SEO trends in 2019

SEO trends are constantly changing, and as a SEO agency it’s frustrating to try and keep up with those trends, which is why we are sharing our SEO trends in 2019.

We will look at what SEO strategies will work and help you dominate in the search engine results page and hopefully earn more revenue in 2019.

Below are 8 important trends you should be considering in 2019.

1. Understanding Your Audience & Their Intent

Like any project, it all starts with planning. It starts with asking if your audience prefers text? Images? Video? or Audio?

Understanding this to begin with be more important than ever in 2019, according to SEO experts.

“You really need to understand what someone is expecting to find when they query a word or phrase, and you need to provide them with the answer in the most simplest way possible,” said Mindy Weinstein (CEO, Market Mindshift).

Even if your website content is perfectly written and SEO optimised, if it’s translated for the wrong audience, it will not grow your business.

The future of a high-ranking website is all about the audience.

If your website enhances your audience’s journey, then you will see the rewards by Google and your visitors will invest in your product/service.

This is really important because rankings have been fluctuating over the past year to help fit with the semantic intent of a user’s enquiry.

It will be more critical than ever for SEO and content specialists to focus largely on the users intent of the keywords they are targeting while creating their content.

You have to think more about the tunnel and where users really want to spend their time when on a website. Do you them to spend more time and money trying to rank for a broad keyword or should they shift focus to terms further down the tunnel, where a buyer is more knowledgeable and is more likely to be interested in the products your selling?

To be compatible with this change in 2019, we may have to change the way we have been doing keyword research.

When doing a keyword research in 2019, it’s important that it is checked with SERPs to see if websites like yours are ranking for a specific targeted phrase. If the top SERPs are filled with directories or review sites and your website isn’t one of them, then you need to move on to another phrase.

Now it’s time to stop matching keyword phrases, and start making sure that your content comprehensively answers your audience questions via a search enquiry.

2. Structured Data Markup

Structured data is added directly to a page’s HTML markup. Search engines use structured data to generate rich snippets, which are small pieces of information that will then appear in search results.

With AI becoming more important for Google, structured data is more important also. If Google wants to move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world, then structured data is critical. No matter how good AI is, if it takes too long to crawl the necessary information it will never be good. AI requires a fast processing of contents and their relations to each other.

SEO experts have advised that they should start looking at and understanding structured data, active and passive search behaviours, and in particular how they can connect to behaviours that can signal intent so that the behaviour of a search becomes a larger effort.

Contextual relationships between behaviours and topics, supported by structured markup, is a critical trend SEO programmers need to start understanding and testing in 2019. Using architecture, tags, metadata and recently structured markup, we’ve had the ability to give search engines signals to understand this topical and supportive content structure.

3. Create Engaging and Quality Content

Algorithm reports from 2018 reveals that Google is intensifying its focus on evaluating quality content and at the depth of a website’s content.

Sites that provide exceptional depth in quality content coverage soar in rankings throughout the 2018. Sites that were weaker with their content depth suffered in comparison.

Google were continually tuning their algorithms last year, and we believe there is still a lot more tuning to do.

This means that if you’re still creating blog content just to keep your SEO alive, it won’t be good enough for much longer.

It will be more beneficial to do one post that is properly posted every few months than doing ten per month that may only receive a few visits.

The best approach is create content that solves your customers problem – content that motivates, helps and connect with your audience.

If you can answer a customers question, make a sale, get a lead, help with SEO (link building), social or community building purposes with a piece of content, then you are wining! Make sure you do your research, and be the solution to the problem your customers have and provide something that is meant for your target audience versus trying to SEO the shit out of it, and then you will always do better in your efforts.

SEO content strategy is not just about answering your customers queries and getting users them to a page. It needs to also use language to engage them and guide the user to the next step.

4. Establish Your Expertise

Establish and grow your businesses area of expertise. Hire experts to author and leverage data from known entities, while ensuring credentials or credit are given to both. Get your employees to blog, write, and record a podcast. How can your brand be the go-to source for your customers, because that level of expertise is what Google is looking for to power their results.

“A major goal of our ranking team is to build an algorithm that would rank documents in the same order as humans would as they are following the guidelines,” said Frédéric Dubut, Microsoft’s senior program manager, Search & AI. “You can only do so at the scale of the web by generalising your ranking algorithm as much as possible. It turns out that modern machine learning is very good at generalizing, so you can expect our core ranking algorithm to get closer to that ideal Intelligent Search product view that we hold internally and which we try to capture in our own guidelines.”

5. Technical SEO

Websites will always continue to grow in complexity, and this will make technical SEO a major focus in 2019 and beyond.

Some areas of focus on the technical side of SEO are:

• JavaScript – More websites will be heavily JavaScript driven. This means it’s time to familiarise for your web developers with JavaScript, and how major search engines play best with JavaScript-driven websites.
• Speed – Sites will start to become simpler and faster because Google is rewarding sites more than once thought for speed.
• Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) – In 2019 you should start thinking about how your website could progress as a PWA in future. How can your PWA become a keepable experience your users would like to put on their home screen?.

6. On-page Optimisation

On-page optimisation will continue to be important this year. There are still incredible results from nothing more than on-page SEO methods.  Links are still very important, but the biggest win for most companies is ongoing on-page optimisation.

7. Voice Search is Coming

This is year of voice search, well not quite yet, but it’s coming. It’s all the big talk at the moment, but when will it really explode? Who knows.

We think more companies will look into a voice optimisation strategy over the next year or two, it still just isn’t quite there yet.

Although voice search got lots of attention in 2018 with Siri and Alexa, voice search is just a piece of the bigger shift, from “results” to “answers” as part of the longer customer’s “conversational search journey.

This will gain more importance in 2019 – then the shift has already started. While ‘voice’ might be an easier way to request answers in some scenarios, it certainly isn’t the ideal format to fulfill the intent in more complex answers (e.g., when comparing services or products).

8. Featured Snippets & Other Google SERP Optimisation

While it’s important to optimise for your own website, you need to also optimise for the Google search experience, because exposure is as much about visibility in the SERPs than about clicks.

That means optimising for featured snippets and other Google search features will continue to be an important trend and more important in 2019.

Every time this happens, it results in a significant spike in traffic.

We’ve only scratched the surface so far. Talk to our experts today and contact us.