SEO: What to Expect in 2015

1. The fundamentals of SEO will always remain constant
"The principles that makes any good marketing campaign successful have remained unchanged for decades. In many ways, 2015 means business as usual for marketers. Successful SEO depends on two key factors: what you say about yourself (on-page SEO) and what other say about you (off-page SEO).
"On-page SEO has to do with both creative and technical expertise. As a marketer, you need to create quality content for your website that your audience will love. And you want to ensure that your website helps Google (and human users) find and share that content easily.
"Successful off-page SEO depends on promotion. You want to attract links from other authoritative sites by creating and promoting fantastic content." —Justin Deaville, managing director at Receptional, a digital marketing agency.

2. Mobile SEO will be even more important
"Google is carefully looking at how user-friendly your site is, so it's more important than ever to be mobile compatible."
In the past, "mobile SEO was about serving the right URL to the mobile user or having a responsive design (whereby your website adapts to the display of the device used to access it) to provide visitors a better experience. Now Google report to users and webmasters whether a site is mobile-friendly, and if your site isn't mobile-friendly, don't expect it to stand out in Google's index pages."—Joe Balestrino, Internet marketing consultant, atJNB Consulting.
(Google offers a free online testing tool to see if your site is mobile-friendly.)

3. Small business SEO will be local
The essence of optimizing your website for your local area will continue to be important in 2015.
"Small businesses definitely want to concentrate on dominating local search queries…Much more attention will be given to local directories and citations. More so, companies will look to optimize their websites by adding addresses, phone numbers and location pages that are consistent with off-page directory listings."—Jared Banz, founder, Banz Marketing Services.

4. More companies will think like a publisher
"More company sites will move to the news media formula with their content. They will credit their writer (not just for text articles but for video and podcasts as well) and give them their own voice. This gives more weight to the author versus the company as a whole. A lot of companies will have a hard time swallowing this, but it's reality. Search engines give a lot more weight to people now, not companies."—Ely Delaney, co-founder, Your Marketing University.

5. More businesses will optimize existing content
Small businesses will produce less new content in 2015, opting to go back to "fully optimize" and update existing content that has had the biggest impact on traffic and leads. "Instead of churning out new content that may or may not be effective, more companies will focus on improving what already works."—Dustin Christensen, digital marketing manager for legal firm Jackson White.

6. CTR, CTA, bounce rate, and dwell time increase as ranking factors
"If small business owners don't know what CTA, CTR and dwell time are, they need to learn now so they can be successful in their organic search traffic goals in 2015.
"CTR (Click-Through Rate) measures the ratio of clicks to impressions; a higher CTR indicates more successful online content. CTA (Call to Action), which can be as simple as "Call now," can increase the time a visitor remains on your site and the amount of links clicked.
"Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who navigate away after viewing only one page. Dwell time is "the time spent on a site overall, as well as the time spent on each page."—James Blews, online marketing and SEO consultant.

7. Links and keywords may become less relevant as ranking factors
"SEO will continue to move away from keywords dictating search rank. The algorithm shifts in search last year only cemented the notion that search engines are putting less importance on keywords and more importance on content. It's reasonable to expect that search engines will index your site and rank it based more on what it thinks your site means rather than what keywords you use on the website."—Austin Matthew Fiascone, digital media manager, TopFire Media.

8. Optimizing videos for search will grow
There's bound to be 64 to 85 percent conversion after watching a product video, according toKISSmetrics. As a result, job descriptions containing the keyword 'video SEO' increased 57 percent last year "because businesses want to ensure their video content is found in search." In 2015, small businesses should submit optimized videos not just to YouTube but to other social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr as well.—Natasha Robinson, co-founder, CMO, MediaNest.

So with these expectations, what are your SEO plans to out rank your competitors in 2015?