Three Ways to Shift Your SEO Strategy to a 2014 Mindset

When I ask clients about their most valued SEO KPI’s, they inevitably come back to two major points: Rankings & Backlinks. It’s no surprise why, as this is what folks have been taught over the past 10 years; that online marketing & SEO is something to game, to hack. A short cut if you will: Beat the system and come up first by doing the right code tweaks. It went something like this:

Add the right words to certain places on your web pages + Get links from tangentially relevant sources = Profit

2013 certainly changed this. In fact, we could call it the “Year of Change” in SEO. This was a year in which Google launched update after update to fight article/e-zine linking sites, bad backlink strategies, and over-optimized pages. It’s also the year that Google Analytics data for keywords were taken away from marketers as a data point and lumped into a (not provided) bucket. Google’s ranking algorithm now compiles 200+ factors to serve web sites to searchers, yet much of the online marketing world’s mindset has continued to focus on the Old Two: Rankings & Backlinks.
The SERPS themselves have changed as well. In this (highly) exaggerated example from the Moz Team Blog, we can see that there are no longer 10 text results on a search result page, but a wealth of possible and contextual information types: Carousel for Local Places results, Shopping Ads, data from Knowledge Graph, News Items, and so forth.
Let’s look at a specific example. In the older days of the web, domain squatting was a popular activity. Someone would buy a keyword heavy domain and sell it to the highest bidder. Pizza.com sold to a buyer for $2.6 million. The assumption was that users would inevitably type the domain or that the domain would rank #1 because it was keyword heavy and could have been easily optimized/linked.