With the dawn of a new year and new and unex­pect­ed chal­lenges on the hori­zon – and lots of big ROI goals to hit – now is the per­fect time to think about your SEO efforts for the com­ing year.

Top SEO Insights for 2016 was Lin­dex’s first SEO Now webi­nar of 2016. I was joined by Daniel Bian­chi­ni, Direc­tor of Ser­vices, White.net, and Chris Hart, Head of Client Devel­op­ment, U.S., Linkdex, who pro­vid­ed an insight­ful overview and lots of ideas for how brands and busi­ness­es can win more traf­fic, cus­tomers, and rev­enue through SEO in 2016.

The webi­nar began with Bian­chi­ni recap­ping a few of the biggest devel­op­ments in SEO over the past sev­er­al months before shar­ing three tac­tics to future proof your SEO in 2016 and beyond, which were:

1. Become obsessed with user-focused con­tent. Cre­ate con­tent for the moment by tru­ly under­stand­ing your audi­ence and what stage of the user jour­ney they are at. Reuse or repur­pose your great con­tent. Use it to dif­fer­en­ti­ate your brand.
2. Pro­vide search engines with con­text. This includes mark­ing up your site with schema and fig­ur­ing out ways your con­tent can be fea­tured as rich answers.
3. Ensure you are equipped for mobile. Under­stand when peo­ple are using dif­fer­ent devices. Make sure your mobile expe­ri­ence is FAST or you’ll lose impa­tient users.

We then took a deep­er dive into these, and oth­er key ele­ments SEOs need to address in 2016 to suc­ceed. Two clear over­ar­ch­ing themes emerged: don’t chase Google, chase your audi­ence; and make sure you pro­vide val­ue to your cus­tomers or audi­ence.

Cus­tomer-cen­tric­i­ty, cre­at­ing amaz­ing user expe­ri­ences, the inevitable con­ver­gence of mobile/apps/desktop into one brand expe­ri­ence, under­stand­ing the entire con­sumer jour­ney, smart usage of data, and tech­ni­cal SEO will all be among the most cru­cial ele­ments to get right in 2016.

Thanks to every­one who joined us live. If you missed it, or want to lis­ten again, you can watch the webi­nar record­ing now:

SEO Now Webinar_ Top SEO Insights for 2016 2–10-16, 12.00 PM from Linkdex on Vimeo.

We’ve also embed­ded Dan’s slides from the webi­nar:

Audience Q&A

We received sev­er­al ques­tions dur­ing the webi­nar. Dan and Chris were kind enough to pro­vide their answers to those here:

Q: Per­son­al assis­tants — is it just rel­e­vant for B2C or also for B2B?

Dan: I think this very much depends on your audi­ence. How­ev­er, unless there is con­sid­er­able cost asso­ci­at­ed to your imple­men­ta­tion why wouldn’t you do it? As more peo­ple use per­son­al assis­tants (it’s grow­ing) and search using mobile, the smarter this appli­ca­tions will become and start to auto­mate what you see. As I men­tioned in the pre­sen­ta­tion, I nev­er actu­al­ly set the app to being in any of the con­tent shown, but it was based on my search pref­er­ences across all my devices. This does require you to be signed into Google, or oth­er but when are you not?

Chris: PAs are good for both B2B and B2C. The rule of sev­en is an old mar­ket­ing adage, which states, “A prospect needs to see / hear your mes­sage at least sev­en times before they remem­ber it.” So why not use PAs to your advan­tage in order to get your lead through the Know –> Trust –> Like cycle.

For exam­ple: A lead may be very busy at work and see mar­ket­ing mes­sages as very intru­sive. But if they are on a train while com­mut­ing home, they may be more open to receiv­ing mes­sag­ing. So why not help them get that mes­sage via PAs?

Q: Is Google clever enough to know my site is respon­sive via a flu­id lay­out (i.e., I don’t have a ded­i­cat­ed mobile site)? Is that OK?

Dan: Yes. There are three ways that Google has indi­cat­ed that they see mobile web­sites, and I would sug­gest that this fits with­in the respon­sive cat­e­go­ry although I am spec­u­lat­ing based on the ques­tion. The three for­mats that Google have pro­vid­ed are shown below:

• Respon­sive design <— Google rec­om­mend­ed
• Dynam­ic Serv­ing
• Sep­a­rate URL (m.)

To help deter­mine whether Google class­es your web­site as mobile-friend­ly, you can check the fol­low­ing tools:

• Mobile Friend­ly tool
• Mobile Usabil­i­ty tool

Q: What about key­words, what are the changes around key­word usage and opti­miza­tion? How to look at key­word organ­ic traf­fic in the seman­tic search era? How to opti­mize for seman­tic search?

Dan: You should be opti­miz­ing around top­ics and not just indi­vid­ual key­words. Sim­i­lar to how in AdWords you would build a list of key­words for a par­tic­u­lar ad group. This set of key­words then allow you to cre­ate con­tent around a top­ic that pro­vides your user with more detailed infor­ma­tion. These top­ics should then be used as part of your con­tent strat­e­gy, which will iden­ti­fy which con­tent should be used at each stage of the buy­ing cycle.

Chris: Key­words should be used to help devel­op and struc­ture con­tent around top­ics. It is not the pure use of the key­word that mat­ters. It is the rel­e­vance of that key­word to the top­ic and arti­cle it is part of. Along with all of the oth­er sup­port­ing arti­cles on the site and the con­tex­tu­al ref­er­ences from link­ing sites.

For exam­ple: Intent is an under­stand­ing of what is being looked for. But con­text is the mean­ing of every­thing that sur­rounds a search.

Look for machine learn­ing to have sig­nif­i­cant and con­tin­ued impact on this in the near future (i.e., RankBrain).

