Last year, I wrote a post where I built a word cloud based on a Momentology article of SEO predictions and advice for 2015. This year, I’m back at it again with SEO advice and predictions for 2016.
To build this year’s word cloud, I used this year’s Momentology article, where 44 SEO industry experts weighed in with the keys for organic search success in 2016. My methodology is fairly simple. I grabbed the text from the article and then used it to build a word cloud. So – without further ado – here is this year’s SEO predictions word cloud:
The 2016 SEO Predictions Word Cloud
Overall, this year’s word cloud is not much different from last year’s word cloud. However, for the 2016 SEO word cloud, I did a much better job of cleaning out unnecessary words, such as verbs and proper nouns. What we are left with is a list of words that are much more representative of the hot topics and buzzwords in the SEO industry.
Here is a list of the Top 50 words (based on the number of times the word occurred):
2016 SEO Predictions Keyword Density
If you follow the SEO industry and/or go to SEO conferences, this list of keywords should seem very familiar. Most of the SEO stories we read are centered around these topics.
It’s clear that when people talk about SEO, they talk about Google. In the Momentology article, the word ‘Bing‘ did not even appear once. Literally no one talked about Bing. As for the word ‘Yahoo‘, it was mentioned 3 times by the same person, and they were talking about the potential sale of Yahoo rather than it’s importance in the realm of organic search success.
There are also several other modern SEO buzzwords and concepts that show up quite often in the article:
- content
- mobile
- data
- user(s)
- experience
- brand(s)
- ranking(s)
- app(s)
- link / links / linking
- audience
These keywords tell the story of SEO today. We focus on these words in nearly every SEO recommendation and strategy that we create. We build content strategies because #ContentIsKing. We use data to support our recommendations. Mobile is the top priority for most retail sites. Audience building, branding, and user experience are becoming even more critical to SEO success. We focus on the overall usefulness of our sites from the perspective of an organic search visitor. We live these topics every day.
One term that did not appear in my list – but does appear in the article 4 times – is artificial intelligence. Personally, I believe we are still far from a time when most retail sites can adapt to the rise of AI in search, but the fact is that AI is playing a large role in determining the organic search results. Google confirmed that with the announcement about their RankBrain system:
RankBrain is Google’s name for a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that’s used to help process its search results, as was reported by Bloomberg and also confirmed to us by Google. [source]
Well, that is about it for today. I hope you enjoyed the 2016 SEO word cloud. Cheers!