Now, I know what you must be thinking. Not again. I want to confess here that I am no fan of this SEO trends blog post myself, but when we run a business, we want our brand to feature in Google. This can be achieved by keeping up with the Joneses from time to time so that people don’t consider you too alien.
Oh yes, I have this small secret. I can predict the future by looking at data. And I’ve done analyzing data from the year 2018. Now, I am ready to give away this information for free.
It’s time to stop being a victim and start working smart to get featured in Google search results. If you follow these SEO trends, I am sure you’ll be able to beat your competition in the year 2019.
1) Find User Intent & Solve their Problem
Everything that you do leaves an impact on your audience. If you want to impress your audience, meet them where they are. And if the audience seems more predisposed towards visuals, use more images in your content. If they show a proclivity for videos, make how-to videos and place them on the front page of your website.
As an Entrepreneur, you must incorporate words and phrases which the audience is looking for.
If the content of the website is perfectly written, but targeting the wrong audience, your business won’t grow an inch.
If you look at any high-ranking website, you’ll realize that it all comes down to your audience. And if the content on the website is not enhancing the customer journey, why will the customers stick to the website?
This is not just important, it is indispensable since Google is now more serious than ever about focusing on users’ intent.
2) Leap over Google Search
No single man can achieve success. Similarly, just appearing on Google won’t do any good to the brand.
The popular belief is that a rolling stone gathers no moss. But with SEO trends in 2019, you must consider other search engines too. Apart from Google, take DuckDuckGo and Bing into a factor which holds a measured chunk after Google.
Search is beyond the search engine itself. People are now searching on app stores. Podcasts and videos are getting more attention than simple search queries.
It’s time to think beyond just driving users to your website. How to improve ranking with quality content? How to explode your website with sales just by using social media?
In 2019, you must focus on optimizing for myriad devices. Responsiveness is not just a concept anymore, you need to act and follow a serious digital marketing strategy to gain maximum advantage.
The entire search experience is all about expertise and control. The sweet spot occurs when we can create a point where the needs of the customer and the elements on our website overlap each other. This juncture is where the magic happens.
3) Structured Data is the key
Now is the time to move from a mobile-only to an AI-first world. A structure is the ultimate key. Regardless of how good your AI is, if there is no structure, it will never force Google Search to move your page up in the ranking.
Understand the vernacular of products and problems that people are facing and systematically arrange them. There must be contextual relationships between topics and the structures that you created. Using tags, metadata, and structured markup gives search engines the ability to link everything together.
4) Not Creating Valuable Content
Google Algorithm update for the year 2018 focuses on the quality of the content. By analyzing high-performance websites, we came to know that websites with exceptional content ranked higher than those with average content.
This means there is no more sustaining your blog with average content. Think twice about publishing posts that don’t add any value to the users.
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What you need is to create content that is solving a problem for the customer. If you’re able to answer a question, you’ll be able to generate a lead. If there are only a few pages on your website, you must use content maps to leave an impact.
5) Showcase Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness
Keeping quality in mind, Google launched a metric to decide the ranking of the website. E-A-T also known as Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness is the key trend for the year 2019.
Although the E-A-T algorithm is written for Google itself, it is an excellent medium to understand the E-A-T guidelines to know where Google is headed with its algorithm.
The way an algorithm ranks a website is how much it adheres to the guidelines of Google. It turns out that the ranking algorithm is good at generalizing and if you can understand the workings of the algorithm, you can rank your website higher in the search results.
6) Invest in Technical SEO
More and more websites are popping up every day.
In 2019, it will be more difficult to rank than it was in 2018.
If you don’t have the pertinent skills, hire an expert SEO agency that can rank your brand in a sustainable way.
However, there are some factors which you can handle yourself:
- Speed: Google is rewarding websites that take less than 1.7 sec to load.
- JavaScript: With a new year comes new JavaScript updates. If you don’t know Java, it is an appropriate time to learn.
- Progressive Web Apps (PWAs): From the year 2019 on, it will be necessary to learn how to get live on PWA. How to keep users busy with experience so that they can stick to the home screen?
7) On-Page Optimization is not dead yet
We have seen incredible improvements in the on-page optimization and the results they provide for brands.
Links might be important but it’s necessary to share how you can leverage the power of On-page optimization:
- Content should answer the questions of the users.
- The internal site search must be smart to analyze the search query by the user.
- Ensure that customers can get their recently purchased items available with a few clicks.
- Using ChatBots to take care of customer service
8) Voice Search is at its full Potential
The last decade was labeled the year of mobile.
It’s not safe anymore to rely on text searches. Now is the time to optimize your website with voice searches. In the year 2019, you’ll get prominent importance if the website is optimized for voice search.
The effective use of voice responses will help users from various countries translate the message and help the brands provide them with the services that they are looking for.
9) Watch out for Machine Learning
There are changes in the algorithm of search engines where machine learning is impacting the way users search for data online. Just because machine learning won’t be something to ignore in the year 2019.
Brands need to adopt machine learning algorithms and develop content which is unique for SEO. The testing, analyzing, and even reporting of data must be implemented by fully understanding the data science and how users are using various mediums to search data on the internet.
10) Optimize websites for Featured Snippets
If you are willing to get ahead in the year 2019, you must check all the boxes, figure out the most trending topics, and craft the best blog posts for it.
The snippets just like in previous years will feature the websites, and blogs providing the most valuable data to their users.
If you’re able to solve more problems of the users, your brand will appear in the search results more often.
To conclude, we can say that creating a website and not featuring it in Google search results is the same as writing a best-seller book and not making time to publish it. If you don’t optimize the website to rank in Google, you’ll be out of business soon.