The pulse of digital marketing

In added, only specialists comprehend which channel or platform requires more focus and where your company ought to be promoted one of the most. They share interesting and amusing material to your target market in various digital channels to enhance their awareness about your company and capture their interest. From images to videos to graphics to infographics - they take advantage of every aspect to reach to the target market and stir their creativity. They run marketing projects in various social channels so that distinct demographics can be used. They get client post evaluates about your items and share their great experiences with your.

Lots of companies still believe that having a top quality site alone suffices to do well online. They are incorrect which too, huge time, since quality sites have an extremely restricted function to play on the web. Such sites just assist take business online and their influence does not work beyond that. So, exactly what next? Exactly what should a company do to optimize their online existence? Put simply, your company has to market itself. It has to promote its product and services throughout channels on the web. It likewise needs to discover methods to reach to more users online and communicate their brand name messages to them.

Such professionals comprehend the pulse of digital marketing and they are typically the master of improving the digital footprint of brand names from throughout market verticals. They have a remarkable understanding of marketing tools such as SEO, SMO, PPC and show Ads. They understand the best ways to take advantage of both, natural and paid marketing to improve traffic to your site. They prepare, design, execute and carry out marketing techniques ideal for various channels and opportunities in the digital area. These professionals aim to improve the presence of your site and its ranking in internet search engine. They assist your company reach to more users on the web.

All this ends up being crucial since digital material is significantly growing in uses and appeal. Individuals or users are constantly online nowadays and from mingling to sharing to purchasing - they are doing the majority of their operate in the digital area. This is something companies need to keep in mind of and for that reason design an appropriate marketing technique to use the digital activities of users. This is where digital marketing is had to make users familiar with your company as well as to take your product and services to them. In essence, companies have to employ professionals to develop an appropriate and channel-specific marketing method to understand their objectives.

, digital marketer assist you provide quantifiable outcomes so that you can understand all those sees, clicks, conversions, impressions, click-through-rates and so on your marketing projects produce. They increase your existence and exposure in every popular digital channel, which assists a good deal in brand name structure. In such a way, these specialists assist provide a 360 degree digital marketing option to change the digital existence of your company. Just doing this will assist your company target a best audience and recognize its objectives in a prompt and wanted way. So, trust just specialists and grow your company in an anticipated way.

Take advantage of your online competitors by enhancing your web existence.

Enhancing your web existence is difficult. This is something that is refrained from doing over night. It takes some time, effort, and tactical preparation. Whether you’re brand-new to the market or somebody who wished to enhance online existence, these pointers are useful for you.

Give Your Web Presence Natural Authority

Social media projects are a ...

Social media projects are a powerful tool for engaging with customers. When building a solid social media visibility, numerous elements play an important function. Initially, you will require to research which platforms are available and choose which network you will keep. Each social media network has its neighborhood as well as customers that have their very own set of guidelines. Considering the policies as well as specifications of finest methods for each and every social network is crucial. You ought to have a clear idea of what you mean to accomplish in mind before you start. Setting such as an objective will certainly assist to limit the kind of project that finest benefit you.

Occasionally turning to a specialist could be helpful to you and your company. Professional SEO solutions give a large variety of benefits. An excellent SEO strategy raises traffic, as well as web traffic increases website rank on Google. Site ranking on Google increases website traffic, which enhances website rank further, putting your name before possible customers when they are searching for just what you provide. A company could continuously skyrocket till it meetings the top of the Google results web page. The outcomes can be long lasting with the help of a professional SEO team.

An SEO agent will form a technique that is finest for every company separately, having a look at exactly how a specific project is carrying out, examining exactly what is functioning as well as exactly what is not functioning and after that reformulate.

Recognizing your target audience is another crucial element. The more a company understands concerning their possible clients, their purchasing practices, inclinations, suches as and also dislikes, the most likely it is that they will certainly draw them in. Among the fantastic advantages of social media marketing is that it could be assessed in genuine time, which implies that you can promptly adjust and change to suit a target customer team.



