SEO Trends That Will Help You Boost Business

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Follow this year’s SEO trends to streamline your strategy, increase sales and boost business.

It seems like an obvious business goal: make sales and increase as you expand. The best way to plan for success is to be prepared for what’s to come. By looking into the year’s SEO trends, you’ll be able to streamline your strategy to ramp up sales and boost business.

Search engines are becoming more intelligent and fine-tuning their process for knowing what users want before they type or say it. Google’s algorithm for how it ranks web pages continuously changes. That’s why it’s essential to revise your SEO strategy so you can be sure your business is at the top of SERPs when people search for similar keywords.

Here are some of the top SEO trends you need to pay attention to if you want to increase sales in 2019.

On-page optimization

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing elements of web pages on your website with the goal of driving traffic and ranking higher in search engines for greater visibility. If you’re going to boost your sales, you have to optimize your website to keep users engaged.

Site speed

In July 2018, Google rolled out an update stating that page speed is now a ranking factor for mobile searches. It wants to highly rank and reward websites that give viewers the best, most streamlined user experience (UX), which leads to increased sales and engagement.

Google’s data also found that 53 percent of mobile users abandon a web page that takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s not a whole lot of time to create conversions, so you have to make sure your site is speedy and efficient in giving users what they want.

Google PageSpeed Insights is a helpful tool used to track your site’s speed and assigns you a score based on what needs to be improved or what’s working well.

File size

Are the images or other visual content on your web pages causing your pages to lag and take several seconds to load? If so, you can bet you have frustrated users on the other end skyrocketing your bounce rates and abandoning the page as quickly as possible. People don’t like to wait for content to load when so many websites out there load within mere seconds. Use image compressors like TinyJPG or Kraken to decrease your image size drastically.

Voice search

A BrightLocal study found that 27 percent of consumers using voice search to find local businesses end up visiting their website. So if your goal is to increase sales in 2019, it’s best to optimize your strategy for voice search.

Make your business part of this growing SEO strategy by optimizing your site so that it appears when someone asks Siri or Alexa a question relative to your content. There are a few things to you can do to optimize your content for voice search.

Use long-tail keywords. When you type up a Google search, it’s usually a short phrase with only main words included. But when you use voice search, you tend to ask the entire question as you would ask a friend. That’s why it’s important to include long-tail keywords in your content.

Create a featured snippet. You know that tiny white box that pops up with a direct answer when you ask Google a question? It’s called a featured snippet, or answer box, and if your content is in it, you’re guaranteed to eat up everyone else’s traffic. Include a concise, clear summary of your content above the fold of your web page using long-tail keywords to maximize your chances of being featured in an answer box.

Optimize for local SEO. The same BrightLocal study found that 58 percent of consumers have used voice search to find local business information in the last year. If you optimize for local SEO, you’ll open your business to an entire pool of new customers. Create a list of keywords consumers would use to find your business via local search and implement them into your strategy.

High-quality content

Search engines favor quality content that brings value and insight to readers. Gathering traffic to your website and creating conversions is about conducting keyword research so your content can rank high in search.

Google doesn’t take kindly to spammy SEO techniques that deceivingly achieve high rankings using poor quality web content, which it refers to as thin content. You should avoid other unfavorable practices like keyword stuffing and doorway pages. If the content you’re putting out doesn’t bring value to your audience, get rid of it. Come up with a revamped content marketing strategy that focuses on the consumer and their needs.

Wrapping up

If your goal this year is to increase sales, it’s important to keep an eye on SEO trends as the algorithm for ranking high is constantly changing and updating. There are lots of rising trends on the market for search engine optimization. Voice search is gaining more popularity year by year, only high-quality content is making it to the front page of SERPs, and on-page optimization techniques are crucial to gaining visibility. What trends will you keep an eye on in 2019?

Jared Atchison

Co-Founder of WPForms, one of the largest WordPress contact form plugins in the market. I have been programming for over a decade and enjoy creating plugins that help people create powerful web designs without touching code.

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