Now that the New Year is here, we are seeing hoards of articles which predict the future of SEO in 2013. While I enjoy reading these sorts of insightful projections, I am cautious about putting too much faith into them. After all, even the best SEO gurus can’t predict the future – or can they? It turns out that some SEO experts are freakishly good at predicting what Google will do. To give you an idea, here are the biggest predictions that SEO experts had last year about and how they turned out.
The Rise of Mobile
Last year, the online marketing experts were full of predictions about how mobile online marketing would blow up. They were right! However, mobile search hasn’t quite blown up in the all-inclusive way that they predicted. While mobile search did quadruple so that it now accounts for 1 in 7 searches, these searches have mostly been local or retail in nature. People are using mobile for price comparisons or to search for local deals. They are NOT using their mobile phones to read blogs or articles! So, if your website is purely informational in nature, the rise of mobile didn’t have such a big impact on you. However, ecommerce merchants and local businesses who weren’t mobilized in 2012 got left behind!
Here are some interesting stats about mobile usage:
- 90% of mobile searches lead to an action with more than 50% resulting in a purchase (Search Engine Land)
- 61% of local searches on a mobile phone result in a phone call (Google)
- Average response time for mobile search is 1 hour (Start App)
The Importance of Google+
Google+ was launched in June, so it was still a fledgling social media website last year and no one really knew what to expect of it. Some experts expected the network to dominate while others predicted that Google+ would stay tiny (it had less than 1% of the social media share last year). In some senses, the naysayers were correct. While Google+ has blown up from 10 million users last year to 500 million in (of which 235 million are active), these users don’t spend much time on Google+. Mashable reported that Google+ users only spend an average of 3.3 minutes on the network per month. Compare this to the 7.5 hours that users spend on Facebook each month!
While Google+ may not come close to Facebook in popularity, Rand Fishing at SEO Mos. was right about his prediction: Google did make it very hard to do great SEO without Google+. Without Google+, you can’t build up your Author Rank to get clout as an industry expert. It is no wonder that SEO experts like Mike Arneson have said of Google+ Author Rank, “It may as well be a penalty against the sites and brands that have done nothing to prepare.”
Freshness Affecting Quality
In November, Google announced that it would be unleashing a “freshness update.” The update would give precedence to newer content and affect 35% of search results! It is no wonder that SEOs were full of predictions about freshness and the future of SEO in! At Search Engine News, Casey Markie predicted that in quantity will become more important than quality. His premise was the idea that the freshness update would cause Google to rank newer content before older yet higher-quality content. Luckily, this prediction did not come true in. Thanks to Google’s increased importance on social signals, the algorithm is better equipped to recognize quality fresh content instead of just fresh content.
Link Spam
I am amazed that Rand Fishing, in his SEO predictions for 2012, was somehow able to predict the Panda web spam update. He wasn’t the only one with this sort of foresight though. Zac Grace at Dejan SEO predicted that there would be less web spam (though he didn’t state exactly how this would come about) and also that anchor text would lose some of its SEO power.