What you should know about SEO in 2015

| SEO

What you should know about SEO in 2015

SEO is a forever changing field in which all businesses need to keep up with in order to achieve online success. To help you dominate the search results we have compiled a list of the latest and most important SEO/Google changes of recent times.

1. Being mobile-friendly has never been more important

Over the last few years we have stated the importance of being mobile-friendly due to the rapid growth of mobile usage. This number is of course continuing to grow, which is likely why Google has decided to add a mobile-friendly label to their mobile search results. This label has been put in place to help users to avoid the frustration of using a non-mobile-friendly website on a mobile device.

Google is not only helping to distinguish mobile-friendly websites on their search results but it looks like they will be using mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking factor in the near future. This means your SEO rankings could decrease dramatically if your website isn’t mobile optimised.   

2. Be wary of Google penalties

SEO is very important and if done correctly can help your website immensely. However if you apply bad SEO (which is very easy to do if you are inexperienced) it can have devastating effects.  Google will penalise your website for a number of reasons including poor content and dodgy links. Fixing these mistakes once committed can take experts months to recover.

No matter what position you are in, it isn’t worth risking it for some quick gains. SEO is a long-term commitment, if you are persistent, write useful content and build relationships, then good results will follow.

3. Enhanced security measures

Last year Google announced that they are going to use https-encryption as a ranking signal, which makes sense as web security is very important. This means https sites will have a greater chance of ranking above standard http sites.  

4. No more Authorship

Over the last 3 years, Google Authorship has been considered pretty important for SEO (especially for blogging) but has now been scrapped by Google.

5. More search in the search results

Over the last few months you may have noticed that some search results are delivering their own search bar, which allows users to search for specific content on that site without entering it. For example, here is the search bar from Rightmove:

 rightmove search.jpg

By using the right markup, you will improve your chances of this search box showing up for your website (however there are no guarantees as this search box is generated by Google). 

Luke Stanley