Social media allows you to interact with people. Making an effort to talk with people about their passions as well as on their level will make them feel welcome. If a blog post is getting remarks, reply to them. If a blog post is getting a whole lot of sort, perhaps it is a sign that you require to publish even more things like it. Involve your consumers by posting concerns and paying attention to comments, and also correspond. Constantly being present advises people of your brand name, product and services and when they locate themselves in need, they will think about you.

One more secret for a successful company is search engine optimization, or SEO. Take a minute to consider what we do when we are in demand of a specific solution or product. We go right to Google or one more online search engine, as well as all the details we need goes to our fingertips. However, being that many people are extremely often hectic or searching for fast answers, a lot of them will certainly not go past the initial or 2nd web page of the Google search.

Many methods exist for search engine optimization. All techniques come down to optimization for "key words". Key phrases are carefully picked words or short phrases that a prospective consumer may kind into an online search engine. Web link building, page analysis, track record management jobs as well as more, play a role in raising rankings. All these aspects interact for a general rise in the rank of the site, with the goal of having it rank high adequate to show up on the very first or second web page of an internet search engine.

As an increasing number of business attempt to gain a benefit in internet search engine positions, occasionally it comes to be harder to preserve stable web traffic to your site and social media existence.

In today's age, social media and SEO play an essential function in most businesses, and also they need fairly a little bit of time and also focus. Relying on specialists is a fantastic very first step towards a better social media strategy and it could aid maximize a long time at the same time.

Can you sell stuff with Facebook Ads?

Affiliate Marketing with Facebook Advertisements

Do you intend to do associate advertising and marketing? What pointers should you use when doing associate marketing and advertising? Examination numerous different site web traffic resources. Facebook is definitely among the optimal sources taking into consideration that it allows you to have a large range of choices when doing your associate advertising and marketing.

This should aid you come up with methods of boosting your marketing existence as a result permitting you making more money. Make usage of a landing websites when enhancing your conversions. Sending web site traffic straight alone does not allow you to attain success. For the individuals who might want to enhance their ROI, making usage of conversions offers the optimal choice for Facebook as an affiliate marketing.

Landing website have to not be made complex thinking about that they should allow you to create website web traffic you require for that reason creating much more income from advertising and marketing. Ask the affiliate manager for brand-new payout. You have to recognize that associate supervisors commonly have the choice of enhancing your payment when useding Facebook promotions.

A lot of the Certified Public Accountant networks usually operate on 25-35% margins when doing associate marketing and advertising. Usage monitoring software application when doing affiliate marketing and advertising. If you are not tracking your marketing tasks, you will certainly rarely obtain profits. Bunches of checking applications are commonly offered for colleagues whenever they want to boost their profits with utilizing Facebook Advertisements.

You must keep in mind that these software program will certainly constantly allow you track your earnings at the precise same time turning up the activities that you could used to enhance your revenue. Ultimately, you should track associate tasks useding the complimentary applications such as Google Analytics.

This will completely help you think about the approaches that you could make use of whenever you intend to enhance your employee advertising and marketing activities therefore making you even more money.
 

Format individual Facebook Ads. 

Do you have an affiliate network that supply prefabricated banners?

You need to prevent utilizing any type of sort of network photo before screening. Monitoring will constantly enable you recognize just exactly what you call for when thinking about approaches to attain high CTR together with conversion price.

When utilizing advertising ads, you should take on one of the most basic pictures since they work. This must help you attract potential customers at the same time improving your customer base with affiliate advertising and marketing.

Examination comparable deals when finding the leading converter. Famous associate advertising niches such as dating & social video pc gaming often have thousands of offers readily available for promo as well as this implies that you have to comprehend if the leading converters as an approach of making sure that you acquire the best when searching for advertising options to enhance your incomes.

Eventually, you will absolutely recognize of the techniques that you need to take when improving your advertising and marketing ability to obtain more revenues. Scale effective projects when utilizing brand-new internet traffic sources. It is essential that you scale up your financially rewarding projects of AdWords Browse Network if you desire to improve your benefit from associate marketing and advertising.

