‘Change’ seems to be the predominant keyword for 2009. Changes are being felt on every level, and despite the slump, and despite the terrible start to the year I feel that many of them are positive ones.
OK, to start with I spose you’re wondering why I didn’t just say ‘my predictions for SEO in 2009?’ In short, I feel that SEO is becoming less and less a standalone issue and more and more an integral part of online marketing. More importantly, I feel that more so than ever before you will need to implement a multi-pronged online marketing strategy if you want to carve out a decent share of your niche market in the coming year.

So let’s get to it.

1. I predict that the beginning of Google’s downfall has, in fact, already started, and will begin to be detectable around the middle of 2009. It will take a few months for word of this to get around, and another few months for most people to grasp the fairly astounding implications.
2. Expect to spend a lot more time considering your niche because this will be of increased importance. Even more so than it has been in recent years. The Internet is huge and the only way that search engines can serve their visitors well is to break it all down into bite-sized chunks.
3. To this end, expect to see fewer and fewer webpages optimized for single-word search terms. Could it be that the time has come when long-tail search is actually more important than even two-word search terms? We shall see…
4. I feel that we will see more and more niches that actually are an ‘intersection’ between two niches: If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, then Karl Long might clarify it for you. But in any case, you should definitely read The Medici Effect (free download alert) because this concept is going to come into its own in 2009.
5. The time has gone where a marketer could just throw up a site and scare up some traffic. Social media is the way of the future. Online marketers will rely more and more on social media marketing for

Online branding
advertising
traffic
and even market research/product creation

6. We won’t see much evidence of the so-called economic slump online. Here’s just one survey that shows that only 25 percent of online marketers plan to cut their advertising budget in 2009:
7. Branding is going to be a lot more about who you network with and how they see you, than how many advertising bucks you’ve invested. This has already started to manifest: a famous case was the Motrin ad that was pulled because of the response from moms on Twitter. Here’s another site that talks about how important it is to network in order to grow your business.

It will be interesting to look back at the end of 2009 to see how close this list was, and to also take a look at some other marketing predictions for 2009. Do hope you’ll join me in December for that.