Digital Marketing Predictions for 2016

Following on from the DMM’s take on the digital landscape for 2016, our team of SEO consultants also shared their views on how they predict the year of 2016 to play out from an SEO perspective; both Googles movements and shifts in the market.

Dave

Google will fix the hacked sites that optimise for image search, for example, the search term “Nike Roshe Shoe” shows lots of hacked sites which redirect off to the attackers websites. I think we’ll also see the Personalised and Local SERP’s will improve to the point that long and short click will affect the results local to you.

Google will lose a big EU law suit, which will have devastating effects on web search and mobile – around privacy. We’ll also see Google continue  to ignore fixing the issues in paid search and will still allow bottom feeders to push up CPC.

A few other quick fire predictions:

• Google will be hacked – the data leak will be amazing
• Something will go wrong with the disavow system and will affect millions
• Bing will increase market share but no one will know why
• People will find out that when the whole web is SSL it’s just as insecure as the whole web without SSL
• Donald Trump will try and ban Muslims from using the internet

Matt

SEO importance is likely to grow considerably this year due to Google’s realtime algorithms growing more and more intelligent – sites will be punished for bad practice much quicker; forcing change. On the flip side, it may allow for faster testing and validation or changes.

Potentially a lot of site clean ups to be generated!!

Craig

I believe Google will continue their knowledge graph integrations into the search results pages as well as move into further Comparison markets, such as Holidays, perhaps.

Data science will also begin to become more apparent with marketers exploring machine learning and data analytics to reduce churn, apply discount targeting and adopt customer segmentation, among much more.

Site speed and mobile friendliness will continue to be a big focus for Google and a stronger ranking factor.

Rory

The potential for ranking for someone else’s brand on the first page of Google will become harder as more social and other brand owned websites take the main positions. This is due to growth in brand bidding and other companies optimising landing pages to rank for their competitors.

Additionally, review sites will be harder to manipulate as they’ll be pushed from the main brand terms.

Ant

Google will intrude further into our lives, by connecting our Social and Cloud Storage accounts such as Twitter, Facebook & Instagram or OneDrive, DropBox, etc to our Google account so they can interrogate our lives more personally scanning social media and reading our files, to provide a more personalized Search Experience.

Making it easier to find the things personal to you more quickly when signed in.