SEO best practices are going to change whether we like it or not. It’s easy to get set in your ways and feel comfortable with your current strategy, but this isn’t going to be sustainable in this industry. It’s important that marketers focus on getting out of their old way of thinking and evolve along with Google and the other search engines in order to find long-term success.
Fortunately, understanding this “new age” of SEO isn’t as time-consuming or overwhelming as it may sound, so the sooner you can get started the better and easier changing your mindset will be in the future.
How SEO is evolving in 2015
Understanding how you can evolve your strategy as the search engines evolve starts with recognizing how it’s all changing in the first place. A great way to do this is by compartmentalizing different SEO tasks and methods and then looking at what was recommended in the past versus what is recommended by search engines now, in the present.
QuickSprout published an excellent infographic, which you can find here, that outlined old SEO versus new SEO. Consider a few of the shifts in the industry QuickSprout pointed out as well as a few of our own below:
1. The SEO mindset
Past: In the past, the goal was to focus on keywords and get rankings on the SERPs. Some thought how you got there wasn’t quite as important as grabbing (and keeping) that spot on page one.
Present: Marketers should focus more on a brand’s reputation, how people engage with that brand, and the quality of the product/service. In the end putting a focus on this should improve your rankings by increasing shares and natural linking across the web, but ultimately the focus needs to be on how your brand is viewed as opposed to its ranking position.
Keyword mentality
Past: Piggybacking off of the SEO mentality of the past, marketers would focus on one major keyword. They would research to find a keyword where they wanted to rank, and then focus on that term and that term alone.
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