10 Predictions for 2016 in SEO & Web Marketing

It's that magical time where, once again, I examine my predictions for the year that's just ended, and make new ones for the one ahead. As is my personal tradition, I'm going to first look at the accuracy of what I've suggested would happen in 2015. Based on how I've done, you can get a sense of how seriously to take my ideas for the future. But, if you'd prefer, you can just skip right to the 2016 predictions.

Rand's 10 Predictions for 2016

#1: Data will reveal Google organic results to have <70% CTR

For many years, Google gave public numbers about the ratio of ads to organic click-through rate. Historically, these were between 80–85% for organic results and 15–20% for ads. But for years now, Google's been getting incredibly aggressive with non-organic results (knowledge graph, various AdWords formats, instant answers, etc). I think 2016 is the year we get better data and real results despite the search giant's silence on the subject.

That's in part going to come from the search marketing industry, where folks like AWR have builttools to track CTR reported in Google Search Console, and from outsiders like SimilarWeb and/orJumpshot, who have access to clickstream-level data.

My prediction is that, on average, across Google's billions of daily searches, even accounting for searches that generate multiple clicks, less than 70% of searches result in at least one click on an organic result.

That's not particularly gloomy though, given Google's growth. Even if we found the number to be 50%, there's still more opportunity in Google's organic results today than there was 4 years ago thanks to the incredible growth rate of searches (desktop's flattened, but hasn't shrunk in that time, and mobile's skyrocketed to more than double total search volume).

To read the rest of Rand's SEO predictions for 2016, see the full Moz article here:

https://moz.com/blog/10-predictions-for-2016-in-seo-web-marketing

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Hector the Connector Predictions for 2016 and Beyond!