Where will SEO go in 2015?

This article sets out our predictions for the direction SEO will move in during 2015, given developments during this year, including the importance of site content, responsive design and social media which are three areas of growing importance.

Content
Original, high quality and well produced content is the new king of the internet, so focus your efforts on that in order to achieve significant search engine visibility. Businesses that continue to focus on SEO without having a strong content strategy in place will hit problems. SEO will become more focussed on technical elements while content marketing will drive search rankings.
Link Profile
Look after your link profile as this helps to determine your rankings and stay within Google’s strict link-building guidelines. Whilst Penguin penalties are the primary reason for websites being kept off the first pages of Google results, Penguin 3.0 helped to re-rank sites that had been previously penalised so that sites aren’t penalised indefinitely.
Mobile
The importance of mobiles has become so dominant in the market that companies need to ensure that their websites are responsive and tailor their content to their users, otherwise they will drop in the search engine rankings and see their conversions plummet.
Brand mentions and citations
These are set to become as powerful as links because of the widespread misuse and abuse of link building. Google appears to be differentiating between express and implied links; express being where there is a URL leading back to a webpage and implied is where there is a reference to or mention of a brand or site without actually linking to it. Google appears to be putting more emphasis on implied links as these are less likely to be manipulated for the purpose of achieving higher search rankings.
Social signals
Correlation studies showstrong correlations between social signals and rankings yet Google has continually denied that social signals are part of its ranking algorithm. Both Google and Bing use social sites to determine how high to rank your website, and even if they are not already part of Google’s ranking algorithm, social signals will no doubt soon become so, especially as social media platforms are becoming more popular.
Build relationships
The aim is to build a community around your website traffic. With the vast amount of content produced every day, it is no longer enough just to create good content and optimise its technical components for SEO. Businesses that humanise their brands are the ones that stand out, for example, through blogs and social media, as search rankings will become more about building relationships and less about technical strategies.
Visual content
has risen immensely, and with an increase in the use of infographics and video there are sites based on GIFs alone. Google already gives slight priority to rich text (so not just plain text) in SERPs (search engine results pages) which points towards visual content slowly replacing plain text.
Negative SEO
This is when a competitor tries to de-rank you, for example by paying a provider to build thousands of black hat automated links to your site. It can take 9 months for disavow files to be completely taken into account when you disavow a link, and although this is unlikely to affect small sites, larger sites are likely to be targeted by negative SEO. Google needs to find a way to recognise manipulative links and penalise the perpetrators.
Integration of SEO, social media and content marketing
SEO is no longer an isolated department and has become fully integrated with the other aspects of marketing. Specialists in each of these three areas will need knowledge of the other two areas as they all have the same goals, and none of them is any longer a separate isolated task but rather all three have converged with the same aim.