Sit Back. Deep Breaths. Stare Into the Crystal Ball. We’re Going to Tell You the Future! of online marketing
A tall dark stranger will come into your life – Ominous or the beginning of a romance novel? In this case the tall dark stranger is one of many other strangers that businesses are going to attract to their product or service via social media, “Ugh, you said social media. My eyeballs just fell asleep!” Social media pimping by marketers is nothing new. What will change however is Google+ will take on a more prevalent role for optimization (even if like 5 people actually use it) so businesses should get that account along with Facebook and Twitter. Basically, have Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ and your bases are covered. Additional sites are gravy though if you have the time and the manpower to make it happen.
- We see some clouds, and thunder… wait that’s not thunder. Definitely clouds—Cloud storage and sharing took a bit of a hit with all of the NSA stuff. Some businesses, specifically foreign ones, were afraid the gov’ment was gonna take their baby. No worries. That will pass. You’re not interesting enough to spy on. The fact is it is a superior way for businesses to store and share stuff, it just is. When there is a better way to do something people use it regardless of the occasional thunderstorm. What’s that have to do with SEO… we don’t know. We do know that if you are a small or medium business planning on growing, get into some of the free (or cheap) cloud services now and it will make it a lot easier going later on.
- VIDEO WILL KILL THE RADIO STAR! — Video kills other medium when it takes off, and currently through very cheap and very easy-to-post-on sites like YouTube, video really is slowly killing off some more conventional means of online advertising. Your business needs to make a YouTube video, and it has to be good, and you have to get people to watch it. A video may be even more important for SEO. Google loves to give searchers YouTube results. They almost always rank very high in organic searches.
- Smartphones are going to get smarter — Okay that’s not exactly a ground breaking prediction. The other non-groundbreaking prediction is that as a result of faster and smarter smart phones more people are going to continue to use mobile devices in order to find businesses. They aren’t going to take that extra 5 minutes to sit at their computer and find the pizzeria they want, they are going to find that while they are walking to their car so they can enter the address into their GPS the second they sit down. “Sure, I’ll wait 20 minutes for pizza, but that satellite orbiting a billion miles in space using technologies that would seem like science fiction 10 years ago BETTER beam me down directions within the freakin inch on the entire earth of exactly where I want to go! And it better do it fast!” So yeah, make sure you have a mobile site or that your site is mobile-compatible.
- And in line with the last one – Be sure that your business shows up on Google Maps according to the appropriate search terms. This is going to become even more essential for businesses. More competitive too. Clicking that little map in the right corner is a lot easier for searchers than going to a website to figure out where a business is located. You might be across the street, but if you’re not on that map there is a very good chance a lot of your customer are going across town to the guy who is on the map.
Tread with care ye who twould enter here! Because we’re going to shamelessly sell ourselves out starting… now.
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