Facebook Ads will most absolutely help you improve your earnings at the exact same time optimizing your roi. You need to recognize that associate projects using Facebook Advertisements normally do not lasts forever therefore you require making specific that you use the trending approaches to be the suitable out there as you scale up your new website traffic sources. Discover a lot a lot more on affiliate marketing when making use of Facebook Ads.

Associate marketing as well as marketing is an incredibly competitive as a result you should regularly upgrade on your own with brand-new details if you want to be the most reliable. Ultimately, the above employee advertising and marketing with Facebook advertisements ideas should assist you maximize your earnings


  .

How to optimise Pinterest pins for SEO

Pinterest has evolved during the past few years from a trending social network to a powerful visual search engine, and as with any other search engine, you can optimise your presence to be discovered by other users.

With more than 100 million users who keep searching and pinning new content depending on their interests, Pinterest is probably an underrated platform, when it comes to its searching capability and the traffic it can drive to your site.

However, in order to create a successful profile on Pinterest, you need to make sure that your pins are easily discovered from other users and that’s when SEO optimisation for Pinterest is required.

Yes, there is SEO optimisation for Pinterest and it’s not as complex as it sounds.

Pinterest is not about quick return-on-investment, and you may be surprised about its evergreen value, so it’s time to start optimising your presence and help other Pinterest users discover your pins through searching.

Here’s a list of the tweaks that could improve your Pinterest presence:

11 tips to boost your SEO on Pinterest

1. Optimise profile

Before you even start pinning, you can tweak your profile and pick the right username. You can change it through your settings and use one that reflects your presence and the way you want to be discovered. The URL will serve as your keyword, so make sure you pick a clear, direct and memorable username.

This also applies to your actual profile name, as it will serve as your identity on the platform.

2. Optimise boards

Your boards should be appealing and neatly organised, emphasising both on the titles, but also on the images of the boards.

Adore Me decided to create an interesting Pinterest presence by paying attention to the details, being playful both with the titles and the images.

From an SEO perspective, it is important to think like a user when picking a board’s title and name it the way it would be searched. Yes, a clever and funny title is great, but if you want to improve your pins’ ranking, you need to optimise the titles in a way that they can be discovered by other users.

Still, you don’t have to strictly focus on the use of keywords, feel free to mix creativity with effectiveness.

Nordstrom, for example, has a very successful presence on Pinterest, and heavily relied on the right optimisation to measure significant traffic from its pins.

3. Optimise pins

Every pin is the representation of your profile, which means that you need to optimise it as much as possible. Don’t be afraid to be descriptive, as this will help the search engine to discover your pins.

Image: Pinterest

4. Focus on descriptions

Not every user spends the right amount of time on the description of a pin and this ultimately affects the chances of having it repinned.

Pinterest favours the pins that provide a specific and thoughtful description, one that helps the users find the image they are looking for when performing a search. Add all the details that describe your image and create a natural flow of text that will favor your pin’s discovery towards others.

Image: Pinterest

5. Avoid hashtags

When Pinterest created a guide on how to use the platform for your business, it mentioned among others:

Don’t just drop in keywords or hashtags. The description is an important part of captivating Pinners. Set a scene that incorporates the right search words, and you’ll help Pinners imagine themselves with your Pin.

On a ‘hashtagging’ scale from Facebook to Instagram, Pinterest is probably in between, as hashtags are not completely useless, but they are also not necessary to extend the reach of your pins.

6. Do keyword research

The best way to find the right keywords for your pins is to actually perform extended searches on your own. Try out how Pinterest searching works, which results show up first, how Pinterest organises the pins, the boards and the pinners in order to start understanding the platform at a deeper level.

Which keywords does the automatic suggestion bring together? Which keywords are relevant to your pins?

Except for the desktop search, it might be a good idea to try out Pinterest’s mobile version, as there’s an increasing number of the audience using mobile searching for the sake of convenience.

As more than 75% of Pinterest usage takes places on phones and tablets, it’s important to understand the differences between the desktop and the mobile search, with Pinterest trying to make the mobile platform as functional as possible.

