SEO is an integral part of digital marketing. What this means is that you always have to keep your eyes and ears peeled for any news and trends, because it is the only way to satisfy both search engines and users, and keep your website ranking where you want it to be. It’s a simple fact of sink or swim. Only those that put their best effort into the SEO game survive long enough to see their business boom. Others fade away into the crowd and disappear sooner or later.
The major goal of search engines is to provide users with the most relevant search results. That is why the algorithms are constantly being improved, and you cannot allow yourself to lag behind. This is why every year you need to redefine your SEO strategy according to the emerging trends. Some of them have been around for some time and are exploding right now, while others are hatching out of their eggs and showing promise to become huge. So, if you want to make it big in 2019, you have to be ahead of these trends, grasp them, and try to implement them the best way you can into your SEO strategy.
Voice Search Is Going to Take over
It is only a matter of time before voice search becomes the leading way of finding what you need online. Predictions say that by the year 2020, 50% of searches are going to be done this way. So, in 2019, you certainly need to catch that train and implement it into your strategy, as its growth is undeniable (even though it’s not strictly predictable), and it is going to be even more important this year than it was the last.
The fact about voice search is that it is one of the greatest changes regarding SEO, and therefore something that you need to approach and optimize in a whole new manner. It isn’t difficult to understand when you take into consideration that the way you type in something into a search query and say it out loud is formulated differently. The questions you are going to ask are going to sound a lot more natural.
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Optimizing User Intent
The days of stuffing your content with popular keywords are long gone. Today, SEO is all about user intent. Google and other companies like it are working hard to make search be all about what the person is really after and providing them with the most relevant individual results. In other words, they want to “deliver their promise”, and actually be helpful and present what is valuable. So, now, the focus is on implementing keywords and phrases into your website in the most meaningful way possible.
Basically, when a person searches for a particular thing online, the most practical result is going to help them determine and decide which business they want to work with. It’s all about organic search engine optimisation. Furthermore, there is a close relationship between user intent and the aforementioned voice search. This is all with the intention to make it possible for the user to clearly articulate what they are looking for.
Structured Data and Markup
Due to artificial intelligence becoming smarter than ever, it is very important that you use structured data whenever you can. A major step for Google was moving to mobile-first indexing. However, the next step is focusing on an AI-first approach. So, the AI may be super-intelligent, but if your data is scattered and takes forever to crawl through, it simply won’t be able to serve its purpose properly.
This is why things like structured data, schema, and search behaviors (active and passive) are crucial for you to dive into. Basically, it’s all about context. It determines the relationship between a particular subject matter and user behavior, all held together by a properly structured markup. You need to use metadata, tags, and information architecture properly in order to provide search engines with the right signals.
Recommended: How Schema Markup Helps Achieve Higher Conversion Rate
Top-notch Content
Now, you are probably thinking: “How can it be an emerging trend when the saying that content is king is years old?” Well, the truth is that now, more than ever, top-notch content is what will make or break your business efforts. In other words, pushing forward the kind of content that is designed to boost your SEO in various ways, but isn’t original and thought-provoking enough, is no longer necessarily going to work. In 2019, more than ever, it is all going to be about high-quality content that provides the user with the best possible experience. The competition is stronger than ever, so, if you aren’t able to provide something truly valuable and interesting, someone else will reap the field.
So, make sure that you’re producing the best possible content, supported by proper internal linking, which will let the search engine know more about other pieces that you have created and posted. Furthermore, this will help you create a funnel for people who already like some bits of contents that they have seen so that they can easily find more. As a result, your pages per session statistic is also going to be boosted.
Brands as Ranking Signals
Google also uses brand mentions in its search algorithm. They serve as search signals in two ways. First, via every unlinked brand mention, your brand gets perceived as an entity by the search engine. This way it can determine how authoritative you are in a certain area. On the other hand, there is context. Google checks everything you’ve got, such as your reputation, how trustworthy you are, how you advertise, how you solve issues that are brought by complaints, and so on.
This is why you must take good care of your reputation, make the best out of white-hat SEO tactics like proper link building, find influencers that can help you move up the ladder, and also look at your competition in order to have a better understanding of how you are doing in comparison.
2019 is going to be marked by a great expansion in focus on user intent, along with the development of artificial intelligence and voice search. Structured data is going to matter a lot, because of the importance of context in relation to user intent. Content may have been king for a while, but now, more than ever, it is crucial to provide top-notch, thought-provoking that beats what your competition has to offer. Finally, brand mentions are going to matter more and more to SEO, changing your perspective on link building.
Nick is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged on projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.
[…] Nick Brown discusses how voice search, user intent, structured data and top notch content will trend in the field of SEO during the year 2019. […]
[…] Schema markup helps search engines like Google to understand your product offerings details better and thus showcase them in a more positive way for the benefit of the user/reader. Schema markup also impacts SEM strategies so that they can provide more relevance to an incoming search query thus increasing your quality score. This estimates the quality of your landing pages, keywords, and ads. […]