3 Trends for 2015 Still Influencing Your Keyword Rankings

Understanding the processes of search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) is something that’s not even easy for the experts to nail down — with Google making all sorts of Panda, Penguin, and Pigeon algorithm updates all the time, it’s not easy to stay on top of the factors that are influencing your website’s ranking on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

That being said, good SEO services and digital marketing companies do work hard to stay on top of these changes, and many search engine marketing groups release updated lists each year of the factors that are most influential for rankings.

2015 might be more than half over, but it isn’t too late to take a look at what’s been influencing your website’s ranking — and maybe even get some ideas about how to improve your SEM and SEO marketing strategies before it’s too late!

• Quality, quality, quality! Research has already shown that content marketing can increase revenue by as much as 40%, but as Google continues focusing on quality-centric updates, quantity is continuing to dip in importance. A low-quality, high-quantity approach is more likely to be useless at its best and harmful at its worst.
• User experience — UX design — is becoming easier to understand and measure for web design. User experience refers to what visitors see and encounter when they visit your website — and for business owners, the power of UX design can be frustrating. It only takes about 50 milliseconds for someone to form an opinion of a business after landing on its webpage, and 94% of people in a recent survey admitted that they’ve mistrusted a business because it had a poorly designed website. When visitors aren’t staying on your website, they aren’t creating conversions and they aren’t sharing your content — and Google can measure this.
• Keywords and low-quality backlinks? Meh. Keywords and backlinks are still very important because they signal to Google’s robot scanners what your business is all about, but Google is getting better and better at seeing how people misuse these two rankings factors easily. Instead of buying sketchy backlinks or measuring keyword quantities on each page of content for your SEO and search engine marketing strategies, focus more on creating compelling content that your audience wants to engage with and share on social media. Not only is Google giving more legitimacy to social media marketing this year, but as your pages are shared, good links will naturally come.

Now we want to know what you think, especially if you’ve been monitoring or managing a search engine optimization or search engine marketing campaign this year. Are there any ranking factors that seem more important than before? Any predictions you have for the remainder of the year? Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments section below!