So how does today’s business plan their SEO strategy for 2015 and beyond?

To help guide you, here are a few of our thoughts on the future of SEO:

The deluge of investment in content marketing will make it increasingly harder to stand out with a purely content-based strategy. SEO planning will need to get a lot more creative and employ more paid and non-paid amplification to help content reach wider audiences.

Google will use more and more signals to determine ranking, and it will get harder and harder for SEOs to fully understand what those signals are, and how they interact.

Apps will get indexed, and App SEO will be a real area of focus.

The rapid expansion of mobile and voice search will lead to more non-traditional SEO. Search will become more embedded within apps and shift in a significant way to natural language voice search.

Search is becoming more personalized and user influenced. Search will move farther away from getting the exact details of on-page SEO right and more towards ensuring that your pages, products, and content actually meet your users’ needs. This is all part of increasing the focus on the user and trying to determine their intent at the time of the search. Becoming an authoritative source for information that meets users needs more than search engine needs will become exceptionally important.

Search has become so dominant in our lives that the people who understand how to become relevant and successful in search will be more powerful in companies.

Brands will move towards lean and fast websites with a great internal structure that’s made for users and is search engine friendly at the same time.

Companies will focus on delivering relevant and great content. The old paradigm to create a landing page for each keyword is gone. SEOs now have to care about topics and not keywords.

Because links are still a strong signal for search engines it’s important to leverage the content to earn links from authoritative sites. While links will continue to be of primary value, smart SEOs will more and more value other means of creating traffic and audience around a site.

Companies are going to need to understand a lot more about web development to continue building engaging content. Having an understanding of the latest trends in web development and a firm understanding of good hosting practices is going to be essential if you’re to have any credibility with a serious web development team.

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*This article was originally published on 360eight’s blog.