2014 Predictions and Recaps
Every January, Rosemont Media CEO Keith Humes creates predictions for the new year in search engine marketing. The past few years have had a few common themes including mobile use, search, and online advertising. Let’s look back on predictions of past years and what we believe 2014 will bring.
Mobile Recap
Mobile has been a part of each year’s prediction since 2010 for good reason. We have seen an increase in mobile use, and as a result, growth in mobile-friendly responsive design and innovations in mobile advertising.
Mobile Predictions:
- Expect mobile marketing to grow as new devices (here’s looking at you Google Glass) make for creative advertising challenges.
Search Recap
Last year Humes predicted Google would continue to change its algorithms to crack down on spammy contents and link sites. That prediction was correct, in 2013 Google made more changes to it’s algorithms and updated Panda, Penguin, and introduced Hummingbird. As a result, content became the focus of new updates. Google also has updated algorithms to incorporate author tags and Google+ in search results.
Past predictions also touched on social search, that is, search engine results integrating with the searcher’s social media profiles. Both Bing and Google+ have experimented with social search in different capacities. Bing remains on the forefront of social search with its 2012 introduction of its social sidebar.
Bing itself has failed on its prediction to challenge Google search. Although it has taken away some market share from Google and attempted to attract users with its social search, Bing hasn’t been widely adapted.
Search Predictions:
- Content as the new linkbuilding: Look to Google to continue making updates which emphasize quality content and spammy linking practices to be punished.
- Push to Google+: Google will continue to integrate Google+ in its products. 2013 saw YouTube anger the internet by replacing anonymous comments with Google+ comments.
Advertising Recap
In last year’s predictions, Humes anticipated Facebook would improve its ads manager to better target customers. Indeed, over the past year, Facebook made many changes, including a significant overhaul of its Ads Manager that allows advertisers to create ads based on marketing objectives.
Another prediction in the past has yet to pan out regarding video ads on Google search results. While there is no video yet on Google search, video is catching on in social media. 2013 was the battle of video on social media. Twitter launched Vine, it’s 7 second video social network and Instagram retaliated by also adding video capabilities.
Advertising Predictions:
- Video ads: Video ads will be the experimental advertising medium in social media in 2014. Its already happening in Facebook. In December it announced the introduction of muted, automatically playing video ads in the News Feed.
- Google to make even more money: Google+ will expand into advertising this year. It also just announced using Google+ posts as ads in the Display Network.
Web Design Recap
Started two years ago, Rosemont’s efforts to lead in developing responsive websites for the elective healthcare industry paid off. 2013 was dubbed “The Year of Responsive Web Design” as Google endorsed responsive as its preferred structure of websites.
Web Design Predictions:
- Widespread adoption of responsive design: Expect to see responsive design become more mainstream.
- Increased popularity of visual elements: Design elements like improved parallax scrolling and large background images on homepages will also become more popular.
- Higher resolution websites: This year look for more affordable 4k monitors which means websites will be able to feature higher resolution images.