2016 has rolled out and it is that time of the year when marketers sit down and evaluate, take stock and make adjustments to their strategies. Among the many areas to look into, is the SEO strategy of your own business.

Google has over the last few years, consistently rolled out numerous updates to improve and elevate the quality of search results and it’s very important to keep track of these, so you can devise an SEO strategy that gives you the intended results.

With each year SEO is becoming a little more challenging and here are a few changes that you should take note of for SEO in the year 2016.

Role Of Mobile Optimized Sites

According to studies, mobile usage has officially surpassed desktop usage. Mobile phones are fast becoming the preferred device to browse the web. This means there is an increased emphasis on optimising your website for mobile devices.

In April 2015, Google had an update which targeted websites that weren’t adapted to the mobile platforms. This resulted in wider variations between the desktop and mobile search results.

Importance Of Video Marketing

If you are a B2C brand or company, then 2016, is the year to focus on video content. According to an article in Forbes, this is the year where video content will surpass text in preference.

This can be a potential game changer as several companies still lean towards written content. Videos make sure that the user stays longer in your website thereby giving the right signals to Google about the quality of your content.

So, this is the year where companies may have to start adapting their SEO strategies to make room for video content in their marketing strategies.

Relevance Of Knowledge Graph

Over the years and after several updates, you can find that google never stops in its quest to enhance the user experiences.

As a result of this, Google now helps you to get search information on the search result page itself. It is called the Google Knowledge Graph, where all the semantic search information gathered is collectively displayed in a box (at the top or to the side of the search results) to enhance the search experience of the user.

This makes searching for an information comes effortlessly for the end user, but it could also means less traffic to your site.

So, if you’d like your website’s information to appear on the knowledge graph, these are the few methods you may want to implement:

• Increase your site’s trust by listing yourself in Wikipedia
• Backlink to other related websites in your niche
• Get a page in Google+ for your brand/company website.
• Use more nouns in the content so the search engines can easily understand your content and its relevancy
• Use schema markup and ensure it is properly implemented on the site.

Impact Of Website Speed

This is an often repeated point. This was a relevant point in 2015 and will continue to hold relevance in 2016 as well.

Page speed  is an important factor to up the rankings in Google and it will continue to become more important in 2016 as Google starts integrating AMP Pages in February.

This makes sense as Google continues to improve it’s user experience. If you’re site loads too slow, the end user will get frustrated and leave your page.  Secondly, if your page takes a while to load, it becomes more difficult for Google to crawl and index your page accordingly.

If you’re looking to check the score of your website’s speed, check out GTMetrix.

Authority and Trust As Key

Search engines are a lot more advanced today and Google easily differentiates between a trusted and a non-trusted website. It believes that the users are more comfortable visiting familiar, popular, big websites, as opposed to small, new and unfamiliar ones.

Google algorithm nowadays prefer websites that looks like a complete authority on a given subject. If you have a new website, you really want to be sure to hit the pavement running when it comes to building out relevant, authority content and links across your website. This increases the trust and authority of your website in Google’s eyes and eventually impacts your rankings in a positive manner.

Conclusion

This year, 2016, it’s becoming increasingly important for website owners to focus on quality over quantity. You need to prove to Google that your business/brand is a relevant and authoritative figure around the keywords you want to rank for.

If your website provides value, you in turn provide Google’s users with a better user experience.

So in short, prove to Google is that your website can provide faster and better answers for their users.