We had a fantastic turnout on Monday for the Search Trends in 2015 presentation.
Our first speaker was Danny Denhard.
2014 was a busy year in search. Emoji became the most popular word and Facebook led the way for ad revenue. It was also the year when Twitter was used by teenagers to ask questions.
So what is install for 2015?
1. Improving sites, tech and functionality
2. Answer questions before they are asked
3. Long form vs Digest – good to have a mixture, and there is reason to explore what works best
4. Breaking a story, PR important
5. Browser vs apps (always audit and market)
In terms of answering as many questions as possible when people land on the site. Mobile can be guilty of not doing this. It is important to create questions off the page and answer them on the site.
So what else will happen in 2015?
1. Pinterest & Instagram – discovery is key
2. Pinterest is good for infographics
3. Shareable is the new ‘viral’
4. Twitter – trust signals could help rank. Authority could be split by subject
5. Twitter and LinkedIn will have their own platforms
6. Vloggers will using different forms of media
7. Contextual content is more important
8. Apps will be built for content – product hunt (disposable apps) location apps are increasingly important
9. GIFS will be created for education
10. 2015 is the year for audio. It is also the year of amplification and promotion
To find out more, view Danny’s presentation on slideshare below:
Our second speaker of the night was Pierre Far from Google.
- 2015 is the year for mobile. Pierre knows many people have been saying this, but mobile is surging.
- Over 60% of purchases on Amazon, were from mobile in November 2014
- Only 3% purchases on mobile app, 97% on mobile web
Pierre mentioned there are some common mistakes people are making with regards to rendering pages:
- Blocked resources – many sites disallow the crawling of JavaScipt and CSS files that are needed to render the page correctly.
- Dynamic serving of resources – Google has seen JS and CSS files being dynamically served depending on the user-agent. This can cause problems.
Mobile websites
Pierre mentioned the importance of having mobile-friendly websites. Google have two resources to help webmasters build mobile friendly sites:
• Their Mobile Sites development guide
• Web Fundamentals
Pierre mentioned the importance of having mobile-friendly websites. Google have two resources to help webmasters build mobile friendly sites:
Structure data – Pierre announced they revamped their Structured Data Testing Tool. They also expanded their support for the JSON-LD syntax to make It easier to include structured data in your pages.
NAP is not enough – Pierre said the acronym in local search is “NAP” – name, address and phone number. But people forget to include opening hours. So he suggest we think in terms of NAPO.
To read more about Pierre’s talk and answer his survey, visit his blog.