Last year rose a popular article where the author predicted upcoming trends for SEO. But since Spring is knocking on our doors I thought it was time to take a look at where we’re at in terms of SEO. The Google giant has been keeping itself busy over the past year. Regular SEO techniques, tasks, and roles have changed dramatically. Let us have a look at what changes we are seeing so far in 2015.

1. The Google giant’s authority keeps expanding

More and more people are starting to realize the great importance Google has over their online business. And that is a good thing since the giant has confirmed the use of Author Rank.

The end of last year, the giant decided to cut down on authorship snippets by a quarter. By doing so, it hoped to increase clicks to only the highest quality content. If you are wondering what does this all mean, it is quite simple: Google has decreased the total number of search results that were joined by author information and increased the competition on the entire online market.

What is more, you can notice that what is displayed next to search results differs in some cases. For example, some search results display full authorship details while other search results only display a line. Also, there is a factor that influences whether the authority snippets are included or not. Such factors are the trustworthiness and the reputation, and of course, the very website that hosts the content.

Some internet trolls have been speculating that if one chooses not to establish a degree of authority through Author rank will become obsolete aka their content will not be ranked. Now, to put these rumors aside, because we are still a long way from that, this comes to stress the importance of getting Authorship set up as soon as possible.

2. More and more brands are beginning to realize the need for social media.

This, of course, comes as no surprise for some of us, as we know it plays a major role in generating huge traffic and content. So far this year, social media proved to be the main factor in terms of generating traffic and content dissemination. According to the latest market studies, the social media giant Facebook is still the biggest leader in terms of referral traffic.

There is a great variety of websites that still struggle to get even mediocre rankings in the search engines. Unlike brands which are increasingly using social media to increase website traffic, these websites still remain in their shadow.

3. Goodbye SEO, Hello Content marketing?

Numerous experts have reached consensus on the fact that in today’s world it is no longer sufficient to have an SEO strategy. Actually, I have seen it myself to be true. I have seen that more and more people use content marketing as a synonym to SEO. Now, although these two are very different on quite a few levels, there are some voices that speculate the former is replacing the latter.

Marketers and business owners must shift their focus and efforts toward creating high-quality content. Also, they have to keep in mind the high value of solid keyword research. They must study their competition and strive to offer better content.

Although the days when everybody struggled to reach the highest ranking, the hard to get number 1 ranking, are over, we must all keep striving for excellence and these SEO trends can help. Even though competition is extremely high in almost every industry and there is virtually a very slim chance we could become the very best, we must all keep hoping that quality will triumph over quantity and popularity.