The key to succeeding with your Search Engine Optimisations in 2019 is through the following strategies. If you are looking to up your SEO game next year, keep reading:
User Experience
User experience is the overall experience that a person has when using a product such as a website, in terms of how easy and pleasing it is to use. UX was increasingly popular throughout 2018 and it is only expected to become more apparent in the years to come.
Optimising for RankBrain can help you to rank higher for your website and here’s how it works:
RankBrain measures how users interact with the search results and Google uses this to help sort their search results. So if you begin a search and stay on the page for a long duration of time, Google will higher this page’s ranking, treating it as good quality content for that keyword. Whereas if you were to click on the result in the top ranking position but you leave the page almost instantly, Google will see this as the content being irrelevant and lower the pages rankings in the search engine result page. RankBrain focuses on two things:
- How long someone spends on the page
- The percentage of people that click on your result
Ensuring you provide your users with the best user experience on your website, through great quality content and good page speeds, you are likely to rank high for user experience.
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are the lazy scrollers way of finding their answer fast with minimal effort and featured snippets are stealing you a lot of clicks. Want to know how to get a featured snippet opportunity? Here’s how:
- Find featured snippet opportunities by finding keywords that you already rank for and that have a featured snippet then search in a organic reporting system for those keywords (Ahrefs)
- Create your snippet which is between 40-60 characters
- Format your content for other types of featured snippets
In-Depth Content
Google used to analyse your page’s HTML to see how many times you used a specific keyword and check that your keyword appears in:
- Title tag
- URL
- Image ALT text
- Description tag
- H1 tag
Although Google still looks for the keywords across these key areas, Google today is even smarter than that. Google will not only focus on measuring your content, but also focuses on your context. Google’s job is to provide users with an answer to their search term and the best results cover an entire topic in-depth.
Optimise Google’s Mobile- First Index
Recently Google messaged millions of people stating “Mobile-first Indexed enabled”, which meant that Google now considers the mobile version of your site, the main version. This will occur even if someone was to search via their desktop device, but this is a good thing. 60% of Google searches are made from a mobile device. Mobile searches are continuing to rapidly increase over desktop searches.
Optimise your website for Google’s Mobile-First Index by:
- Making your content consistent across desktop and mobile
- Move from m. to Responsive design
- Make sure your website is great on mobile
Video
Video is slowly becoming one of the most dominating and demanding strategies to building content for SEO today. If you’re not creating video content, you’re missing out on a great opportunity.
YouTube is already the second largest search engine and like all online platforms, it’s growing fast. More people today prefer watching video tutorials than sitting and reading a step by step guide.
To get the most out of your video content, optimise it specifically for YouTube, this search engine is too large to ignore.
Optimise Voice Search
Voice search may be the next biggest thing in 2019 and here’s why:
41% of adults use voice search at least once each day:
Voice searches have increased by 35 times since 2008:
20% of all searches through mobile are voice searches:
In order to optimise for voice search you must have:
- Content that ranks high in search results
- Content has appeared in a featured snippet
- Include a question and answer in your content
Content and Links
Despite all the new strategies each year to ensure your SEO performs at its best, SEO is still all about content and links. Without great content, it is impossible to get people to link to your website and without link building, you will unlikely sit on the first page of results.
Google recently released a statement saying that content and inks are still their number 1 and number 2 factors for ranking. Therefore we know, quality content and relevant links will still be the foundation of SEO in 2019.
If you are looking to keep your website in line with the latest trends next year, this short guide will give the perfect starting point. For more information on how to optimise your website for the best version of Search Engine Optimisation, contact us today via our contact form or give us a call on 02380227117