Did you meet your digital marketing goals in 2014? Are you planning to improve your SEM and SEO results over the course of 2015? SEO and paid search are still vital components to a digital marketing strategy, but you have to pay close attention to the trends or your campaign could be swept into obscurity.
To improve your digital marketing strategy, it’s critical to pause and reflect on the past year and analyze what happened.
Our partners at Volume Nine recently published a full recap of what happened in SEO in 2014, and look ahead with some SEO predictions for 2015. Enjoy a sample of their findings below.
2014 Review and Tips
- In both SEM & SEO, Google rewards advertisers delivering high quality results for keyword searches.
- The Pigeon update shook up local organic results, making geo-targeted paid search campaigns more important than ever.
- Google updated the dreaded Penguin algorithm, making anything less than cutting-edge SEO a waste of time and money.
To ride these changes, use elements from any of your most successful landing page on your websites’ main page.
If you want to consistently stand out in search results, you need a great quality score to get better rankings. But the impacts to any algorithm updates are hard to predict, so how can you take what happened with these updates in 2014 and use it?
Moving into 2015
One way that our friends at Volume Nine predict these trends will carry into the New Year is through mobile devices. Here, high-quality content will still reign, but after Adwords’ recent announcement to remove campaigns targeted by device, SEO experts must look to more innovative way to reach mobile consumers. Smashing Magazine reports that mobile users spend less time per session — nearly 1:30 less — on mobile device than desktops, so 2015 will determine best practices to reach the ever-increasing number of mobile browsers.
Keep in mind, one of the best ways to stay ahead of trends, like mobile, is to understand how to read and interpret your data. If you haven’t taken the time to get Google Analytics Certified, check out this great study guide designed to help you pass the test and become an expert in Google Analytics.
Remember, a healthy SEM campaign is your insurance policy against potentially losing your organic rankings due to algorithm updates. A smart digital marketing campaign includes both channels.
Check out the full breakdown from 2014 and SEO 2015 predictions from our partners at Volume Nine.