Image: Pinterest

Analysing Pinterest keywords

If you’d like to analyse the performance of specific keywords on Pinterest, then you can use Google, following this  formula:

site: www.pinterest.com “keyword”

This way you can analyse the most popular pins according to their search ranking and use the results to improve the optimisation of your own keywords.

How to find who pins from your site

If you want to understand how pinners pin your content directly from your site, then all you need to do is use the url:

http://www.pinterest.com/source/[yoursite]

This is an easy way to understand what Pinterest users like pinning from your own content, but also the way it ranks in Pinterest’s platform.

Analysing Pinterest’s referral traffic

Pinterest is among the social networks that may drive great referral traffic to your site, so it’s useful to measure the pages that attracted the biggest traffic, examining how pinners reached your page and whether you can further optimise the most popular pins, or even to upgrade your content with new posts.

7. Use rich pins

Rich pins are the enhanced version of the regular pins, providing more information about a pin. They can be used in six contexts (app, movie, recipe, article, product and place) and their effectiveness is significantly better than usual pins.

Whether it’s providing the price of the product, a full-recipe, or an article, rich pins tend to perform better in the search ranking and they are highly recommended if your presence can benefit from them.

For example, About.com noted an increase of 70% on its traffic back to the site with the use of rich pins.

8. Verify website

A verified website seems to be prioritised on the search results above the rest, increasing the pinner’s authority and eventually the ranking on the searches.

What’s more, the verification of your website on Pinterest allows you to access further details on your account in Pinterest Analytics, helping you understand the performance of your presence, from your most popular pins, to an analysis of your audience.

9. Pin consistently

Pinterest is all about consistency. You don’t have to be obsessed with it, or look like a spam account, but you need to incorporate it in your content calendar and pin appealing content several times during the week.

What’s more, content curation is also important, which means that except for the content creation, you also need to spend the necessary amount of time to spot popular pins and users in your niche area, in order to repin what’s relevant to your audience (and the boards you want to create).

Remember, Pinterest is ideal for the circulation of evergreen content and this highlights even more the need to focus on relevance and quality.

Image: Pinterest

10. Focus on quality

Every image you’re pinning should aim to stand out from the rest, always while maintaining its relevance.

Quality is rewarded with better ranking in the search results and thus, with repins and traffic to your site. Pinterest users may not notice your description, but they certainly pay attention to the image and this means that every pin should be clear, have the right size (ideally at least 600 pixels wide), and balance the actual image with text overlays if needed to provide more context..

11. Pin vertical images

Every image can be pinned on Pinterest, but vertical images have more chances to be noticed, as they occupy more space in the feed.

What’s more, vertical pins are ideal for mobile devices, which brings us back to the importance of creating pins that are highly optimised for Pinterest’s mobile version.

An ideal size of a vertical pin should be close to 736px by 2000px, in order to take up the necessary space in the feed, but also to provide the necessary details when clicked.

Finally, here’s how a Pinterest pin of all the tips could look like, taking into consideration what we mentioned above:

Credit to searchenginewatch.com

10 Predictions for 2016 in SEO & Web Marketing

#1: We'll see the first major not-for-profit university in the US offer a degree in Internet Marketing, including classes on SEO.

+1 This is one where I should have done more research. Several universities already offered degrees in online marketing, and the only technicality may be what one considers "major." That said, given that places like Penn State, Vanderbilt, and Georgetown all either released or announced programs in online marketing in 2015, I'm giving myself partial credit.

#2: Google will continue the trend of providing instant answers in search results with more interactive tools.

+1 While it certainly couldn't be argued that Google backed down from the trend of more instant answers in results, the number of new interactive tools in 2015 was somewhat limited. They tried out a new hotel finder interface, some new home services results, and some fun results for queries like "I'm feeling curious," but the only ones I'd consider truly interactive and pervasive were their rollout of a mortgage calculator and their enhanced, re-launched flight finder, complete with affiliate program.

#3: 2015 will be the year Facebook begins including some form of web content (not on Facebook's site) in their search functionality.

