rise in online advertising throughout 2015, digital ad expense is forecasted to exceed TV advertising in the year 2016. With a huge chunk of digital spend allocated to social advertising, now digital advertisers won’t be able to ignore it this year, companies will be able to easily put their content in front of the accurate audience by targeting the most appropriate social media platforms. There is no running away from using social media advertising for the growth of your business in 2016 with increasingly urbane audience targeting options and in general a lower cost per click in comparison to adwords.
6. Tracking User behavior
Tracking User behavior helps you in making informed decisions regarding the next redesign or update for your site, and it also provides you with the data to back up any choices before making changes based on gut instinct only. Tracking how the visitors interact with your website and assembling this data is now simpler than ever and anyone who’s not doing this yet needs to start, right away!
Tools like Hotjar, Kissmetrics, Crazyegg and Formissimo let you to put up a comprehensive picture of how users interact with your website and what is preventing them from turning into customers. By means of these tools you can create an improved website for your customers thereby removing potential blockers which may be stopping them from growing your outcome.
7. Social Media
Social media is not a digital marketing strategy by itself, nor is it appropriate for all businesses and it is hard to say whether or not it has any pertinent effect in terms of organic traffic rankings, having said so, social media can still act as very useful means for interacting and engaging with followers and presenting a more human aspect on your business which will enable you to create lasting relationships with both potential as well as existing customers.
Laying more importance on customer engagement and brand building with social media is what companies must be focusing on social channels in the year 2016. At the same time it is not advised that you focus on all social media channels simultaneously, our advice is that you must select only those channels which will be the most favorable for your business and work well on those channels only.
8. Video
You must have some marketing tactics when it comes to videos; the explosion of YouTube superstars is a clear indication of this. Videos can help your business to engage and entertain potential audiences in more effective a visual manner as compared to static images.
This year proves to be the perfect time to jump on the video marketing bandwagon and incorporate videos in your digital strategy. These days’ users prefer to watch content rather than to read it, and you must keep up with them!
9. Buy buttons
Buy buttons are frequently making appearances on social media sites like Pinterest and Twitter, and the option to buy directly through a search engine or social site is going to fly into a rage this year. If you have an E-commerce store you must take a note of this in 2016, for the reason that buy buttons are going to grow in terms popularity and preference in 2016 and we don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t. The ability for visitors to purchase directly from a social media site is without doubt a tempting prospect for marketers; the speculation is that this would result in improved conversion rate.
10. Content
Content would continue to be king in 2016, however any digital marketing agency who thinks that simply adding some blog posts on a website qualifies as creating quality content then they must get their facts right! Content has to be valuable, relevant and useful to users and it has to respond to their search queries effectively as well as quickly. Creating this type of content will allow your brand to develop into an authority in your subject matter and turn into the go-to site for visitors. Once you create such reputation then it also helps in building trust with the users. Google clearly mentions in the webmaster guidelines “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share”
Any website can amplify the number of relevant visitors who are more probable to convert into customers, to a great extent by creating quality content which accurately answers the queries of searchers and then promoting such content by social media and outreach.
