In our digital world, trends come and go just about as quickly as we’re able to wrap our heads around them. These constant revolutions require marketers to adopt the most modern best practices, and ditch what’s irrelevant. This is why 2016 marketing budgets are set to increase to 11% of company revenue, according to Gartner’s 2015 CMO report

1. The 3 Big 2016 Search Trends we foresee
What does 2016 Hold?
2015 brought SEO countless new introductions like our new friend RankBrain and
the further refinement of Facebook search. Here we will cover where search
engine optimization is likely to go, and what you can do about it.
Online click path and site structure increased importance
Whe ou la d o a e site a d do ’t k o hat to li k or ha e trou le
navigating a site, your reaction is most likely just to click back or close that tab.
The likelihood of isitors si pl lea i g a page e ause the a ’t fi d so ethi g
has been steadily increasing over the last 5 years. Right now, it is estimated that
50% of all online sales are missed due to customers not finding what they were
looking for.

2. This is multiplied by the fact that Google is heavily recording the way people
interact with your page, and closing your page quickly after arriving on it is a large
factor with heavy ranking significance.
This is ’t the o l etri i ol ed o our site’s li k path a d stru ture, though.
Overall visitor engagement with your website is also measured by Google and
assigns your site a placement in search results.
To opti ize e er isitor’s experience on your website you need to look at its
organization. Subcategories and dropdowns are excellent additions, but become
overwhelming for visitors if there are more than 20 dropdown items. If your site
has a wealth of data stored in it, adding a search bar is a necessity.
A d do ’t ig ore those o a pho e, ha i g a li k-to-call and a fully responsive
site is the only option in 2016.
Higher significance of digital footprint rather than traditional
web ranking factors
This trend began only a few years ago. Traditional search engine optimization
ideas like page rank and other ways of calculating the value of a page with a set
formula are becoming less impactful. Although they are still the basis of
e er thi g “EO’s operate off of, the eed for a ore o erar hi g i tegratio ith
the internet in general has become apparent.
A e a ple of this, is the laser fo us a “EO’s put on only Google search .
Facebook search has become a strong competitor and is rapidly becoming more
refined, thus, becoming fully optimized on Facebook is something no one can
ignore any longer.

3. A i porta t a to adapt to this tre d is to ha ge the a ou thi k. “ilo’s that
hold ideas separate like website maintenance/development and social media
should be just as important from an SEO perspective, as they both boost the
digital footprint of a brand.
New emphasis on structured data due to machine learning
As of last year, we had the opportunity to learn about and research the way
RankBrain works.
This machine leaning system that Google implemented into its ranking process is
the third most important ranking signal that Google uses, so it has changed quite
a bit during its lifetime.
The biggest result, in terms of search engine optimization, is that we can manually
send signals to RankBrain through structured data markup tools like scheme.org.
Doing this makes sure that web crawlers know exactly what is on a site instead of
leaving it to them to interpret it.
As web crawlers have become more refined, structured data markups have
similarly become more important. Now, missing or inaccurate data could be fatal
to a e site’s i terpretatio through a e ra ler.
The best way to deal with this is to simply make sure your website has been
correctly marked up using a structured data testing tool.

4. An added bonus of doing this is that you could potentially capture a rich snippet
that Google indexes to directly answer a query in search results, especially if you
use structured data to markup videos and bulleted lists.
Do you feel prepared for these trends? We sure hope so! Ho e er, if you’re not
so sure, let us kno here that you’d like an SEO audit and e’ll get right a k to
you.
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/sea-sailing-vessel-ocean-sunset-1101168/