What is the future of SEO? Sometimes offering an SEO company is a little bit like shaking a magic eight ball and asking for stock tips. It’s still a guessing game, between people who do SEO and Google who creates search results. Over the last few years we have noticed a few trends that we believe will still be in vogue in the next few years.

On Site Optimization is still a big deal

At least 50% of the sites we evaluate for free don’t have good core SEO. Some of the more common problems we see are old or outdated content management systems, the same keywords being used over and over again and simply blank fields. We still spend a significant amount of time preparing sites to get going with SEO and don’t see that changing in the future.

Not enough time to create content.

We are big believers in blogging to get search results. On average our site gets about 300 visits a day from search and 95% goes to blog articles. Blogging is one of the best ways to build content and build keywords. However, most small business owners lack the time to blog and create content for their website. We continue to believe; SEO will need to create good content in the form of blogs, videos, pictures, infographs, etc. for their clients to keep their sites ranked in search results.

Bad SEO will continue to feed good SEO

Often, people ask us to look at their site and see if Panda or Penguin has penalized their sites. These leads typically had a relationship with an SEO company that “delivered great results” but later failed. Almost always this is due to some kind of link spamming. As Google continues to catch these tricks, there is no doubt that today’s SEO gamers, will be tomorrow’s lead of a white hat SEO company that plays by Google’s rules

Google will get better at guessing

One of the things the engineers at Google continue to work on is to understand how a person’s search history influences future searches. For example, if you ask Google about “Who is Tom Cruise” followed by “How tall is he?” Google can understand that the he is Tom Cruise. What the future may hold for Google is asking Google, what is there to do around here? And based on your location, passed searches, postings on Twitter or Google + and what’s in your email, Google may have a pretty good idea about what you like and be able to suggest events. What this means for an SEO is that they will need to continue to convince their clients that they will need to put as much as possible online for their business. Google is only as smart as the information it finds and indexes. If Google doesn’t know about it then it can’t suggest and it can’t provide personal choices.

For us SEOs, we will need to continue to evolve. There will still be a technical aspect to our jobs, but we will need to broaden ourselves into social media, design, content creation and website development. This is simply to ensure that a wide variety of our client’s business is online.