Everyone with a working website will know that SEO is the single most important aspect of ranking your website higher on search engines. It is a vital practice that cannot be overlooked. It’s what separates successful businesses from the rest, and it will continue to do so.
It’s 2019, and like most things, trends change, and you need to adapt to those changes. The case is the same for SEO and in this article; we are going to discuss the best SEO practices for 2019.
Source: blog.marketo.com
1. Don’t Fight Where You Can’t Win
Throughout my time at various marketing agencies, I always heard a term called “Blue Ocean Strategy.” This is a popular marketing strategy that suggests avoiding the well-established niches, and going for the market space that if somewhat uncontested. To further explain that we will give you a simple anecdote. Why swim in shark-infested waters, when you can swim in clear blue waters? The idea behind it is to avoid market spaces where big players are already established and to go for the ones where the competition is slim, and the market is young.
2. Optimizing Your SEO to Feature Snippets
Various researches have proven that content with featured snippets gets double the clicks. Feature snippets are these amazing little boxes that pop up on Google every time we ask Google a question. They don’t require you to click on it because they display your answer straight up. However, researchers have found that despite it giving you the answer, people still click on such content.
Featured snippets are a new thing on Google, but they can be huge for SEO. Hiring SEO agencies to optimize your content as feature snippets can greatly benefit your SERP ranking.
Source: gobizlocal.net
3. Delete Pages That Hold no Value to You
There was a term in 2010 that people creamed their pants when they heard it (in the digital marketing niche). The term was used to describe pages that hold no real value to you. Those pages are called “Zombie Pages”. As we said, they hold no real value to you, they don’t drive traffic, no authority, they have no web presence, and these pages often hold outdated content. These pages can come across as duplicate content, outdated blog posts, outdated press releases, pages for products that no one buys, and pages that shouldn’t be indexed.
Every website has a few zombie pages on display. Deleting them can greatly benefit your SEO as Google would no longer deem them low-quality.
4. Cluster Your Content
SEO is constantly changing their algorithms to favor a certain type of content. Such is the case for 2019 as clustering your content could prove beneficial towards your SEO. Topic clustering your content is the latest trend that involves changing your website structure so that single pages will act as hubs of information. From here, each cluster will be linked towards your content, and each cluster will be connected back to the primary hub. This is useful because search engines will understand how things are connected between each other and will help you easily index your pages.
Source: claytonjohnson.com
5. Voice Search
Possibly the newest SEO trend is voice search. This comes to us as no surprise as voice search has been available to us for quite some time. We are surprised that it took that long to get integrated into the SEO game. Here is a piece of good advice on how to optimize your content so that you benefit from voice searches.
- Optimize your content so that it aligns with the types of queries you hear from voice searches
- Research Long-tilled keywords
- Optimize your pages so that they load fast
- Prioritize content that has an average word count of around 2400 words