The year 2011 was an important one for online marketing and especially for search engine optimization. Why? Primarily because businesses started to understand the impact they can create through web.
Even the small business jumped into SEO and social media marketing and made a big difference to their online presence. So obviously now the next logical questions are: What now? What changes and trends can people expect in 2012?
Firstly, businesses will need to understand that SEO will no longer be a secret weapon. It is a universal thing by now and companies cannot expect that the competition will not be tapping online resources. Everyone is keen to invest in online marketing and search engine optimization for the obvious benefits. However, this in no way means that SEO will not be important. Quite contrarily, SEO will gain more popularity and the strategies will become more complex. A lot of other variables like platform automation, multi channel search, social signal in search, privacy, content marketing, social media influence and mobile searches will shape the SEO strategies.
In simpler words, search engine optimization will evolve into something more intelligent and will require a lot of planning and proper execution. There won’t be any universal plans and companies will really have to tailor cut what they want. Social media will get bigger in SEO than it ever was. In 2012, search engines will try to interpret social graph in a better way. Social media is surely influencing ranking positions and it should better be taken into account.Moreover, the paid search results will increase replacing the genuine or organic search results. For what reasons? Well, Google and other search engines have a lot of pressure of increasing the revenues and profits and paid search result is a great way of doing that. First we witnessed Google ads and the Google shopping so it’s quite clear that Google may start charging for other things too.
Other interesting trend that we can see in 2012 will be harder stand against spammy practices, which is a good thing as good SEO practices will be encouraged this way. Google is accumulating more data than it ever did and it will increase further this year. Artificial links, article spinning and various other spammy practices will surely be on a decline this year.
Moreover, competition in SEO will be fiercer now. As more and more companies are online, web marketing will be at an all time high. In 2012, more businesses will look to use SEO for selling and brand building. However, due to the change in trends some will even fail to a certain extent and only the companies which will accept the changes and plan accordingly will be successful.
Finally, SEO trends in 2012 will continue to incline towards quality instead of quantity which was more in focus last year. Google Panda 2 will boost the focus on freshness of content than the spinned version of everything. It is pretty much clear that SEO will not be just SEO any longer. The transformation is inevitable this year with lots of other things coming under SEO engineering.
