If there’s one constant in the business of search engine optimization for St Charles businesses and those across the state of Missouri, it’s the knowledge that change is just around the corner. Predicting future trends in SEO can be something of a risky pastime, as Google and its competitors continually update and refine search algorithms. Still, there are some general patterns which can be monitored and which tell us something about what to expect.
In this post, I’ll highlight one or two of the trends which I believe will shape the SEO landscape over the course of 2016. Hopefully the information will help you to consider your business SEO strategy for the next 12 months and decide which areas you can look after yourself and where you might want to engage a specialist provider of search engine optimization St Charles or St Louis.
Time to Think Mobile First
As I mentioned, some patterns in search engine optimization follow a reasonably stable trajectory and so can be subject to reasonably accurate forecasting. One such trend is the phenomenal growth in mobile search. You’re about to reach the point where more traffic visiting your website does so by way of smart phone and tablet access than by desktop or even laptop computers.
SEO columnist Jayson DeMers recently wrote an article published on the Forbes website, titled The Top 7 SEO Trends That Will Dominate 2016, in which he predicts that over the next five years, desktop browsing will become almost a non-existent way to search for online content.
Responsive Website Design is Now Essential
In case you’re wondering what the upsurge in mobile search means to you and your business enterprise, the shift is something you should take seriously. You may even need to consider a full redesign of your website, particularly if you haven’t yet taken advantage of responsive design.
The problem is this: if your business website is optimized only for desktop users and makes hard work for mobile visitors who find their way to your pages, you can expect to lose sales conversions and leads with ever-increasing frequency. Furthermore, it’s not only search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing that SEO for St Charles businesses such as yours must target, but additionally, the rather different requirements to get found by voice-search using tools such as Siri and Cortana.
New Keywords—New Optimization Needs
The adoption of voice search is growing rapidly in popularity with Internet users, both because of its convenience for mobile browsing and the technology advances that have finally made voice queries usable for the general population of mobile-device owners.
As content strategist Becki Woods writes in her article for Advanced Web Ranking (Four Ways to Succeed in Mobile Search in 2016), your business website copy and informational content will need to answer queries that use the conversational structure of a spoken question. Note too, that the emphasis is on answering these spoken queries, not merely finding ways to incorporate the key phrases into your online content. That means you’ll want to think about adding a lot more in the way of articles, blog posts, or FAQs to your optimization strategy for 2016.
The Growing Wealth of Rich Answers
Have you started to notice how, when you search for something on Google, it’s becoming common to find your question answered in a block of text right at the top of the search-results page? This direct delivery of information by search engines has a name—rich answers.
Kelsey Jones, executive editor at Search Engine Journal (SEJ), reported recently on the growth in rich-answer availability in an October SEJ article (Study Finds Google Rich Answer Results Have Increased Dramatically). Along with her report on the growing trend, Kelsey also provides a good overview of what a rich answer is.
Kelsey explains that in addition to snippets of text that answer a search query, rich answers can also include maps (try typing “St Louis SEO Company” into Google and you’ll get a map-based rich answer), recipes, solutions to calculations and monetary exchange rates. During 2016, rich answers will be available for an increasing range of search queries, which can actually be good news for search engine optimization on St Charles business websites.
If your website contains plenty of proprietary content, which is unique and of a high standard, it can be that content, from your site, that appears in Google’s rich answers. That’s something you should keep in mind for your SEO strategy. As well as answering user’s queries, you’ll need to include information that will tempt them to click through to your pages after digesting your rich answer content.
In Summary
From now through 2016, search engine optimization for St Charles business-owners will require something of a paradigm-shift. You’ll need to think constantly in terms of mobile-friendly content, learn to answer queries rather than just include keywords in your web copy, and plan to capitalize on continuing search engine developments such as rich answers.
Of course your competitors too, will be subject to the same impacts of these trends in SEO. If you’d like to see how your website performs against your competitors in the great St Charles search engine optimization race, Changescape Web can help.
Just visit our website and look for our complimentary search rank report. Submit the form and we’ll benchmark your business against your named competitors.