SEO News

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Disclosure and payments to bloggers

Andrew Girdwood, media innovations director at DigitasLBi

I think this will be a hot topic in 2015 but I’m unsure what the trend will be. 

If brands step up with a proper amount of concern or regulators became more active then I think we will see SEOs engaged in this shady behaviour react with due speed to retreat. 

Otherwise I think the bad habits will continue, the topic to become even hotter and the trend for 2015 will be that of growing concern. 

It will be like a legal game of chicken.

(For more on this topic, read: Paying bloggers for positive reviews: is it common and is it right?)

Mobile

Nick Fettiplace, SEO director of Jellyfish

It surprises me how many big brands still do not have an effective mobile proposition. There’s been so much talk around this topic for several years now, but I feel 2015 will be the year that it really counts. 

We only need to look at the development of Google’s own product suite to see how much emphasis is being placed here right now… e.g. the release of the ‘mobile-friendly test’ feature plus the recent tagging of mobile-friendly websites within their organic SERPs (which appeared in November 2014). 

With 2015 geared-up to be the year when mobile search overtakes desktop search, it’s definitely worth getting up to speed here.

(Related post: Mobile SEO: what should you be thinking about?)

Multimedia content

Ruth Attwood, advanced search consultanct at 4Ps

A greater focus on multimedia content – onsite video engagement, creative image content and optimisation – potentially even the relevance and quality of images and videos as machine image reading and recognition continues to progress.

Will sites that use stock photography not do as well as sites that use their own unique images for a better UX?

Machine learning

Will Critchlow, founder and CEO of Distilled

We will see more and more machine learning in the wild. 

An example of this is the increasing use of general answer boxes (i.e. not those that come directly from the knowledge graph).

Google’s ability to interpret natural language is continuing faster than we might think and it is clearly already capable of summarisation. 

I think we’re going to start to see true winners and losers among websites that are getting new traffic this way and websites that are hit by having all their key information summarised and presented to the user within the SERPs.

(Related post: How to use machine learning to enhance your marketing campaigns)

A move beyond Google?

Ruth Atwood, 4Ps

2015 might also be the year we see a bit of a search landscape shakeup – with Yahoo’s market share already starting to ramp up thanks to the default search Firefox deal, and Google’s default Safari search provider deal with Apple expiring too, we may finally reach a stage where marketers can’t ignore other search providers.

Greater focus on speed and agility

Andrew Girdwood, DigitasLBi

SEO will think harder about newsjacking and the ability to get good quality creative content out in response to events. 

This all has to be done at ‘SEO effective’ price points.

(Related post: Agile newsjacking from Alex and Alexa and baby Prince George)

Latent semantic indexing

Nick Fettiplace, Jellyfish

A big discussion at the moment, but ultimately I feel this will lead to better content across the web and move us even further from the old ‘keyword stuffing’ days. 

Once again, when producing our content we can put the user first and rest-assured that we will still be rewarded by search engines for doing so. 

There has been so much movement towards this in recent years, with the evolution of the Panda algorithm and the release of Hummingbird. 

Latent Semantic Indexing is the next natural step. Is it also preparing us for the growth of voice-activated search in coming years? Probably.

(Related post: Has Hummingbird changed SEO forever?)

Knowledge graph

Andrew Girdwood, DigitasLBi

I think we will see greater focus on knowledge graph integration and schema. 

This will happen in both the technical side of the business but will also influence user experience and interfaces.

(Related post: Google’s Knowledge Graph: one step closer to the semantic web?)

Social

Nick Fettiplace, Jellyfish

There is much talk about ‘brand citations’ playing an increasing role as a ranking metric. 

With this in mind, social becomes important once again. 

Not only can social monitoring tools identify these brand citations, but they can also provide valuable insight around the demographics, personas and geographies of those who are more responsible for them, allowing us to utilise this information when planning our strategies.

Death to the keyword

Ruth Attwood, 4Ps

I expect to see topical search development pushing more and more towards conversational and query answering, even further divorcing from keywords. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if beasts like Panda start to implement additional, more subtle, over-optimisation penalties to combat keyword-chasing as Google tries to encourage sites away from this angle.

It’s not just about rankings

Paul Smith, CEO of 4Ps Marketing

We will spend most of our year explaining that Google rankings are not the best measure of online success.  

Posted by Hannah_Smith

Earlier this year I wrote a post about
the future of marketing. In it, I made a handful of predictions; arguably the most ‘out there’ of which was this: in the future, only brands which ‘mean something’ to consumers will survive. 

In today’s post I’ll be exploring what it takes to become a meaningful brand, and how you might go about building one.

SEO is not dead

However, what we’re being asked to do as SEOs is constantly evolving. 

It used to be that you could build a very successful business online just by being great at SEO. But today, the SERPs are changing, and ranking first doesn’t mean what it used to:

The BBC still rank first organically for ‘weather’—but their listing is pushed beneath the fold. Plus, given the that the information the searcher is seeking is displayed right there in the SERP, I’m guessing they’re not receiving as much traffic from this term as they once were.

But it’s not just informational queries:

Skyscanner still rank first for the term ‘flights to paris’, but again here their organic listing is pushed beneath the fold thanks to paid search listings and the proprietary Google flight product.

Google is even going so far as to show its proprietary products against branded searches (hat-tip to 
Barry Adams for pointing this out):

MoneySuperMarket’s organic listing is above the fold, but Google is nonetheless being very aggressive.

As a consequence of these changes, as SEOs, we’re being asked to do different things. Clients of yesteryear used to say things like:

Get us links!