-1 In some ways, you could argue that Facebook's hosting of instant articles (which began in March and now has substantive coverage across many publishers) matches this prediction, but since Facebook technically is putting these articles on their site, I'm marking it as "not completely wrong," rather than "partially accurate."

#4: Google's indexation of Twitter will grow dramatically, and a significantly higher percentage of tweets, hashtags, and profiles will be indexed by the year's end.

+1 It's true that Google's indexation of Twitter grew (as Stone Temple's analysis shows), but the much more substantive gains came from the renewed partnership between Twitter & Google, which my prediction didn't perfectly cover.

#5: The EU will take additional regulatory action against Google that will create new, substantive changes to the search results for European searchers.

+2 The EU filed formal antitrust accusations against Google in April. We may not see resolution for a while, but this certainly fits with what I thought might happen.

#6: Mobile search, mobile devices, SSL/HTTPS referrals, and apps will combine to make traffic source data increasingly hard to come by.

-1 Mostly thanks to Facebook correcting their lack of referral passing on mobile and in their app, this trend reversed in 2015, and we're seeing less misreported "direct" traffic than in the two years prior. That said, as Marshall Simmonds showed at MozCon, a large portion of search traffic is still "dark," and isn't giving search marketers the credit they deserve. There's more detail in his public SMX presentation on the topic.

#7: The content advertising/recommendation platforms will continue to consolidate, and either Taboola or Outbrain will be acquired or do some heavy acquiring themselves.

-2 As best I can tell, neither Taboola nor Outbrain made any big acquisitions in 2015, and there wasn't much M&A activity in the space overall. The biggest transaction by far wasTaboola's $117mm financing round, which I assumed would lead to them making some purchases — but so far, no dice.

#8: Promoted pins will make Pinterest an emerging juggernaut in the social media and social advertising world, particularly for e-commerce.

+1 In December, Pinterest finally opened up promoted pins via self-service (and claimed one million active business accounts), but even before that, it appears the program's beengoing gangbusters. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any specific numbers, so it's hard to know how well the testing and ramp-up has gone, which is why I'm only giving myself a "partially accurate" score.

#9: Foursquare (and/or Swarm) will be bought, merge with someone, or shut down in 2015 (probably one of the first two).

-2 Despite a struggling business, Foursquare and Swarm both stayed alive and independent. The company is now raising a rough down-round (they were valued at half the valuation of prior funding rounds, which sucks for employee shareholders and founders), and pundits are saying a sale to Microsoft or another tech giant is likely, but it hasn't happened yet, so my prediction loses out.

#10: Amazon will not take considerable search share from Google, nor will mobile search harm Google's ad revenue substantively. 

+2 No one touched Google's market share in 2015 (91%+ globally), and Google appears to be making great steps to continue their ad-driven growth in mobile. Their stocks, revenue, and market position feel just as unassailable today as they did a year ago, despite all the chatter suggesting otherwise.

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 built tools to track CTR reported in Google Search Console, and from outsiders likeSimilarWeb and/or Jumpshot, 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).

#2: Mobile will barely cut in to desktop's usage and its growth rate in developed countries will slow

I'm not sure if 2015 was the year of mobile, but I think 2016 will be the year that growth rates for mobile begin tapering off. Note — I'm not saying we're at "peak mobile," but I am saying the growth rate has reached its apex and I think in 2016, the percentage growth numbers will fall.

Simultaneously, I think we may have reached the peak of desktop/laptop decline, and I expect that in 2016, desktop usage rates will stay largely unchanged. Most everything that mobile was going to replace or take away from desktop use has been taken, and I'm skeptical that things like creative work, programming, long-form writing, computer gaming, and other tasks that big monitors and full keyboard+mouse inputs were made for can be successfully cannibalized by the screen that fits in our pockets.

#3: Twitter will figure out how to grow again

It's been a rough couple years for Twitter, but I'm bullish on the company in 2016 and long term. It takes new CEOs some time to right the ship and it takes time for changes in a company's leadership to impact their growth. It might be toward the end of 2016, but I believe we're going to see numbers from Twitter that improve their market position and their stock price (note: I hold no public market stock).

