December 16th, 2015
With 2016 just over the horizon, search engine optimization (SEO) experts are already trying to read their tea leaves and determine the trends that will shape the next year in digital marketing. Here are just a few of the predictions they're making.
Video Marketing Will Be Even Bigger
Video marketing is already huge. In fact, YouTube has become the Internet's second-largest search engine. It's even more significant than Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL put together. This past summer, YouTube announced that users uploaded 400 hours of video every minute. In November, Facebook announced that they were generating 8 billion video views per day. And there's no sign that video marketing is on the decline, either.
Local SEO Is Going to Get Even Bigger
This is excellent news for small business. More and more people are using their mobile devices to search. Mobile has gotten so big that Google has said that a desktop-specific site isn't required anymore. Since more people are searching on the fly, more people are looking and getting local results. Research shows that 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in the hopes of finding local results, with 61% of those searches resulting in a purchase.
Target Keywords Will Change
Digital assistants are quickly getting better and better. OK Google, Siri, and Cortana are all actually useful nowadays, and they're only going to get better. The key to using these digital assistants to search is actually to ask a question. As these digital assistants get more and more popular, websites will soon have to add longer tail keywords to show up in the results. For example, rather than getting optimized for the keyword "cheap pizza," they'll have to get optimized for "Where can I get cheap pizza?" After all, 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine, so those keywords will have to go in.
These are just some of the prediction digital media experts are making