SEO or Search Engine Optimisation trends change every year to rank relevant pages for users. Because SEO is being used by every website, Google won’t compromise ranking. Hence, newer updates are released and the algorithms keep changing. Here are 6 SEO trends of 2019 that you need to know about.
1. User Experience
Google has prioritized user experience as the most important criterion. It plays a vital role in every aspect of SEO, be it your website or the content on your page. The attention span of a user has reduced to 7 seconds which is the total time you have to grab their attention.
You can give your user the best experience on your page by optimizing it. Your content needs to be easier to read and containing body tags to make the headings more prominent. Many a time you might fill your page up with as many ads as you can but most SEO consultant would advise that cluttering your page with ads would cause the user to leave your site.
Often websites make their ads blend in with the content, tricking the reader. The content on your page should also have a good word count which can solve the user query and contain relevant information.
2. Voice search
Voice search has lately become the trend for every app and site. Every website is allowing voice search to be used for various queries and for that matter even Google. As it is the latest trend, you should also incorporate voice search for your website and app.
With voice search devices like Alexa and Ok Google gaining popularity, it can be predicted that this technology will have much greater prospects in the future, as well. If you haven’t optimized for voice search and your competitor has, be ready to lose some users.
3. Page Speed
Page speed has been a crucial point to rank any website by Google. If your page speed is low, the chances of Google ranking you for queries is close to nil. Even if your page does rank, a user would leave the page if the site took longer to load. This is called a bounce rate where a user leaves your page right after clicking on it which signals Google of a bad experience.
It has also been added in the Google Quality Guidelines as a criterion for ranking. Google PageSpeed is a tool where you can know your page speed. The scores are in the range of 0–100 where a score 85 or above means that your page speed is good. The ideal page speed should be 3 seconds. Longer than this and 50% of users have already left the page.
4. Mobile Site
Mobile friendly websites have been termed as mandatory by Google to rank in the search results. Hence, making your site user-friendly for mobile users is vital. The desktop version isn’t so user-friendly making the experience of surfing websites really tedious. This increases the importance of optimizing your website. In mobile-first indexing, Google indexes your mobile site first.
If you do not have a mobile site, Google will index the desktop version as well but it will affect your rankings because you haven’t optimized for a mobile version. This feature will affect your site even if you are searching from a desktop. A user would definitely leave your page and prefer to visit a page that fits in the screen of their phone.
5. Other Search Engines
Everyone prefers to use Google browser to get answers to their queries but there exists some percentage of users that operate from other browsing sites as well. Browsers like Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc. also hold some percentage of users.
So, performing SEO for other search engines makes a lot of sense. If visibility and traffic are the main goals, why shouldn’t other browsers be considered even if the percentage of people using it is small? For this specific reason, you should consider SEO optimization for other web browsers, too.
6. Video Content
The percentage of people using their internet for watching videoes has increased tremendously. Predictions are that video content will be taking over other types of content which would, in turn, make digital marketers start using video for marketing their client’s brand. Marketing via video is becoming crucial for every digital marketer due to its popularity.
A report by Hubspot revealed that Facebook is catching up for being used for videos almost as much as Youtube. This shows user behavior and their preference for videos over other types of content. With better camera quality of smartphones, creating video content is becoming easier.
Conclusion
These are some of the trends of 2019 that are changing the way SEO is. With technology advancing and newer updates coming in every day, SEO is going to change a lot in the years to come and every SEO consultant will have to create newer strategies and techniques to replace the older ones.
The innovations could revise the way users interact on the internet today and renew the ways brands and businesses gain traffic.
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