Looking Back on 2014 Web Predictions

A year ago I wrote about my 2014 web trends and predictions. I am going to go back and highlight my predictions to see which came true or fell short. The web is a difficult thing to anticipate because of how fast it moves and even getting partially correct predictions is a tough thing to accomplish. Please feel free to comment on predictions or trends that you felt were spot on or way off.

1) Link Building Services Will Continue to Lose Value

 
This is something that goes hand in hand with SEO services. I think it is more difficult than ever to provide quality link building and SEO services as a third party agency. For instance, lets say a firm charges 2000 a month for link building and SEO. How many links will you actually get for that monthly fee and what type of quality will you be getting? Generating quality links should really be done through promotion of your website and brand content, something that is best done from within the company itself, and not outsourced. The problem here is that many companies fail to invest in a full time or even part time person who has the SEO knowledge to do this effectively, thus they are forced to look for outside help.
The problem with this is that most companies lack enough content to promote in the first place. Therefore, it is really only very large companies that have the internal brand and content resources to justify such a third party expense. Ultimately, Google is cracking down on poor quality links that are not relevant to your site because they see this as SEO spam. This makes it more difficult than ever to win valuable backlinks, especially as a third party service that is not an expert in a customer’s industry or specific business and lacks the content or brand resources to build those quality backlinks.
The Matt Cutts of Bing, Duane Forester wrote in a 2014 post about 10 myths of SEO, “You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path.”  Both Search Engine Land and Globerunner covered the death of link building in 2014. Its not to say that quality backlinks aren’t important, it’s just that the outbound strategy of acquiring them is now antiquated and a link earning perspective is what should be used in 2015 and beyond.
Ultimately, this prediction is tough to prove, but I do think many businesses are frustrated or do not feel that they got the value out of their link building / SEO services because they do not fully understand how difficult it is to build quality links to your website as a third party. I would say this prediction was partially correct, but very difficult to prove one way or another.

2) Mobile Growth Will Make Mobile or Responsive Sites a Necessity

This was somewhat of an obvious one that has already started to take place, however the necessity part may have been a bit of hyperbole. It is still amazing to me how many companies do not have a responsive website design in place. Magento CE 1.9 now comes with a default responsive theme. Additionally, most modern themes you will find on something like Themeforest will also be responsive. There are many responsive frameworks that allow you to build a responsive website faster and more effectively. Frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation are very mature and offer unbelievable flexibility / scalability for building a responsive website.
I think many companies know mobile is important but not as many as I would have expected have adopted responsive design, so I think my prediction fell short on this one. The reasons for this are likely that there is both a lack of front end developers with this skill providing services to clients, in tandem with a lack of knowledge on how this type of website works and how it would be implemented. Furthermore, it requires an overhaul of your website, something many business owners simply might not want to take on as a project.
The use of mobile devices to access the Internet has increased 67% worldwide over the last 12 months from August 2013 to August 2014, according to StatCounter, an independent website analytics company. I would say the trend is there but the necessity part certainly did not come true.

3) Yahoo Search Will Continue to Struggle Compared to Bing And Google

This certainly came true, as Search Engine Land noted that yahoo fell below search volume of 10% for the first time ever in July 2014.  Directly from them…
Here are the figures for June:

• Google: 67.6 percent
• Bing: 19.2 percent
• Yahoo: 9.8 percent
• Others: 3.4 percent

Yahoo has transitioned its company away from search to become a more media focused company. I see this trend continuing into 2015 and beyond. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo transitions as a company, but its future growth is certainly not in search.

4) Social Media & Blogging Will Rule SEO

Social media and blogging certainly have taken a bigger role in SEO, but I was surprised at how much backlinks have still held strong as a major ranking factor in search engines algorithms. I do feel that social media and blogging are two of the most consistent and surefire ways to improve your SEO as opposed to other methods that can reach diminishing returns faster, however, I am not confident it completely dominated SEO in 2014 as much as I had predicted. I think this is a difficult one to prove as far as how much the ranking algorithm changed in favor of social media and consistent content creation in the form of blogging. However, if you look at this SEO infographic from Searchmetrics, you will notice that relevant content was considered a major change in 2014 for ranking factors. Additionally, social shares were highly correlated with higher rankings.

