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As you may know Google makes hundreds of small algorithm (SEO) updates on a regular basis, with a few major ones through the year. As we are rolling into 2016, we can expect a big one coming our way pretty soon. Sadly, Google usually doesn’t notify marketing and web design agencies of this kind of stuff (which, however, would be nice of them to do). Indeed, they want SEO be organic, hence they “force” everyone to just be “good” in their SEO practices.
But is it really enough to be a “good-old-white-hat-SEO” marketer or do you have to be something more?
Well, you do have to test and refresh your SEO on a regular basis, that much we know for sure. Naturally covering your SEO foundation and revising it from time to time, but also keeping up with the industry best practices and testing SEO on a regular basis. When you notice something going off with your SEO (e.g. organic traffic slows down or your primary keywords are not ranking well anymore) – see what’s going on with Google, and how you can adjust your SEO strategy to stay on the “good SEO list”.
And while we are waiting to learn more on what exactly Google is doing this January, and how it will affect your website’s ranking. Let’s see what happened in the past, and perhaps we can predict the future?
The 2 most prominent SEO updates in 2015:
Mobile Update AKA “Mobilegeddon” — April 22, 2015
By far the biggest SEO update of 2015 was the so called “mobilegedon” – giving everyone a reality check on the quality of their websites and how they show up on mobiles. Until then, some companies, just closed their eyes on the mobile experience, hoping that their customers are not using their iPhones to access websites. Alas, you can’t hide from Google. It will haunt you down. Moreover, it seems it was not enough for your website to be “mobile-friendly” or just responsive, it has to be adopted for your mobile device for the mobile experience, so to speak, providing a seamless integration of your content into the mobile browsing.
Is your website optimized for mobile? Good question, eh?
The Quality Update — May 3, 2015
This one is self-explanatory, isn’t it? Naturally, Google is all about quality. And with social media literally taking over the world, Google has to stay on top of their (search) game, and provide quality results to its customers (you, the searcher). Google has been paying attention to content for a while, but it seems it was easy to trick it in the past. When we first offered SEO services back in 2008, sadly there were a lot of black hat SEO techniques, and it seemed you just can’t win if you don’t employ them. It’s truly refreshing to work on SEO in 2016, since it actually is organic (Hallelujah!). So, what can we expect from SEO in 2016?
I would say something heavily related to social behaviour and user search intent. While we are trying to predict the (SEO) future, I think Google is trying to predict human behaviour before it happens. Just like Lisa in one of the latest The Simpsons episode, where she invented a social media app that predicts user behaviour. I bet Google is totally working on something like that. Be warned!
All jokes aside. How’s your SEO? Looking to refresh your SEO tactics this year? Give us a shout or stop by our (Marketing) Greenhouse in the heart of Vancouver.
P.S. We always have chocolate.