A mix of things have come true from my previous thoughts. For one, I feel like SEOs are definitely getting more opportunity to focus on a broader range of marketing. I don’t know many people that still call themselves SEOs at this point.

I also think companies are putting more thought into office environment and culture. It’s still not great and there’s still a lot of companies that don’t care, but it’s getting better. Anytime I’m asked if I know of any companies with open positions, culture and environment are the first things that come to mind. If your culture sucks, you’ll lose the opportunity to hire talented and creative people that can go somewhere better.

The one thing I haven’t seen is a massive shift in the marketing world. I would still love to see a huge disruptor similar to the introduction of smart devices, which forced everyone to implement responsive designs. I enjoy working on new problems and it’s about time for something to change.

My main wish last year was for Google to get some of the relevance issues sorted that we’ve been seeing across a lot of search results.

Over the course of 2014, we’ve seen a number of Google updates (including the last Penguin update) seriously improve things.

This is good from a user perspective and it really levels the playing field.

For 2015 I hope to see Google moving things forward in the same way, but I’d also wish for….

..Google to address the negative SEO issue more seriously – some sites that should have recovered with the latest Penguin update haven’t.

..Plenty of updates this year but as usual people have seen these updates and just dived in without thinking. The announcement about ranking benefits for SSL is a good one. There is so much more to this than most people realize so I hope people start putting the time into researching the implications of things like this fully before making decisions that could impact their rankings.

1. Well my first and biggest wish absolutely did not come true. Quite the opposite in fact. I thought authorship was going to improve and become even bigger and better than I thought it already was, and as many of you probably know, Google eliminated it completely. I would love to keep this wish and hope for it to return in 2015 because I thought it was such a great feature for writers and searchers, but I’m not holding my breath unfortunately. I think authorship is gone as we know it, and although I don’t think Google will introduce anything similar in the near future, I will always wish for it! They always give us a few curveballs each year, so I’m going to continue hoping that this will be one of them and authorship will return.
2. This second wish is one that I think actually did come true to a certain extent. This year we saw the guest blogging world get rocked, and so many authoritative websites re-did their guest blogging guidelines and stopped accepting them altogether. As I said last year, I would rather have this be the situation than a website letting me do all of the work and then ignoring me. I’m getting more responses asking for a regular contributor, which has always been my goal as a writer, so I’m pleased!
3. The last wish definitely came true. People are taking local SEO much more seriously than they used to, and I suppose that isn’t much of a surprise. It’s so important, so it’s great to see more and more companies getting involved and creating great Google+ Business pages.

My new wishes for next year? Well being a full-time writer, I’ll keep wishing for another authorship alternative and I’ll keep wishing for authoritative websites to take a harder look at writers that they maybe don’t have a mutual connection with, but can still offer great content. I’ll also wish for less freelance opportunities for bloggers and more full-time positions. This is best for companies and for writers, so I hope that this mentality shifts more for companies in 2015.

Looking back at last year’s answers I think I managed to get 2 out of 3 wishes. Unfortunately a couple of speaking gigs I went for fell through but I did manage to attend my first Brightonseo conference & work has been going great since I stopped f***ing swearing so much.

For 2015:

1.  I’m still hoping to Pop my “Speaking cherry” – come and get me conference organisers. I’m an unknown quantity, but I’m cheap!
2. I wish that the SEO community in the north of England gets its act together as there’s some excellent talent up here but there are lots of great events which take place in London but very few around here.
3.  Google finally get a grip on Penguin & find a way that sites who’ve been a victim of negative SEO aren’t penalized

I actually think all my wishes came true!

Agencies and SEOs in general seem to be talking about links for traffic, engagement etc. rather than keyword rankings. From top to bottom, the mindset seems to have really changed about how progress should be measured and this will only be helped by the fact that Google has essentially killed PageRank. Dan Shure’s post on Moz about comments being the metric that could save blogging was one of the best posts I’ve read this year and seems symptomatic of a greater consideration of what success looks like in all aspects of SEO.

I can’t speak for everyone else’s clients, but 2014 seemed to be the year that an awareness seemed to spread amongst businesses that they had to be more involved and not just leave their SEO agency to bring traffic to their site. Some of our clients started to come to us with content ideas and those who were still driven by our team to do so were much more receptive.

Finally, Google didn’t mess with the Analytics interface, which probably means a major overhaul is coming soon!

As for my wishes for this year, I mainly hope that blogging is affected positively by Google’s revised stance on guest blogging, and that bloggers go back to writing for fun rather than seeing it as a way to make money quick through guest posts. We’ve approached too many with great collaboration ideas only to be quoted ridiculous amounts just to host content, when in reality they would benefit from giving their audience a good reading experience as much as we would from the amplification of our brands.