Via Twitter Has a Serious Growth Problem

For marketers, this means investments in Twitter will pay bigger long-term dividends. I think folks who learn how to effectively advertise with Twitter, how to earn an audience there, and how to leverage the conversations — not just to promote, but to learn and participate — will have remarkable opportunity. There's flexibility in the features afforded by Twitter, combined with the way their stream and amplification function makes for much greater creative and content potential than the limits imposed by Facebook and Instagram in their organic streams (which is not to say that Facebook and Instagram aren't incredible opportunities themselves — they both are).

#4: Social content engines will become a force

In 2015, I started using 5 new content recommendation engines:

• Pocket's New, Beta Recommendations which recommends content to me based on how other Pocket users are employing it, and lets me follow other Pocketers who publicly "recommend" content they read. BTW — if you want to follow my recommendations, you can see those here.
• Nuzzel – A great app and website that's very nearly a replacement for my favorite content engine of all time, the long-defunct Trunk.ly. It aggregates links shared on Twitter and Facebook by folks you follow, and shows content from "friends of friends," too.
• ProductHunt – A popular website in the startup & tech world that works like Reddit for software and apps. Creating an account and following others can help personalize the site's suggestions and what appears in their daily emails.
• Snapzu – a new(ish) service that aggregates content that's been shared in other places. They call themselves a "community of communities" and have an invite system that keeps signal:noise ratio high.

My prediction is that one or more of these will rise to the level of some of the second-tier social networks in popularity, referral traffic, and active users. That's probably Pocket, but it wouldn't surprise me to see Feedly or even a brand new player like Refind make a big splash. Social networks make content delivery and signal:noise secondary priorities behind engagement and conversation. I believe some of the players focused on this space will have an outstanding 2016 — content consumers need them.

33K followers only a month after the beta launch?? That's a powerful platform...

Of course, as these platforms take off, they also become of deep interest and importance to marketers, especially content marketers, as social amplifiers, influencers, and probably, as a result, some level of search rankings will get a boost if content does well on them.

#5: Yext will IPO, prompting even more interest in the world of local listings

In 2014, there were numerous articles predicting Yext's IPO. It didn't happen in 2015, but I think this is the year. They've executed well, built a moat with their contracts and their powerful sales team, and they play in a space where businesses desperately need help — local listings.

I think Yext's rise will create a great deal more interest in the local listings world from tech, financial, and business folks who've previously mostly ignored it. I'm also bullish on Moz Local's growth (a semi-direct competitor to Yext), and I actually think Yext's making of this market will help with that, just as Hubspot's IPO helped so many companies in the inbound and content marketing worlds.

#6: The death of normal distributions will hit both publishing and search results hard

I found Alex Danco's recent post about the death of normal distributions to be prescient (despite some criticism of the lack of data underlying the graphs). I agree that we're moving away from a world of normal distributions in demand curves and towards a winner-take-all model. The "long tail" theory of digitization has been mostly proven false (with a few notable exception areas like keyword search demand and social network connections).

Via Taylor Swift, iOS, & the Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution is Vanishing

In 2016, I think we're going to see more of what happened to GigaOm and what was described in The Sad Economics of Internet Fame. That is, content becoming so ubiquitous and so hard to monetize that only the big winners will be able to keep up the game. Adblocking's growth may play a part in that, as will Google's algorithms that reward faster-loading, higher-engagement pages that don't drive away visitors with interruptions and annoyances.

Likewise, I think we're going to see more consolidation overall in search results, with fewer unique domains in the top 10 rankings of search results (we should be able to measure this via MozCast). I'm not happy about this prediction — my hope is that it's wrong. I believe in and love the diversity of content that the web and its organic marketing channels have enabled.

