SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a marketing strategy that is becoming more important as technology and search engine algorithms progress. So, what has changed so far in 2019 and what do we need to look out for? Hopefully what has changed so far will not come as a huge surprise, as to stay ahead of the SEO game you should be continually monitoring what is happening in the marketplace, and not waiting to simply follow what your competitors start to do. Keeping an eye out for the technologies that were implemented last year or the year before and watching how they progress will help to give you an insight into what is becoming the next emerging technology or trend to focus on. This will give you some meaty material to think about and consider how this will affect the future of SEO. If you need assistance with onsite SEO services then it’s advisable to contact a professional team for advice.
For instance, voice-activated technology has been around in the mainstream for approximately five years, so it was only a matter of time before technology developed and started to impact SEO. In 2019 this is definitely one advancement to watch, as even though the traditional SEO actions of creating effective SEO content, UX optimization and link building will still help voice search results, with every fifth search enquiry on a mobile device now being conducted via the voice input method ( and we can presume this will only continue to increase) it is worth beginning to focus more on longtail keywords. This will help when optimizing your content along with anticipating the possible user questions your content will need to answer. This voice enquiry along with mobile-first indexing is expected to increase in 2019 as the mobile market continues to grow. This makes a lot of sense as more people are accessing mobile data and accessing web-based content whilst out and about.
This will see 2019 being the year of mobile-first indexing. It’s wise to get up to speed with this now and be prepared. Mobile-first indexing means that Google will begin with your mobile version of content when looking at where your site should be indexed and ranked in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). However, this doesn’t mean that a site without a mobile version will be delisted and it doesn’t mean that a mobile-first index means mobile-only. This simply means that once your site has a mobile version, Google will use this for indexing and ranking. With mobile versions becoming the main marker for ranking, there is now no excuse for your site not being mobile-friendly.
Let’s also keep 2019 ‘page speed’ and ‘online brand mentions’ in mind as these remain a hot topic. Page speed and loading times of desktop sites have historically been a ranking factor, but watch out as this now expands to mobile devices with ranking being based on optimization and speed. Brand signalling also remains a ranking factor with branded searches still being a huge trust signal for SEO and these will continue to do so as Google continues to use online brand mentions in its search algorithm.
