SEO Trends in 2013

“Nothing endures but change,” is a famous quote by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. While these words were first spoken over a thousand years ago, the sentiment is still true today, especially when it comes to internet marketing and best SEO practices.

In order for businesses to survive and thrive in 2013 and beyond, it is important that organisations fully understand how certain new trends have changed SEO and internet marketing practices. What worked just a few short years ago to get a company’s products and services ranked and noticed online can now actually damage a company’s visibility and conversion.

There is one central theme and 5 related trends that are changing and shaping the SEO environment for 2013 and beyond. Your next marketing campaign’s overall rate of success will depend on how well you understand the changes brought about by this new theme and its associated trends and adjust your plans accordingly when developing and implementing your next comprehensive online marketing strategy.

The key theme for 2013 is developing websites and content that is driven by the user’s experience rather than being product or service driven. In the past, when you developed your website, your key focus might have been developing a website that informed potential customers of your products and services and provided a call to action. Your content would also have been written certain keywords and used links and backlinks to establish your website’s ranking. This would have been done with little regard for the quality of content on your website’s actual landing pages.

The importance of search and search engine ranking has not gone away for 2013. Research shows that most sales derive from organic searches, but now, in order to rank high in search engine results and increase one’s conversion rate, the website must be created with the thought of what your potential client will experience when visiting the site. Keyword research and links will not only be site specific, but page specific as well, but will now also take a backseat to the importance of creating original and engaging content that can be shared socially.
Visiting your site should now an enjoyable, social experience for the visitor, so that they want to repeat and share this experience with their friends and contacts. When developing one’s website now, it is important that every aspect, down to the smallest detail, works in concert to create a user driven experience by encouraging the following:

• Make visitors want to click-thru to your website, regardless of the platform through which they have searched and found you.
• Delights visitors with unique content that fully informs them, while also entertaining them or otherwise providing something of value to them.
• Provides a clear call to action through both traditional as well as newer social media channels, so that visitors can not only buy, but they can easily like, share, tweet, pin, follow and otherwise socially share their experience with the brand.
• Takes into account the importance of authorship, branding, links and keyword research so that your site sends the proper signals to obtain the best possible search rankings for your site.

The following 5 trends will help you to provide an engaging user experience while also helping you to prove the authority of your site to the search engines so that you will still rank high in search engine results and optimize your traffic. These trends will also help you to increase conversion rates by making it easier for visitors to enjoy the experience of visiting your site so that they market your site for you, across multiple social media channels and internet access platforms.

Keywords. Creating content on your site that ranks for certain keywords will still be used to drive traffic to your site in 2013 and beyond, but as with the use of links, the way that it is used has changed. Search engine algorithms have been updated to ensure that only reliable, unique, useful content around those keywords will increase a site’s ranking, and there will be penalties for sites that do not provide meaningful content around these keywords. When determining page rank, search engines will also be looking at the quality of the links, the authorship of the pages, as well as the quality of the site’s landing pages, and how all three of these work together with the keywords that are used when creating the site. You will still need to do some keyword research when creating your site, but it is going to take a backseat in importance to authorship, reliable, trustworthy link sources, and quality content.
 Authority Based on Authorship. Search engines are going to be looking for the “face” of your brand when it comes to the content on your website. In order to ensure that content is both unique and authoritative, search engines will give more weight to content that is truly “new” and provides a fresh, personalized take on any given topics. Sites that use content that is syndicated and repetitive will presumably see penalties in rank.

Mobile Platforms. Most people now know that what makes a site visually appealing and easy to interact with over a laptop or PC is vastly different for those who access a site through a mobile platform such as a smartphone or tablet. New mobile technologies such as Google Glass will make the need for sites that are easy to access on mobile platforms even more imperative. Even if you have a site with a high search ranking, for mobile users, most of these sites load too slowly, and have content that is too small and with such poor resolution that conversion remains low, and mobile users click away to a site that may be lower in ranking but optimized for mobile use. With the increase in internet access through mobile platforms it is imperative to have a site that is optimized for mobile use to increase both traffic and conversion rates.

Easily Shared, Organic Social Media. While most people will still find your site based on your search engine rankings, search engine algorithms are increasingly being tweaked to consider how your site is shared socially. Search engines will penalize your site for buying likes, but reward your site for having actual visitors who like your site and share links from it across sites such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and more. When creating posts that can be easily shared across these social media sites, strategic use of keywords can also help increase rankings and authority.

While many SEO best practices of the past have not gone away completely, they have changed dramatically for 2013 and beyond. It is therefore critically important to the success and even the survival of your brand and your business to understand and implement these changing trends as you continue to update and sharpen your brand’s image to the public.