The first thing I wished for obviously didn’t come true. In fact – Google has even started limiting keyword data that comes out of AdWords accounts now.

I think the second wish still has a long way to go. There’s still plenty of link and content spam going around.

Wish number three sort of came true as Penguin seems to get smarter with every update and a lot of spam sites got hit. The best thing about these updates is that all the sites we work on get a boost in ranking as a lot of room opens up on the first page with the spam being dealt with.

For 2015 I hope that the trend will continue upwards and that we’ll see sites that deserve to rank organically on the first page.

Google has been a bit more transparent and more detailed via google webmaster tools.

Google + is still a ghost town and Google has backed off shoving it in our face.

And there are few 3rd party solutions for not provided.

My Wishes for next year:

1. SEOs stop thinking about building links and become better T shaped marketers. The days of old school SEO and increasing rankings solely through onpage optimization and link building are over. SEO requires much more work and collaboration with product, content, social media, brand, etc
2. Better tracking and analytics for multi-channel conversions, mobile, multiple device conversions
3. I wish Google would shift the weight given to big brands to give a portion to brands that are growing at a rapid rate. This gives the little guys (who are growing fast) less of a disadvantage.

My ‘SEO wish’ for 2014 was that Google would slow down with the ‘stick’ approach to getting web masters to do what they want (via penalties) and increase the use of incentives and rewards. In some respects that has started to happen. In depth articles are popping up more and there is absolute and irrefutable evidence that sites with a data led, search-opportunity focused content strategies are seeing significant increases in traffic from the long tail.

Penguin was also (finally) rolled out and more effective at targeting the ‘right’ wrong behaviour. There is still work to do here though but at least those that are doing the right things are recovering.

Sadly Google have not made any significant move on the social signals topic though, which disappoints me. It’s so logical that quality social signals should validate good content.

And then we have the integration piece. Most organisations have been grappling with this all year, with varied results. The main thing is that most now realise there is added value in joining up search with other channels, but most struggle with how best to do it. We have spent a lot of time this year working internally on this with bigger clients helping create processes that enable this to happen.

2015

As for 2015 I would like to see consistency across verticals. It does feel as if Google has some things right in some niches  but in others there is no logic to SERPs. We’ve looked at enough data to conclude that it must be a mistake and these really do need ‘tidying up’ to allow brands to build strategies for the long term.

I also hope that Penguin runs more effectively and more regularly so that brands can truly affect dips in performance quickly. Google needs to realise the severe impact actions can have on businesses from a people perspective and at least give those that have ‘done wrong’ the ability to fix it quickly.

And finally, that those agencies still peddling the same old ‘solutions’ that are creating so many link issues for brands and businesses disappear! The industry is so much better than that and should no longer be dragged through the mud by the minority!

Ah yes, time to reflect on last years wishes which were:

1. More talent in the SEO industry.
2. Less snake-oil salesmen.
3. Having keywords back.

Surprisingly, all 3 of these wishes have come true in some regard.

1. It does seem like there are more entry-level professionals in the SEO field who are much more credible in years past. I think this has to do with the limited job choices for recent college graduates, combined with simply growing up in the internet age. Many of these young people have the drive to learn, which has always been a desirable trait, but this generation is developing their skills in a post-penguin/post-panda world- setting them apart from SEOs of the past.
2. Because of the swift changes in the industry, it does seem like SEO snake oil salesmen are less prevalent then they once were. I attribute this to the increasing difficulty in trying to game the system, and instead towards signals of quality. The practices which were hidden from business owners, those practices which magically rocketed sites to number 1 overnight simply do not work any longer. The shift to actual marketing – ranking signals coming out of the dark – means business owners can actually understand what it takes to rank, instead of putting blind faith in an SEO provider.
3. We’ve learned to adapt to the lack of keywords by measuring traffic at the page-level, but keyword data is still useful and at the very least interesting. SEO platforms have been able to estimate keyword traffic by automating time-consuming formulas. Specifically, this is the rank, click curve, and search volume estimation. I won’t name any particular platforms, but the one I use integrates with my analytics package and provides estimated keyword traffic at the page level. This was released only about 6 months ago.

My wishes for 2015:

1. Let’s settle on a name for what we do. SEO, inbound marketing, content marketing, etc. We’re all realizing the importance of multi-channel marketing, so hopefully we’ll have a label which everyone can agree upon.
2. Better identification of “dark” traffic sources in analytics packages. This is the type of traffic which can’t be identified from any particular referral source or website, and it seems to be on the rise. I’d really hate to see referral sources go the same way as keyword referrals, in that they become hidden or unavailable.

