We went over the year in search in our last post, let’s look at what the year likely holds for us in the coming year. If the direction that Google has taken over the last year – one thing we can say for sure is that it’s going to be a full year of fast updates and quick changes. SEO is always evolving and we have seen Google make changes, roll them back, tweak them and keep on being at it. There were a number of small updates and a few big ones.

Here’s what the big ones for this year look to be like

1. The year when Social Search gets mature, Google+ has always been something that Google wanted to push, they are getting more and more traction with their platform and they will definitely have closer integration with their search results. The more people recommend your website in Social circle’s the better results you’re going to see.

2. Stronger integration with schema.org. Google has already setup a number of integrations such as star ratings, author markup, price matching, etc. Google already announced closer integration for e-commerce websites such as price points, categories of products and so on.

3. Link text will definitely not be as important, we’ve seen that exact link matches are already lower in importance and Google is putting penalties on high exact match links. We are going to see more importance on brand building in terms of link building. The better you position you website as a brand the quicker the results.

4. Accessibility, mobile is going to be big this year onwards. The number of mobile devices on the marketing is going up extremely quickly. We expect by 2017 mobile searches will overtake desktop based queries, to ensure you are high on rankings, have a decent website that is child friendly.

5. Real content, Google is looking for real websites with real content for real people! That’s right, keep it real is the word, when people write content for blogs or websites, they naturally cover varied topics, right from research areas to musings and ruminations. The more natural you keep your content, the better your website is going to appear. Thinking about your goals in the long term will help, for example if you have a website about romantic short stories, writing about dark chocolate and strawberries would be quite different in nature, but as objects they would be close to each other.

We predict these to be the key areas that Google is going to be looking at over the next year, it certainly will be an exciting year ahead so keep visiting us and reading on how things are changing with the world of search and keep yourself updated and changing!