What have the most significant developments been for SEO in the last 12 months?

Julia Logan, Irish Wonder: 

Most people will probably say it’s the complete loss of keyword data from Google, but that was coming and we all knew it would eventually get to this.

What seems more striking to me, however, is Google admitting its helplessness in some verticals to an extent where it just introduced handpicked whitelists of what can rank in those verticals.

Dr Pete Meyers, Marketing Scientist at Moz: 

Not to be unoriginal, but I think [not provided] has to lead the list for me. While good SEOs take a broad perspective, keywords are still a big part of our job, and this one really hurt.

As a tool provider, it’s reshaped many of our conversations. That’s good and bad, but it was certainly jarring. I think Google’s radical push to redefine mobile has changed our world much more than we know.

It’s terrified of how mobile consumption could (and has) impact ad revenue, and mobile features are now leading desktop features. It’s a big shift in direction that will have profound implications next year.

Kevin Gibbons, UK MD at Blueglass:

The integration of SEO being driven by marketing strategy has been the biggest shift I’ve seen. I wrote about how agency models are changing earlier in the year and we’ve seen lots of people edge away from SEO over the last year.

This is not so much because SEO isn’t important anymore, (as long as there’s organic search is sending traffic/sales it’s always going to be valuable), but as the lines become more blurred SEO is now more commonly being viewed, quite rightly, as a single channel within a wider strategy. 

Andrew Girdwood, Media Innovations Director at LBi: 

There has been very many but the one which feels most important has been the changing numbers among the SEO tribes.  

This isn’t a scientifically researched observation but my perception is that the number of agency and in-house SEOs who embrace the earned model with outreach, engagement, content, editorial pitches now outnumber those who cling to the more ‘traditional’ model of process based link building.

A number of developments are responsible for that swing. I’d suggest it’s the combination of Panda (to identify bad content), Penguin (to punish you for too many links from bad content) combined with Google being more transparent or verbose about action that has caused this change.

Will Critchlow, Founder and CMO at Distilled: 

I’d call out three things that are significant in different ways:

  • The rapid change to 100% (not provided). Although the writing was on the wall before this year, it was easy to believe that Google would find some way not to take away the last shreds of organic keyword data.

    I don’t buy the public reasons given for the change or like the alternatives they talk about. I think this is almost purely an anti-competitive play.

  • Hummingbird has had a negligible impact on actual search marketing strategies (at least for anyone who had been looking to the future before it dropped). It deserves a mention though as we believe it will be ultimately as significant as the changes enabled by the Caffeine update. You can see more of our thoughts on this in this video discussion.
  • Google’s ongoing PR offensive and treatment of businesses under penalty has continued through 2013 and has really started reaching the mainstream marketing consciousness. We’re seeing fewer requests for the shady stuff. Previously we would see a lot and we would have to talk them out of it, now fewer businesses are keen to go down that route.

Teddie Cowell, Director of SEO, Mediacom:  

Hummingbird was a major overhaul of the underlying algorithms that power Google and an important milestone in the evolution of search. Instead of being based on design concepts that were around over 10 years ago, the new infrastructure is designed to enable Google to evolve and do want they want in the next ten years.

The key components of Hummingbird are its ability to understand information better and return ‘answers’ to questions much more quickly.

It also opens up the possibility for a more natural ‘conversational’ style interaction with Google search, which will be required to break out of the current search box paradigm and enable hands free search experiences on mobile and Google Glass etc.

Matthew Barnes, SEO Executive at Stickyeyes:

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last 12-months about keyword data being made unavailable to the masses, making it more difficult for SEO marketers to define and set the most effective strategy for their clients across unbranded keywords.

This challenge will force agencies to work smarter and more closely with their insights, content, social, paid search and strategic insight teams.

However, the most unappreciated changes are yet to come. Recently many Google users have experienced the paid search results which look almost identical to organic results.

This, combined with various other elements such as knowledge graph, in depth articles and news, is starting to take the attention away from organic search, increasing the competitiveness to grab the all-important click-through.

Richard Baxter, CEO at SEOGadget: 

Developments in SEO have very obviously been fuelled by changes to the way Google’s working. I think I have to reflect on how my agency has changed in the past 12 months to answer this question.

We started the year, pretty much like any other agency – building links with mostly articles and infographics, cranking out audit work, keyword research, all the usual things you’d expect, with a bit of bespoke consulting for more difficult projects with a sprinkling of USP for good measure.

Then, this thing happened – we decided we wanted to enjoy the work a little more beyond simply ‘building quality links for rankings’. At the same time, and somewhat fortuitously, Google were starting to really grind away at low quality link profiles, penalising sites left right and centre.

I think our evolution is clearly tracking in response to how SEO has been pushed to develop in the last 12 months. We have such a general content marketing, revenue led focus to the work we do and that’s definitely because of Google.

We’re not an industry of link builders anymore. We’re an industry of aspiring marketers, longing to find that sweet spot between attracting hundreds of links to our clients sites while converting the traffic generated to our new assets into sales.

It sounds an awful lot like advertising and I think that we’re looking at the big ad agency guys in some detail for inspiration on our company structure, creative capabilities and marketing channels.

Jimmy McCann, Head of SEO at Search Laboratory:

The improved transparency and communication on Google’s Webmaster Tools. Over the last 12 months the communication has really opened up on here, which is good but could still be better. It’s definitely a start though.