#7: The rise of adblocking is going to trigger attempts at legislation and incite more sites to restrict adblocking users

Via Adobe/Pagefair Report

Adblocking was part of a huge conversation in 2015, and my guess is that the reaction to this growing technology is going to mimic how entrenched players have reacted to technology leaps in the past — by trying to legislate it away. I anticipate that in either the US or the EU, some form of government action will arise (in the US, most likely due to lobbying AKA our legalized system of bribery) to "protect the interests of publishers and journalists who serve the public good."

If that exact quote appears from a source, I think I should get double the points, don't you? :-)

#8: DuckDuckGo will be the fastest-growing search engine of 2016

Google had a good 2015. So did Bing, actually (given they now power AOL and had relative success with Windows 10 and the Edge browser). But in 2016, I think our fastest-growing broad, web search engine will be DuckDuckGo, whose growth in 2015 was pretty remarkable, too:

Via DuckDuckGo's wonderfully transparent Traffic Stats page

Part of this is the continuing storylines of privacy, part of it is the early adopters in the tech world moving to DDG, and part of it is DDG's accomplishments as an engine — for a lot of queries, they're now truly as good as Google (although they miss some, too). If I weren't in SEO, with a professional need to see as many Google results as possible, I'd honestly consider switching.

Given DDG has many fewer queries to being with, I'll make a slightly bolder claim — their growth rate in 2016 will exceed their 2015 growth rate, and no currently-existing other major web search engine will grow as quickly. If Apple or Facebook decide to get directly into search, well... A) they should buy DuckDuckGo and B) all bets are off.

#9: Content marketing software for the non-enterprise will finally emerge

For a long while now, large enterprises and big content shops have been the sole beneficiaries of content marketing software that tracks performance, suggests improvements, helps with publishing, ideas, outreach, etc. But I think 2016 will be the year that some of the SMB and mid-market players emerge. There are numerous players poised to take this market, including:

• Buzzsumo – To date, they've been the strongest performer of the bunch, but I'd categorize them primarily as a research tool (albeit an amazing one). They've broken into content alerts, but I think they might do more with ongoing campaigns, suggestions, and analytics in 2016.
• Kapost – Built for content creators to pitch and share ideas, manage the content publication process, and distribute effectively across channels, Kapost has been around for a few years, but continues to improve and gain market traction among their target B2B customers.
• Priceonomics – I think these folks will make a big splash with this product once it's public. They've almost exactly followed Moz's model, first building an impressive blog and a passionate following, and now launching what looks like very interesting software that they themselves have been using internally.
• Quicksprout – Like Priceonomics, Quicksprout was first a popular blog in the marketing space and according to a blog post from cofounder Hiten Shah, they'll be launching a SaaS product to help people produce better content in the near future.
• Moz Content – One of the quietest launches we've done at Moz was in November of last year when we announced Moz Content, which provides audits, ongoing tracking, analytics, and competitive research tools for content marketers. It's hard for me to be objective, but I think Moz Content has a good chance of growing substantially this year.

My prediction is that one or more of these will gain significant market share of 2,000 or more new, paying users in 2016.

#10: The "big" trends for 2016: Wearables, VR, smart home, and Internet of Things will have almost no impact on the world of web marketing (yet)

I've been known to be a skeptic about a lot of supposed "game-changers" in tech and marketing, and this year, I'm sticking to that archetype. I know that all the tech publications are basically saying the same thing — it's the year of wearables, virtual reality, smart home, Internet of Things, and personal transport.

I won't argue against any of those (though I'm not sure VR will be as mainstream by next Christmas as the tech blogosphere is prognosticating), but I will argue that none of them will have a big impact on how we do web marketing. There may be a few niche opportunities, but my prediction is that none of these new trends will create marketing/advertising platforms or potential in the $50mm+ range. If ads on refrigerators or in VR helmets or if new social media platforms on wearables attract that kind of business, I'll lose my 2 points.

BTW — I'm obsessed with my Fitbit; I just really hope no one can market to me through it.

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There we have it! My ten predictions for 2016 are set in stone (errr... an easily editable blog post, but I'd never abuse your trust or Google's cached snapshot like that). I look forward to your comments, critiques, and any predictions you'd like to share here. We'll see how it plays out next January.

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