5) Social Media Advertising Will Eat Into Google Advertising for the First Time

This prediction sort of came true, however, it was not necessarily worded well, making it a bit confusing. First of all, a large portion of Google’s advertising growth is from Youtube, which is considered a social media website. If you look at growth from Facebook and Youtube, the two largest social media advertising platforms, you will see huge growth of over 50% for 2013 and 2014. Google’s total growth in advertising revenue in Q3 2014 was 20%, and a large percentage of this comes from Youtube which is carrying well over 20% growth in 2013 and 2014. Ultimately, Google advertising is growing steadily, however, social media advertising is growing much faster and I think some of that growth is taking away from Google’s advertising growth. I would consider this prediction in the right direction, but it is difficult to prove how much social media growth specifically took away from Google.com search advertising growth (not Google owned sites like Youtube) which is what my prediction was intended to mean in more specific terms.

Facebook Revenue Growth:

6) Ecommerce Will Become a Necessity for More and More Businesses

This is something that has certainly been taking place for a while now. I think many businesses are finding it hard to grow their brick and mortar retail stores and are looking to the Internet to increase growth. eCommerce growth has been steady in 2014 posting Q3 2014 increases of 16.1% Y/Y. As eCommerce sales approach 10% of total retail sales it will become more and more critical to have an eCommerce store. Something also not mentioned is the percentage of offline sales that are driven by online eCommerce stores that have more robust product information than a non eCommerce store.
I would guess this percentage is significant, perhaps around 5-10%. This means that eCommerce websites could be driving as much as 20% or more of total sales, if not much higher, depending on what the real number of offline sales being attributed to a company having eCommerce product information online is. I think this prediction is partially true in that more and more businesses will have to invest heavily into eCommerce to stay competitive. However, the percentage of businesses this applied to in 2014 is hard to quantify. Either way, as eCommerce approaches 10% of retail sales, and grows in the B2B space as well, generating that percentage of revenue will be all the more critical to staying in business and growing in 2015 and beyond.

7) WordPress Will Start to Cut Into Drupal and Joomla Downloads

I am not going to lie here, I am incredibly bias when it comes to WordPress versus Drupal and Joomla. Personally, I find Joomla and Drupal unnecessarily complex for what they are meant to do: manage content. I have heard of scaling advantages for Drupal versus WordPress, but I have never experienced them personally, so I have not seen a WordPress website that we could not scale. As for Joomla, I am not sure why you would use it over WordPress.  Either way, the best evidence I have to prove my prediction is from Builtwith.  As you clearly see from the graphs, both Drupal and Joomla dipped in 2014, whereas WordPress had healthy gains. Enough said.

 

 
 

8) Magento Will Solidify its Stranglehold as the Number One Ecommerce Platform

The Ebay owned eCommerce platform, Magento, has been the leading eCommerce CMS for sometime now and has made major gains in 2014 with release date upgrades for both the community and Enterprise edition. Magento CE 1.8 was also released in late 2013 so most of those improvements were not felt until 2014, as well. Research from Builtwith and Aheadworks both show major gains for Magento in 2014. Magento has also become the leading mid market eCommerce solution surpassing Oracle in its blog post in May 2014. Magento has gained considerable ground, however, I think platforms like Shopify have also shwon serious growth within the eCommerce space. Ultimately, I think Magento is going to maintain its lead into 2015 and beyond with its major release of 2.0.


 

9) Internet Advertising Will Creep up on Television Advertising Faster than Expected.

According to a new blog post by Adage, digital advertising will surpass television advertising as soon as 2017! The forecasts are difficult to trust because there are many different ones, but after looking at earnings reports from the top tech companies, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, their revenue is still skyrocketing. There is no shortage of online advertising growth, and with new devices like the Chromecast, services like Netflix and HBO going exclusively online, there are more reasons than ever to cut ties with television and stick to internet media consumption as a consumer and the trend is only accelerating. This prediction is tough to prove, but as the Adage blog suggests, it appears as if  digital advertising will reign supreme sooner than most have expected and I could not be happier.

10) Email Marketing Will Become a Necessary Growth Strategy for Smaller Companies

This prediction could be interpreted in many ways. Arguably smaller could mean fortune 1000 versus fortune 500 companies, in which the bottom 500 are smaller than the top 500. What I meant here was that the necessity to have an effective email marketing campaign as part of your marketing strategy is going to trickle down to smaller companies. Not every company will need email marketing as much as others, but on average, it is an extremely effective form of marketing with ROI as high as 40 to 1 for many companies. Therefore, with competition as fierce as ever, smaller companies with say, 100 employees or less, cannot afford to miss out on that type of ROI opportunity as they have less marketing resources to work with than their larger competitors. It’s tough to prove this prediction and I don’t have great evidence to support it, so please comment if you feel this was accurate or not accurate at all!
Have a great 2015 and thanks for all the support we have received as an up and coming web design and marketing agency in 2014!