Every two years, Moz interviews some of the best minds in the SEO industry concerning the future of search engine optimization and how Google's ever changing algorithm is influencing it now and in the future.

This time, there are a handful of useful insights we can gather from the latest survey by Moz on 2015 ranking factors. In addition to this, the survey also touches on how Google's algorithm features are expected to change in the next 1 year.

Foundational Factors of SEO

Of course they still had to touch on the same ranking factors that we're all familiar with. These include mobile friendliness, analysis of site pages, usage of data (CTR), readability and design, influence of structured data on serps, app popularity, site speed and many more.

Of all the ranking factors that were taken into account, the survey projected that some factors would remain constant in the next one year. These included topical relevance of links, quantity of paid results on serps, social signals, presence and prominence of ads over content, raw domain authority, internal links and many more.

The survey also predicted that the effectiveness of paid links and influence of anchor text would decrease. Nevertheless, all the factors that Google's algorithm touched revolved around user friendliness. So the general consensus was that the search engine was more concerned with user experience than anything else. That's the reason it touched heavily on mobile friendliness, perceived value, readability and many more.

Specific SEO Ranking Factors

On a scale of 1-10 (Least relevant to most relevant), below we outline several specific ranking factors that impact Travers City SEO in 2015.

On-page keyword optimization

On-page SEO is concentrated on particular keywords placed on some parts of the HTML code. When it comes to on-page optimization, keywords put in title elements still maintained an influence of 8.34. On the other hand, keywords incorporated into specific parts of HTML elements maintained a relevance of 4.16.

Domain-level keyword features

These are features that deal with how keywords are used in the domain and sub-domain names, plus how they're likely to affect ranking. Keywords incorporated in the exact match domain had relevance of 5.83, while keyword in the domain extension had 2.55 only.

Link metrics for individual pages

This has to do with metrics concerning various pages of a website. These include page rank, number of inbound (backlinks) and outbound links and many more. In this study, it was found that raw quantity of in-bound links from high authority sites had a relevance of 7.78, while external links pointing back to a page had a relevance of 3.85 only.

The uniqueness of a page had an influence of 7.85, while pages that featured open graph data maintained it at 3.64.

Qualities of branding & brand metrics

The search volume of the brand or domain showed a relevance of 6.54, while social media pages for popular businesses fell at 3.99 relevance.

Page social features

This part studied third-party metrics related to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and many more. The survey found that content engagement stood at 3.87 on average, while up-votes on particular site pages on social media maintained a relevance of 2.7.

The future of SEO

These SEO experts were asked to give their views on anything they thought would come up and influence ranking. Some of the sentiments worth noting are summarized below:

• The app world will be noticed by Google. For instance, if a webmaster had a popular app that was relative to their competitor, Google wouldn't hesitate to notice it.
• Mobile-friendliness will increase, together with directly or indirectly related factors.
• User location may influence mobile serps. On the other hand, connected devices like watches and cars would allow voice search.

These factors, plus many more, make the world of SEO and ranking now and in the next 12 months. Therefore, with this information, webmasters can fine-tune their site resources to maximize on these changes and also stay out of the way for possible penalties.

To learn more about the survey and its findings, visit Moz.com.