I can’t really say Google granted any of my gifts this year. I suppose the webmaster notifications have slightly improved, but still not to a higher point of usefulness (in my opinion). Maybe I’ll have better luck next year.

The majority of my wishes were fun and farfetched in reality. I don’t think anyone really expected Google to give our organic keyword data back, but they could have improved Google WMT search query data by now (and haven’t!).

Google also haven’t decided to just ignore unnatural links (instead of penalising), or done a better job at providing all inbounds links or all those they deem as ‘unnatural’. Again, these were just hopes rather than expectations!

The only wish which I think became closer to reality  is the death of mobile sub domains. Google are obviously pushing responsive design and mobile usability hard at the moment and I expect this to be a stronger signal in scoring in 2015. So if you’ve ignored some device types to date, start taking notice quickly.

I’ll keep with the wishes I had from last year, but just add two others – An ‘algorithmic action viewer’ to Google WMT would be really nice, as sometimes Penguin and Panda cases can be complicated for an experienced SEO, let alone the average webmaster.

I’d also love to see better communication from Google again, we don’t seem to be much wiser about what really happened with Penguin 2.2 (sorry, Penguin 3.0…). Perhaps they’d rather not let out what happened there :).

None of my wishes came true :). Google reps are still very vocal and confusing. Google Authorship has been discontinued. Bing is nowhere near the top (plus they lost @DuaneForrester who was their only hope!).

My 2015 wishes would be:

1. No more manual penalties. I am all for cleaning the web but manual penalty process is broken. There should be an algorithmic fix to identifying low-quality sites and pages.
2. Still waiting for a Google competitor. Nothing personal against the search giant but competition makes anything better, so I think a competitor would be good for everyone including Google
3. A new popular social media platform. Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus are getting boring. I’d love to see something new being brought up to the table. I’d love to witness new concepts around how people can network online!

#1: That the SEO/internet marketing community would understand the experience, skill, and hard work it takes to create engaging content/copy.

Still no luck on this one, but at least my other wishes came true! SEO pros still want to pay low rates and make content one of the lowest line-items on their budgets. If “content is king,” then why does it get pushed all the way to the end of the budget? Makes no sense to me! A few do get it, but most don’t. Hopefully that changes in the coming year.

#2: That I can be of greater service to others and people in general both personally and professionally.

I admit – I’m not as far as I want to be on this one. But I’m doing a better job of recognizing the needs of others and meeting them. Still a lot of work to do here.

#3. I hope the Packers draft wisely, reload, and dominate next year after a disappointing season this year.

This wish came true! They’re 7-3 and one of the hottest teams in the NFL right now. They just scored 50 points in back-to-back games and annihilated a worthy opponent in Philadelphia.

Sadly my wishes for 2014 didn’t come true, let’s see if in 2015 -with more “feasible” ones- I have better luck:

#1: Google Webmaster Tools improvement & better integration with Google Analytics: With more accurate and non-limited data from crawling errors, indexing information, and rankings in Google Webmaster Tools. A Google Webmaster Tools integration with Google Analytics that goes beyond having a report in the Google Analytics interface, but actually be able to cross-refer queries and pages GWT data along the GA one.

#2: Support for regional targeting: Give some specific regional weight to those .eu and .asia domains and allow us to geotarget generic domains to regions: continents and at a more granular level with cities; and not only countries.

#3: New popularity signals beyond links: It’s finally time that Google moves beyond an “only” links approach, as Yandex is doing for some specific industries already, it would be nice to see an actual evolution of Google in this area.

Last year I’d hoped we could regain some of the data we had lost with Keyword Not Provided. Many marketers have come up with workarounds and solutions, but in general I still have not seen a cohesive solution that correlates rankings, traffic, and landing pages. Webmaster Tools provides some of this data but still requires a lot of massaging of data to get the full picture. What I would like is a tool that will measure all of my rankings, identify the pages that are ranking, then measure how much traffic that page received from Google organic, and give me an estimate of traffic for that keyword/page. For 2015 – maybe I’ll build it!

I also wished for a content marketing dashboard that pulls in mentions, social streams, and emails and has both project management and tasking capabilities. As of yet I have not found an affordable solution. I use a combination of Streak, Podio and Hootsuite to accomplish this, but it is not an elegant solution. I still wish for this in 2015!

And finally, I wished for an end to Penguin penalties. Instead, we’ve only seen 1 Penguin refresh in 2015, which is good for sites that could be penalized, but terrible for the hundreds of thousands of sites that’ve done the work to recover. In 2015 I wish Google would relax some of the penalties on sites that have “reformed” and spent the time, effort and money to clean up their link profiles.

But for 2015, my biggest wish is to attract new readers and email subscribers for our Blog!