Q: Back­links — which are the best prac­tices about link build­ing and using anchor text in 2016?

Dan: You want to increase the num­ber of backinks your web­site gets? Build great con­tent or dig­i­tal assets that are worth link­ing to.

(For a more detailed dis­cus­sion about links, lis­ten to the webi­nar.)

Q: You men­tioned schemas for search engines. Can you explain a lit­tle fur­ther?

Chris: Your best bet is to use them where applic­a­ble so that you can get the most rel­e­vant info to a query in the SERP. Remem­ber users glance through piles of infor­ma­tion, give them some­thing to glace at.

Dan: Search engines read con­tent on the pages, but it doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly give any con­text as what it is. The Hum­ming­bird update and schema has helped search engines to get more clar­i­ty to what is being dis­played. Schemas for search engines can be used in mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent ways HTML5 & JSON-LD just two that I men­tioned, and are snip­pets of code that sur­round spe­cif­ic parts of your web­site con­tent.

A very sim­ple exam­ple would be pric­ing. You’d wrap the price of your prod­uct in schema, which will be picked up by search engines and like­ly dis­played with­in the search engine result pages.

There are many resources on schema, but the two that I always point to are:

• https://schema.org/
• https://developers.google.com/schemas/

If you’re look­ing for infor­ma­tion or test­ing tools on imple­men­ta­tion, then I would rec­om­mend the fol­low­ing:

• https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
• https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

Q: Does Google use as rank­ing sig­nal – when vis­i­tors keep com­ing back to your web­site?

Chris: To say yes or no to this, would be giv­ing you an answer that I just do not have any way of know­ing. But what I can assume is, that giv­en Google’s vis­i­bil­i­ty and abil­i­ty to tag/track under­stand users, at some point I would think that they can. If they do that is one thing, but also know, under­stand­ing the weight­ed val­ue they put on such a thing is anoth­er. So while they might use it, there is no way to tell the val­ue of that sig­nal alone.

Dan: On an ongo­ing basis? Then I would say no. How­ev­er, if a sud­den surge of peo­ple were search­ing for a spe­cif­ic web­site using a cer­tain query then I’d expect and have seen a short term increase in rank­ings for that web­site.

I have seen some exper­i­ments that Rand over at Moz has con­duct­ed where he has sent a lot of social traf­fic to a cer­tain search phrase and then select a spe­cif­ic web­site. This has then seen an increase in posi­tion for that term, although on a very tem­po­rary basis.

Q: About AMP pages, we have LTE as stan­dard offer so we have fast con­nec­tion in here Vien­na, any­way con­nec­tions are get­ting faster and faster so why do we need AMP? As I under­stand AMP will look like page from ’90s.

Chris: As talked about on the webi­nar AMP may not be for every­one. So it is impor­tant to know if it is for you and to do that you need to under­stand what it is for. It is Google’s answer to instant arti­cles in Face­book and or Apple news. AMP is designed to accel­er­ate the ren­der­ing of pages for a user’s mobile expe­ri­ence, it is large­ly designed for pub­lish­ers.

Also, it is a counter mea­sure to the accel­er­a­tion of ad block­ers. If many peo­ple are block­ing AdSense ads via an ad block­er then the pub­lish­er and Google do not make mon­ey. Google will use AMP to get around the ad block­ers.

Dan: Google will con­tin­ue to pro­vide resources to improve web­sites as part of their mis­sion to improve the web. This doesn’t how­ev­er mean that it is some­thing that you need to imple­ment if you think that your web­site speed is good enough.

Michael King has writ­ten a very good post on improv­ing site speed by using one piece of code -

Q: Do you have any opti­miza­tion tips for indus­tries that are very com­pet­i­tive, but quite con­ser­v­a­tive and reg­u­lat­ed when it comes to their con­tent?

Chris: Dur­ing the webi­nar we sug­gest­ed that com­pa­nies devel­op sep­a­rate stand­alone sites that are out­side the rules of reg­u­la­tions and are more focused on engage­ment / con­ver­sa­tion with mem­bers of that indus­tries com­mu­ni­ties.

Dan: If you do decide to go down build­ing a con­tent plat­form for your brand, under­stand that it takes time to gain trac­tion. Put every­thing that you have into and you keep going so that it is a suc­cess. It’s easy to get down about the trac­tion you are gain­ing, but just keep going!

This Econ­sul­tan­cy post pro­vides some infor­ma­tion on ideas for the finance indus­try.

Q: One of my clients has a blog post that’s got­ten more traf­fic than oth­ers, and I want to reuse it. Is it accu­rate that Google doesn’t like con­tent that looks like a copy/repeat of some­thing else? So if I make a few changes to update it, does that mean I should delete the pre­vi­ous (orig­i­nal) post so it doesn’t look like a copy?

Dan: Many dif­fer­ent ways that this can be han­dled. I’d sug­gest that you check out the webi­nar for more in-depth respons­es but in short:

• Repub­lish­ing isn’t an issue if it’s valid and use­ful.
• If you copy it to anoth­er URL then you’d want to imple­ment canon­i­cal tags.
• When cre­at­ing con­tent think about whether it can be used again, will it be ever­green. Then you can real­ly think about the URLs that you are using.
• Check the webi­nar. :)

Thanks to Dan and Chris for these answers!

For more thoughts on where search is head­ing in 2016, be sure to check out SEO Trends: 44 Experts on the Future of Organ­ic Search Suc­cess on Momen­tol­ogy.

What do you want to see in upcom­ing Linkdex webi­na­rs? Sug­gest a top­ic! Tweet us at @linkdex. We look for­ward to hear­ing your sug­ges­tions and bring­ing you the top­ics you want to hear about.