2015 SEO Trends – 5 Ways to Climb Up The Rankings!

Staying ahead of Google and on top of the SEO pile has never been easy. Even when you’re doing everything right it is no guarantee that you will get on that coveted first page for vacation rental searches. And if you are, there is nothing to stop Google sweeping the rug from under your feet and changing their algorithm. SEO is not just about climbing to the top, it is about staying there. A constant battle against inertia  Today we’re discussing 5 of the biggest SEO trends that are going to change the game in 2015.

Mobile-Optimised Sites
As well as being vital for capturing visits and sales from mobile customers, not having a mobile-optimised site could start to become very damaging. Sites that are not optimised for mobile and tablets are going to plummet in 2015. Google is now charting the usability of sites for mobiles. Now that they have the exact figures for just how mobile-friendly your site is, sites with a poor score are going to see themselves sliding down the SEO rankings.

Another innovation that is set to arrive in 2015 is a ‘mobile-friendly’ label. This means that sites that are well optimised for viewing on a phone or tablet, will get a marker next to their site in Google. Users will be able to see the sites that are going to work well on their devices before they click on them. This is also likely to affect the overall ranking of your site once it has been fully rolled out. If you are unsure how to get started optimising your site for mobiles, have a look at our custom sites and templates that are built to work on every device.

Content Creation
Quality, not quantity. Content creation is still a very part of any good SEO plan but Google is focusing its rankings on well-crafted content that people want to read. The focus is shifting more to specific long-tail search questions and phrases. Having content that actually answers the questions your customers want to ask and having content that is more than disguised adverts and an excuse to jam in keywords will reward you with a higher SEO ranking.

Social Media
How retweets and likes translate into SEO is not widely understood. It stands to reason that the more traction your posts get on social media, the better your site perform in SEO. But, it is not always as clear-cut as that. Facebook and Google are both taking steps to reduce the amount of content it considers to be spam. So, the message for social media is the same as search-driven traffic - high-quality content and clear, specific websites are going to get the best results.

Personalisation

Google learns. It gathers information from your searches and now it is going to use it to make your searches more accurate. SEO plans cannot hope to cast a wide a net as possible. Search engine rankings can take into account the personal tastes and familiar patterns. A greengrocer and someone looking to buy a tablet might get very different results when searching for apples. What this means for vacation rentals is that for SEO, having a large brief when it comes to SEO may not be as effective. Search engines are responding to more specific queries and stray keywords, or misunderstood searches are becoming less frequent. Your site should be targeting your customers more directly by catering to this increase in detail with your site and your content.

Semantic Search
This means that Google is going to consider the meaning behind every word in your search. It aims to understand the meaning of your entire search rather than a scattergun search of the separate keywords that make up your search. Search engines are understanding sentences and rewarding the sites that are able to match these more ‘conversational’ search queries. One way to do this is to consider LSI (Latent Semantic indexing) which basically boils down to the synonyms people will use when searching now. It also knows when separate words link with each other under one heading. For example, it will know Bill Gates is linked with Microsoft, and factor that into longer searches.

The prevailing trend is that sites with the best content, sites that are well made, and constantly updated are going to be high in the rankings. Click-bait and glut of keywords can now be sniffed out by Google. The changes in SEO for 2015 are going to mean that your site needs to be tailored for people, not just built to tick the boxes of Google’s latest algorithm.