But today they’re saying things like:

Get us press coverage, social shares and exposure [links] on sites our target audience reads.

Whilst they may not explicitly be asking us to build a brand, nonetheless much of what we do today looks a lot like brand building. But where do we start?

What does ‘brand’ mean?

Before we kick off I think it’s worth exploring what brand really means. We have a tendency to use ‘brand’ and ‘company’ or ‘organisation’ interchangeably, but in reality they are two distinctly different things.

Here’s a definition:

brand – to impress firmly; fix ineradicably; place indelibly

Therefore a brand is not a brand unless it leaves a lasting impression, and of course, it needs to be a favourable impression. Essentially companies or organisations need to build brands that mean something to people.

However, right now companies and organisations are struggling to do this effectively:

“In Europe and the US, consumers would not care if 92% of brands ceased to exist” 

~ 
source

That means that consumers would only miss 8% of brands. 

Clearly we have a mountain to climb. How do we go about building meaningful brands? Particularly on SEO retainer budgets?

You can learn a lot by deconstructing the success of others

Like many in the search industry, I’m a fan of taking stuff apart to figure out how it works. So, when trying to figure out how to go about building a meaningful brand, I started by looking at what meaningful brands are doing right now.

I uncovered three core principles—some meaningful brands do all three; some just do one or two—I’ll deal with them each in turn.

1) Meaningful brands find opportunities to delight customers

@smartcarusa

@ArgosHelpers

This is how @ArgosHelpers responded to a customer asking when PS4s would be back in stock:

The takeaway here is not people love brands who use slang—I think this is actually a very artfully worded response. See how the brand has taken care to use the same language as their customer without being in any way condescending? That’s what you need to shoot for.

@TescoMobile

This is how @TescoMobile responded when someone described their network as a ‘turn off’:

Whoa! 

The lesson here is definitely not ‘be a dick to people who are dicks to you’; I think the lesson here is that a well-judged, cheeky response can travel.

Ultimately you need to tread carefully if you want to use this type of tactic. I think @TescoMobile got away with this one—but it is really close to the line. To do this sort of thing you need to have a deep understanding of your audience—what’s considered funny and what’s just plain rude? This can vary hugely depending on the niche you’re working in and the public perception of your brand.

Moreover, if you’re a brand engaging in this sort of activity, you need to consider not only your own response, but the potential response from your audience, too. Some brands have an army of loyal advocates. But if brands aren’t careful, they may unwittingly encourage said army to attack an individual with a response like this.

Of course it’s not just interactions that have the capacity to delight—sometimes being nimble is enough:

@Arbys

When Pharrell turned up to the GRAMMYs wearing *that hat* here’s how @Arbys responded:

The takeaway here is not that you need a bit of luck, instead it’s that you need to be ready, willing and able to take advantage of opportunities as and when they arise. I think that if @Arbys hadn’t tweeted that, then someone else would have done and their brand wouldn’t have benefited.

Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this; let’s move on to principle two:

2) Meaningful brands give people the ability to define themselves to others

Have you ever thought about why you share what you share on social media? Most of us don’t think about it too much, but
The New York Times did a
study on the psychology of sharing in which 68% of respondents said they share things via social media to give others a better sense of who they are and what they care about.

For example, I might share an article from
hbr.org because I want you to think I’m the sort of person who reads Harvard Business Review. Or I might share an Oatmeal comic because I want you to think I have an excellent sense of humour. I might share something about the Lean In movement because I want to let you know where I stand on important issues.

If you’re seeking to create a meaningful brand, this can be an excellent space to play in because brands can give people the ability to define themselves to others. Now I don’t necessarily mean by creating content like
this which literally allows people to define themselves:

Brands can also help people define themselves by creating things people ‘look good’ sharing—let’s take a look at some examples:

GE’s #6SecondScience

The takeaway here is to create things which are tangentially related to your brand, that people ‘look good’ sharing. When people shared this content they were sharing stuff that was more than just ‘cool’—by sharing this content they were also able to express their enthusiasm for science.

In a similar vein meaningful brands create commercials that don’t feel like commercials—again, these are things that people ‘look good’ sharing:

Wren’s First Kiss

This film definitely got people talking. To date it’s received over 94 million YouTube views and coverage on over 1300 sites. But this isn’t just a video content play…

Oreo

When Oreo turned 100, they created 100 pieces of content over 100 days:

This campaign got over 1m Facebook ‘likes’ and thousands of pieces of press coverage. 

But actually, I think the smartest thing about this campaign was that it was highly topical content which put the cookie right in the centre of people’s conversations without being self-serving.

Still with me? Let’s move on to principle three:

3) Meaningful brands stand for something above and beyond their products or services

This is difficult to explain in the abstract, so I’m going to shoot straight to some examples.

BrewDog

Nike

I think that this advert is powerful because Nike isn’t talking about how their trainers enhance your performance, they’re talking about celebrating everyone’s athletic endeavours. It’s about more than just their products. 

OKCupid

I think that taking the decision to stand for something is perhaps most potent when it could actually cost a brand customers. When Mozilla appointed a new CEO, OKCupid showed this message to Firefox users:

They went on to say:

The takeaway here is not ‘align your brand with a cause and win the the Internet’, but rather, taking a bold stance on a relevant issue, even if it could actually hurt your business, can create a lasting impression.

What do I mean by ‘actually hurt your business’? Sadly, not everyone believes in equal rights for gay couples, as such, taking this stance could cost OK Cupid.

Using these principles day-to-day

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