The all-powerful phenomenon that we know as “Google” is something that’s never easy to define, to predict, or even to understand. As anyone in the digital marketing industry can attest, it seems like once you figure out what Google’s all about, it changes on you.
Now, large corporations are pretty lucky. They can pay for SEO services which cover nearly every corner of search engine optimization factors so that no Google changes are too drastically terrible; smaller businesses, however, are often left to clean up the mess of a website post-algorithm update.
While Google is sure to have some surprises in store for the coming year, let’s take a quick look at a few things that you’ll likely see in 2016 so that you can bolster your website before it’s too late:
- Google already releases algorithm updates constantly, but real-time Panda updates will likely become more prevalent. This means that if you haven’t hired a good web design firm to clean up your website, you’ll want to start looking for one ASAP and keep them close throughout the year.
- Google released something called “Micro-Moments” in 2015 which allows for detailed tracking of searches during a very short time frame. This service is still in its early stages and may not be useful for a lot of businesses yet, but you can expect to see Micro-Moments becoming more popular during 2016 as the bugs are worked out.
- App Store Optimization is becoming more important as mobile device users choose to access the web via mobile apps instead of mobile web browsers; as more apps are created, there’s more competition to get a top ranking in an App Store search results list. This is expected to tie in heavily with search engine optimization strategies, but it’ll get a bit more complicated and will need its own digital marketing optimization approach.
So is Google going to make search engine optimization even trickier for web developers and digital marketing firms in 2016, or will the process of SEO start to make a little more sense? Only time will tell!
