SEO Trends for 2016

Wondering where you should focus your search marketing strategy in 2016? To start this new year, we have the pleasure to introduce an overview of the trends that most likely will influence the SEO world this year. From our own predictions based on scientific research to experts' opinions from all over the world, this might be the most valuable guide to how to optimize your website for search this year. Best of all we will share this information with you for absolutely free.

Link Earning will replace Link Building

Let's start this guide by looking into the links (ondoubtful the most value seo tactic). For you years you have heard you need build links to your content, the more quality link you build the better, etc. Well, you need to think different, it is not about building them, it is now actually all about earning. Link building is about gaining links quickly and easily. If you can do that, it means those links are not that qualitative and won't bring that much benefits. This is why link building should be replaced by link earning. Link earning is about valuable and trustworthy linking strategies. While creating infographics, ebooks, white paper were a great way to collect link in 2015, make it even more tangible this year. Offer reviews, giveaways, etc to offer something different and unique. You know the old saying "Exclusivity creates desire". By building a powerful relationship people will be more interested by linking to you.

Mobile Search and Optimization

Mobile search overpassed desktop search in 2015 and that trend is not going to slow down. Over a billion people access the web from their mobile devices, and 80 percent of all consumers use smartphones for shopping. 70% of mobile searches lead to online action within an hour. Actually, mobile searches have been made easier thanks to more powerful mobile browsers, faster networks and the mobile-friendly websites expansion. Users are now using their mobile to do their research and are switching more than ever of devices used. Moreover, as Google is rewarding user experience, websites will need more than ever to offer the best mobile experience possible. And this comes with responsive websites.

15 percent of all Internet traffic are now mobile, abd 95 percent of these have searched for local information. As users are using different devices to navigate, your website needs to be compatible with all this different formats. The mobile-friendly update has been created to foster websites to offer a better experience to users on mobile devices. Mobile optimization started in 2015 and will keep growing in 2016 as website owners have understand that desktop websites needed to be converted into mobile ones too. Websites now need to be conceptualized for both desktop and mobile SEO.

Semantic Search, Intention and Voice Search

As you proably already are aware off, keywords alone are not enough anymore as people are not searching for exact match keywords. Search engines can now guess from your interactions with websites your intentions of search. Search engines then provide relevant content based on these intentions, offering more intuitive results. And this is deeply linked to mobile uses working with Siri, Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, etc. Voice search is something you should not neglect as this new form of search will gaining space this year. Thanks to mobile devices and mobile websites beating the native apps desktop search, voice search is becoming really popular. Actually, people can directly search for something and get precise answers without having to type something. That trend also impacts keywords as people enter complete phrases when searching. Queries are more and more based on long-tail keywords. A could thing to keep in mind as you are writing content is "how would people as ask a question about this".

Conversion rate optimization

Conversion rate optimization is a SEO metric that will gain more consideration in 2016. As a lot of searches are made from mobile devices, when users visit a website, they don't necessary close their tabs. It results that websites remain open even if the user is not visiting the page anymore. Those behaviors don’t reflect real business conversion so conversion rate optimization is essential to calculate the real conversion and not the traffic volume. CRO is then useful to understand session data, users’ attentions spans, analytics and to plan effective SEO plans to increase your conversion rate.

Content will still be King

With no surprise, you will still need to focus on content in 2016. While quality and relevance are still important, length and interactivity matter too. Interactive content refers to any type of content made from user response. For instance, it can be a content produced from an enquiry. Let’s say we are working on providing tips box on our tool that guide the user to specific explanatory content. This new form of content delivers a more intuitive, interactive content and build a closer relationship with the user. On the other hand, long content is also a SEO trend that have proven its efficiency. Short content have lesser chances to rank well in the SERPs. Actually, studies have proven that content with 1200 to 1500 words were more likely to rank high in search results. In parallel, rich content with images, infographics, videos, animation will get more impact in the SERPs. Diverse, rich and long content will be an increasing trend in 2016, and the coming years. Content from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc are still going to increase on the SERPs. Social media is a leading content distribution platform for marketers as part of their SEO strategy. As social signal is still a ranking factor, it is interesting to get its social content appearing in search results and get a wider visibility.

Content Aggregation

Users like to consume snackable content that is already gathered around a specific theme. Content from Wiki, maps, knowledge graph, social media, news, images and videos make for 85 percent of Google search results. People looks for sources that provide all the information they are looking for in one common place. Aggregation is a great way to collect and share content that target a specific audience but also to build your authority. In fact, if you gather content from qualitative websites and experts in one place, your curation will get even better. For instance, Hubspot has created Inbound.org with Moz to curate great content and increase their reach.

And then we have Video

With Youtube being the second largest search engines, video still have long days to come. Video is a great way to engage audience but also to improve your rankings. And as we said before, content including interactive content like videos tend to rank higher. So you should integrate videos in your overall SEO strategy if it’s not already done. Quicksprout.com has stated that videos get 50 times better organic page ranks in Google compared to plain, classic text results. Also, video searches also tend to gather higher click-through rate compared to static text content. Video is definitely a major trend in 2016. To know how to optimize your videos for search engines, you can read our previous article about SEO video./p>