Whether you’re a digital marketer or a website owner, knowing the ins and outs of search engine optimization would be a vital practice for you. Although it’s unlikely that basic strategies might change, however, that shouldn’t give you a reason to be dependent on the old techniques.
In fact, with a change in the browsing habits of your customers, you must keep your execution up-to-date. Undoubtedly, the way people use search engines, especially Google, changes consistently. For instance, over the past few years, mobile indexing has gathered a lot of importance for both page ranking and accessibility.
Considering how 51% of the website traffic comes from search engines organically, you cannot take this aspect of marketing for granted.
So, how is the game of SEO going to change in 2019? What are the SEO strategies you should concentrate on? This post will help you find out everything about the state of SEO in 2019.
- Domination of Google Rankbrain:
Although Rankbrain has been around since 2015, Google lately confirmed it as their third crucial ranking factor. Unlike other elements, Rankbrain assists Google in processing search queries and sorting them in the SERPs.
By continually testing sites and observing user experience on pages, Rankbrain lets Google comprehend what search result would be the best for a specific site, based on the users’ query.
Apart from that, this factor is even powerful enough to alter the search algorithm on the basis of the perfect match. Perpetually, it can tweak the prominence of content length, backlinks, content freshness, and other factors.
Here are some tips that you can use to optimize for Rankbrain:
- Provide readers what they’re looking for right above the fold
- Keep the content well-formatted, easy-to-understand and simple
- Concentrate on writing in-depth guides
- Reduce bounce rate
- Use short, descriptive URLs
- Broaden the Horizons for Traffic Sources:
Believe it or not, Google doesn’t want you to focus solely on SEO as the only source of gaining website traffic in 2019 and thenceforth. Confused? Don’t be; there’s nothing new about it.
As they say, “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.” It’s high time that you must start learning how the diversification of traffic is vital to sustaining in the online world for a longer time. You can begin by trying to build a community around your audience.
Moreover, in the future, if you wish to live through any algorithm changes, you’d have to aim at alternative sources for traffic.
Here are a few tips that may help you:
- Make use of social media
- Invest in drive paid traffic and ads (if you have enough budget)
- Build a community
- Voice & Image Search Will Be Noteworthy:
Although reports claim that an approximate of 50% searches are going to be voice searches by 2020, it could be a fact away from reality. But, this doesn’t change the truth that voice search is rising as a trend, thanks to AI-enabled voice assistants.
Accordingly, 72% of people who have a voice-activated speaker say that using such a device is a part of their daily life. Adding more to it, image searches aren’t left behind either. 19% of Google’s search queries include images. Thus, optimizing your site for these two could be quite beneficial for you.
Here are a few tips that will help you optimize well for voice and image search:
- Use tools like Answer The Public to figure out keywords
- Use relevant, high-quality images and customize their file name
- Discover the phrases local people use to find products by voice search
- Use the alt tag and correct file type for images
- Mobile-First Index Optimizing:
Another essential SEO trend that’s going to dominate in 2019 is the mobile-first index by Google. Essentially, it means that this well-known search engine is now going to index the mobile version of your site and will rank it accordingly.
Another thing to note here is that factors, such as content width, site speed, and formatting on the mobile are going to be the ranking factors. With an approximate of 55% of search traffic coming from mobile, it’s essential to keep this point in mind.
To optimize the site for mobile, follow these tips:
- Ensure the content is the same in both mobile and the desktop version of the site
- Optimize the site for mobile speed as it’s an essential factor
- Make use of responsive templates and themes
- Optimize images before publishing on the site
- Featured Snippets Optimization:
Along with optimizing the website, you must also execute Google search experience optimization. Somewhere in 2017, featured snippets started appearing on Google. And, since then, they’ve become more prevalent.
According to an estimation, about 30% of search results show a featured snippet. Furthermore, in 2018, more featured snippet versions rolled out, making the process easier for you.
So, today, whether you create content with bullet lists or with images, you can have the chance of featuring your content at the zero position. But how should you optimize for this position? Here are a few ways:
- Include a question in the heading
- The answer that question under the title in 40-50 words
- Add a table featuring relevant data
- Organize content in a step-by-step format
- Be concise and make use of keywords
- Enhance Technical SEO:
Often, SEO is considered to be an exclusive concern of marketers and content creators. But, in reality, it’s one such aspect that developers should think of as well. The technical SEO process is all about ensuring that the website matches the basic standards set by search engines.
Although two significant aspects, speed, and mobile-friendliness, have already been spoken about, however, another thing to pay attention to is the security. For example, Google has necessitated the websites to use HTTPS to be characterized as secure.
Apart from this, there are a few other things that you can do to maintain the technical SEO, like:
- Fix issues with duplicate content
- Create an XML sitemap
- Enable AMP for better output
- Add structured data markup to the website
- Register the site with Google search console
- Links Will Be Still Important:
Every year, the rumors for link building being dead becomes the talk of the town. However, even in 2019, backlinks are going to play an essential role in your entire SEO process.
People from the other sides of the Google walls have admitted that links from good old page ranks are still an integral signal for the search engine to rank your website.
Moreover, you can easily achieve authority or link power through quality backlinks. However, in 2019, you’d have to understand that link building from not-so-popular platforms isn’t going to bring any benefits.
You must also be attentive to the guest posts. If you’re confused, here are some ideas that will help you create better links for your website:
- Add keywords in links
- Generate links through infographics
- Write guest articles for significant portals of your niche
- Explore social media
- Contact bloggers and journalists in your field
- Creating Videos Will Help:
Currently, the trend of online videos is on the verge of explosion. And, that’s all in the right way. In fact, Cisco has stated that online videos are going to cover a whopping 80% of the online traffic by the year 2021.
And, there are chances that this may still not satiate the demands of the world. If you assess the ongoing trends, there are more videos out there. But, 43% of people still want to have more of it.
In short, if you haven’t added videos to your digital marketing strategy yet, you’d be missing out on something huge. To make the most out of it, there are so many ways in which you can use videos.
If your brand is relatively new, you can create brand introduction videos to make your target audience familiar with your products or services.
And then, you can also:
- Use YouTube to post videos
- Embed videos in blogs and articles for more views
- Write meta description for videos
- Choose attractive headlines
- Promote your videos well
Wrapping Up:
There’s no way you can consider search engine optimization to be a fixated pursuit. With significant changes in the internet, the parameters that comprehend how to rank your site change as well. This simply means that you’d have to stay updated with the latest SEO trends to make sure that you gain nothing but success.
So, that’s how the picture of SEO looks in 2019. And, for sure, it’s going to change in a few years again. Maybe, you’ll find a completely new process by 2020.
Whatever it’s going to be, the basic procedure to execute SEO would still remain the same. So, if you’re just starting up, take a step-by-step ladder.
Do you know more about the latest trends? If yes, share with us in the comments section.