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The 5 Biggest SEO Lessons We Learned In 2015

This article is more than 8 years old.

We’re closing in on the end of 2015, and since it’s been an exciting and eventful year in the world of SEO, I think it’s appropriate and practical to reflect on some of the biggest lessons we learned this year. There weren’t any major game-changers on the level of Panda or Penguin, but that doesn’t mean the industry itself hasn’t changed—we’ve been privy to new technologies, new strategies, and new trends that are starting to shape SEO (and will likely continue doing so well into next year).

As you analyze this year’s metrics and consider what adjustments you’ll make in 2016, remember these five lessons we learned over the past year:

1. Digital assistant searches are here to stay. When Siri was first introduced, people seemed to think of it more as a gimmick or a novelty than a practical, reliable means of searching. Its speech recognition left something to be desired, and it didn’t always turn up the results you were hoping for. Now, several years later, Siri has become sophisticated enough to handle almost any vocal query, and multiple new competitors, including Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana, have emerged to solidify the market.

Marrying online and device-based search into one package and saving users the trouble of typing in queries or browsing through results, it’s only a matter of time before more users adopt it as their search medium of choice. As a result, queries will grow to be more conversational, search algorithms will invest more in semantic understanding, and mobile search traffic will lock up its dominance over desktop search traffic.

2. Google isn’t changing the game the way it used to. If you look at end-year reports from 2014, 2013, all the way back to the early- to mid-2000s, the major influencing force in “what we learned in SEO” was Google. Google was the undisputed champion in the search world, and it was almost singlehandedly responsible for bringing all the shiny new features and industry standards we’ve since grown accustomed to. All eyes would be on Google for the next big game-changer, like the Panda or Penguin algorithms that sent ripples through the SEO industry.

This year proved this is no longer the case. Google may still be getting two-thirds of all search traffic and introducing great new features and functions, but it isn’t alone and its updates aren’t as game-changing. Bing, Yahoo, Apple, and even social media platforms like Facebook are all working hard at introducing their own search options for consumers, and the rise of digital assistants has begun to blend back-end search engines into one, agnostic, indistinguishable system.

3. Mobile is still growing in importance. Mobile search traffic has grown consistently and predictably over the past few years, but this year hit a new high—in May, Google announced that mobile traffic had officially surpassed desktop traffic in several countries. On top of that, it released its much-anticipated “Mobilegeddon” update, which theoretically penalized any sites that were not mobile compliant while rewarding those that were.

But the mobile shifts haven’t stopped there. Mobile features, like digital assistants and user-friendly search layouts, are still increasing in prominence. Google’s even made a statement that having a dedicated desktop version of your site isn’t necessary so long as your site displays correctly on mobile. Add in the fact that Google is shifting its desktop search results pages to look more like mobile results (like its local 3-pack update earlier this year), and it’s not hard to see that mobile optimization is still growing in importance.

4. Content is being indexed in new ways. Content is starting to be indexed on new platforms and in new ways. Google signed a new deal with Twitter back in spring to index the bulk of its tweets as content to be displayed in relevant searches. Facebook is now offering Instant Articles to a handful of select publishers, drawing attention away from onsite-hosted content and toward in-app content, forcing users to stay in its app longer. The way we publish, consume, and access content is starting to lean toward universal accessibility, which could be a huge opportunity for emerging strategists, and a major threat to those unwilling to change their current approach.

5. Manual updates may soon be a thing of the past. At the end of October, Google announced it had released RankBrain, a machine learning algorithm that works with the semantic-deciphering Hummingbird update to better understand user ambiguous and complicated queries and provide appropriate results. Rather than relying on manual updates from technicians, RankBrain learns on its own based on new data from new queries, and updates itself to be better. Coupled with the advancing trend of Google releasing fewer game-changing updates (and instead, much smaller, less noticeable tweaks), this machine-learning algorithm could herald in a future where manual updates are obsolete. Instead, we’ll see minor updates roll out gradually and almost constantly.

If there’s anything we’ve learned about SEO over the past five years, it’s that it rarely stays the same for long. No matter how hard you try to predict the future, Google, Bing, and other players introduce something new to shake things up. Manual updates are dying, so the speed and intensity of these shifts may finally start to curtail, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’ll need to stay on your toes if you want to be a good search marketer in 2016 and beyond.