How will the growth of mobile affect the future of SEO?

Following all the excitement of ‘Mobilegeddon’ – a Google update that favours mobile friendly sites and punishes those that remain stubbornly biased towards the desktop – it seems everyone in digital marketing, indeed, people across a number of industries, have been busy talking and focussing on all things mobile.

Anurag Aluwalia, Head of SEO here at Ambergreen, agrees with many in the industry that the ever increasing number of mobile friendly sites and the heightened focus on mobile marketing strategies is going to have more and more of an effect on SEO looking into the future.

I caught up with him to talk about why this was the case and in which specific ways he thought SEO might be affected and why. Here’s what we learnt:

1. As people continue to use voice search on mobiles, we will see an increase in the use of long tail keyword phrases in search
2. As people use mobiles with location information to search, SEO will become more intelligent and aware of location and contextual information
3. As more and more websites are supported by apps, it is likely that we will see a rise in app links appearing in our SERPS
4. As Social Media is a huge part of everything we do these days, it is inevitable that it will continue to influence search as it becomes yet more sophisticated and more integral to marketing.
   1. Google search will become more personalised as Google gains access to more and more social data
   2. Social profiles and posts will begin to appear regularly in search rankings
   3. As technology becomes more sophisticated, there will be an increased use of sentiment analysis in search
   4. The place of trending topics in search will become more prevalent and it is likely that a ‘trending’ label will become a strong marker of authority
5. The continued rise in the use of video as a medium will have a number of effects on SEO:
   1. Google will make increased use of video transcripts in search
   2. There is great potential for video tagging to appear in search and to be recognised by Google
6. Links will equal real relationships to a greater extent as Google becomes more sophisticated and better able to notice real life endorsement
7. Just as Google now recognises mobile friendly sites, so in the future it will favour fully responsive sites and the greater a site’s ability to adapt to different devices, the greater its authority.

What do you think? Is there anything Anurag missed? Do you think he is wrong about anything? Or perhaps we didn’t go far enough in our predictions.

Let us know or tweet us with your thoughts @ambergreen_says