SEO is key to getting your website’s ranking up, without ranking you simply won’t be seen. Using SEO strategies on your blogs, social media and website, you could be missing out. Using SEO best practices 2019 is one of the most effective ways to make sure your customers can find you.
An SEO strategy should always be a part of your big picture marketing strategy. It’s important to remember that your SEO is ever changing. Your rankings can change from day to day, that’s why you need a strong long-term plan.
The best strategies are adjusted to make room for the new practices and algorithm updates. The new SEO practices aren’t rocket science, but if you follow these guidelines then it’ll be a piece of cake.
Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
It’s no secret that people are glued to their phones. Actually, around 60 percent of Google searches are done on a phone or tablet. It’s safe to say that number will probably only grow in the years to come.
That’s why Google is making phones the center of their algorithm. Moving forward, the mobile version on your website will be considered the default version.
This means that if you have content that’s hidden on your mobile site, it doesn’t exist to Googles crawlers anymore. Hidden content is anything that the user can’t see right away such as w read more drop down or a widget the only works on a desktop.
Your best bet is to make sure your page is completely responsive on a mobile device. If your webpage is built with a template, you might need to change it. Some templates just weren’t made to be mobile friendly. You might be able to see everything, but the site needs to also run smoothly.
Another change that’s been recently announced is that AdWords is now able to check the responsiveness or your mobile version.
Use Rich Snippets
The rich snippets, or the rich answer box, is the box that pops up what you ask search engines a question. Its called a rich snippet because it’s rich in information and context.
The best way to take advantage of this if to make sure that when you are building out a page that it contains the answer and a question.
For example, in an H tag, you would have “What is a rich Snippet?” then the text following the H tag would answer the question. The quickest way to get featured in the answer box it to make sure your website has all of the information a user would want.
You need to not only have all of the information that a user will need, but it needs to be structured. The more structured your site is the easier it will be for the search engine to crawl your website.
Optimize for Voice Search
The popularity of voice search is growing fast. Think about it with Alexa, Google Home and our phones we tend to ask virtual assistants a lot of questions. So much so that 40 percent of adults do a voice search at least once a day.
Since voice searches are done by verbally asking the question, they tend to be more in depth than a regular search. Think about it, when you type something into a search engine, you simplify it. However, when you verbally ask questions, your language is more conversational.
That changes one major thing, keywords. It’s no longer going to be keyword focused, context is going to be a lot more important.
While this is a new thing there are a few things that we know for sure about how voice search works. Google Home tends to use the rich snippets to find the answer to your questions.
That makes it even more important to have the question and the answers on your website. We suggest you make the answers on your website are as specific as possible.
Enhance Your Page Speed
No one wants to visit a slow website. Search engines understand that too and it’s becoming a bigger factor in your rankings.
If your webpage takes longer then 3 seconds to load 53 percent of people will find their information elsewhere. A slow website might mean that you have too many uncompressed files or images, your first step should be to compress what you can.
The people who visit your website want their information quickly, and the slower your site is the more annoyed your users are going to be.
User Experience Matters
While most of the SEO components are based on an algorithm, your website needs to built around the actual users. You need to keep in mind what the websites main focus is and make sure that the user can accomplish it easily.
Search engines are starting to take this into consideration. Google has RankBrain, it measures how people interact with the results from their searches.
For example, if you search for something, click the top result but the page loads slow or the information that you want isn’t there so you exit out of it. Then you go to the third result and stay on that page for a long time because the content is exactly what you wanted – the RankBrain algorithm will take that into consideration.
RankBrain takes a few things into consideration. How much time people spend on your site and the number of people who click on your website are just a couple of the factors.
RankBrain was already considered to be the Google’s third most important ranking factor, but they have announced that in 2019 it will become even more important.
Make Sure to Use Videos
Videos are starting to take over the internet. In fact, YouTube has become the world’s second largest search engine.
Around 55 percent of a Google searches have at least one video pop up. However, there are a lot of people who will skip Google or another search engine altogether and go right to YouTube.
What’s really great about using videos to help your search ranking is that almost no one is doing it yet. Most marketers don’t want to take the time to upload videos to YouTube. If you start optimizing your content this way, it will be relatively simple to get your videos seen and bring traffic to your website.
Don’t Forget About Links
Link building is hardly new to the world of SEO but in 2019 it is still going to be a part of the SEO best practices 2019. Without quality backlinks, you will never make it to the first page of any search engine.
A backlink is simply an outside website linking back to yours. You want to make sure it has a good domain authority, the better the DA is the more the link is worth to you.
These links are so important because this is how the algorithms figure out if your content is good and trustworthy. If no one is linking to your information, then the crawlers assume that your content or website is not reliable.
There is a direct correlation between having quality links and the amount of traffic your website will get.
Good, Long Form Content
Content is king.
In 2019 this will be even more so. The way people engage with your content will play an even bigger role in your SEO rankings. The algorithms are not looking not only at length of the content but its quality and context as well.
Keyword stuffing isn’t going to skyrocket you to the top of the rankings anymore. You need Quality longe form content that helps the reader in some way. The more in-depth your page can get the better it will be for your SEO.
You want to make sure that the reader has no reason to go anywhere else but your website, this ties back into RankBrain. To be able to cover everything that needs to be covered we suggest you publish content that’s 1,500 – 2,000 words.
Long-form content has proven to do better in search rankings than having shorter, even if you have more of the shorter content.
Know your target market and keep them in mind while curating the content. Who you are aiming to attract will affect the type of content you publish. Also, keep an eye out for user-driven content, this can help you understand what people are looking to read. That way you can create high ranking content easier.
Use SEO Best Practices 2019
The SEO best practices 2019 aren’t hard to implement but they will make a big difference in your visibility.
Remember content is king, and make sure your website is user-friendly. No one wants to with forever for a page to load, and forever in internet time is 3 seconds.
The search engines are tweaking their algorithms to be more in tune with what people actually want to see. So as a rule of thumb, keep your users happy.
If you have any other questions or need more specific advice contact us. We’re more than happy to help.
