The search engine algorithms change regularly, so it’s important not to look at SEO as a one-time job. It’s something that you need to perform on a regular basis in order to remain competitive, and it’s an industry you need to remain up to date with in order to avoid running afoul of the latest guidelines. In this article, we’ve listed the trends you need to be aware of currently if you want your business to remain competitive in the SERPs.
1. Don’t Just Focus on Google
While Google is still inarguably the most important engine to get your website ranked on, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t focus on your position on other search engines as well. This doesn’t just mean traditional search engines like Bing either. You should also be considering, as an example, the Amazon store, the Apple app store, and social media websites like YouTube. All of these are great ways of drawing traffic to your site. In addition, with mobile search becoming more and more popular, it’s likely that in the future, the search landscape could change quite dramatically. An SEO Belfast company can help you with this.
2. Continue Creating Quality Content
While Google have openly said that the length of content doesn’t influence its position in the search engines, it’s still important to focus on creating quality content rather than pumping out a lot of inferior words. The main thing you want to focus on here is providing content that users will find useful, and ensuring that the content you produce isn’t misleading. You also want to be focusing on your on-page SEO, which involves internal linking, optimising images, and creating user-friendly URLs.
3. Website Speed is More Important Than Ever Before
While website speed has always been important – you never want to keep a customer waiting after all – it’s more important than ever in 2019 thanks to Google’s mobile-first index policy. If your site takes more than a second to load, it could end up getting penalised by the search engines; but the faster it loads, the higher it’s likely to rank. There are plenty of SEO tools that can help you to determine how fast your website is, but an SEO company should also be able to help you rectify this if you think it’s a problem.
4. Voice Search is No Longer a Novelty
When smartphones first started letting users search via voice, many thought it was a novelty that wouldn’t take off. However, with the popularity of Alexa, Echo, and Google Home, lots of people are now using voice search on a daily basis. Businesses, therefore, need to stop seeing voice search as a novelty and start optimising their content with it in mind. Voice search often makes use of commands or questions, and the tone of voice is also more colloquial. These are all things to keep in mind.
Remaining competitive has never been more important. Keep the above tips in mind if you don’t want to be left behind this year.