Well, another year end is almost upon us – and doesn’t time fly when you are having fun!?
It’s that time when us SEO’s start to look forward to the new year, and what challenges and changes it brings to the world of Search Engine Optimisation. 2009 saw alot of change and revelations such as Google denying the duplicate content penalty, changes to Page Rank sculpting and the introduction of real time social media being included in search results.
So what challenges will 2010 present us with? Here are my top 5 predictions.
1. Real Time Search will be huge in 2010 – but to what benefit?
The growth of social networking sites, such as Twitter, simply cannot be ignored. Late in 2009 Microsoft started to include real time social media feeds in their results pages, and Google promptly followed. However, this isn’t neccesarily good for SEO as it potentially detracts from the need for quality content and inbound links. Why not just tweet about a topic in order to get noticed? The flip side of this is that real time search surely can only show the results for seconds as live results will change nearly every millisecond.
2. Search Engine Results Evolution could me less traffic
What do I mean by this? Over the last 6 months we have seen more and more results displaying additional information in the actual search engine listings. For example, type in the name of a Football Club whilst they are playing a live game and you will probably see the actual realtime score in the SERPs. Great for searchers who are looking for quick fire information, but maybe not so good for site owners relying on click throughs.
3. Organic SEO spend will rise
More and more companies will turn to organic SEO in an attempt to increase traffic to their site. Organic SEO continues to outpace PPC in terms of growth, and 2010 will be no different. More and more searchers become ’suspicious’ of PPC results whilst trust in the organic results grows. This is surely a sign that the search engines have been doing the right thing when it comes to delivering results that searchers want to see? What this might mean is that SEO’s are employed in house, rather than as an external resource. Time will tell.
4. The conversion metric will be king
2010 will see a greater emphasis on conversion. In the past SEO’s have mainly focused on driving traffic, whilst the more dynamic SEO professionals will also have put a strong focus on conversions. I personally beleive that 2010 will be the year of improving bounce rate and converting prospects to enquiries and enquiries to sales.
5. The Top 3 positions in the SERPS will become more valuable then ever
Generally speaking, sites that have been on the first page of the search results have tended to get the majority share of the traffic, but towards the end of the year we saw a trend that our sites in the top 3 ranking positions started to grow dramatically in terms of visitors. This could be mainly down to the amount of information that Google is now trying to cram onto the first page of the SERPS since its ‘Caffeine’ engine was implemented. Never the less, this makes SEO much more competitive and potentially more expensive for clients but the ROI from investment could also be much more rewarding.
In Summary
Of course, as we have seen with 2009, the world of Search Engine Optimisation can change on a regular basis and our friends at Google are quite happy to keep the majority of these changes under the hat and keep us all guessing.
What I am certain of though, is that 2010 will be a very big year for search, and with the right mindset and SEO company it could also be a very rewarding year for your business.
Have a very Merry Christmas and prosperous New Year from all of us at eSoftware Solutions.
