
12 Feb Important SEO trends in 2019
As a digital communicator, you already know the best practices to improve traffic to your website.
There are some elements that are our digital commandments and know that we can’t create content without them:
- Design for mobile
- Improve user experience (UX) / design with user intent
- Create quality content
- Increase webpage speed
You can read our blog posts for a quick refresher.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always changing and new trends are popping up. To stay a head of SEO trends, we have listed five trends you will need to optimize for in 2019.
Important SEO trends in 2019
1. Mobile-first indexing
Google launched the mobile-first index in 2018.
What is the mobile-first index?
Websites are now ranked based on the quality of UX on mobile devices. If your website has a mobile version, this version will be indexed, and the desktop version is indexed as per usual.
If ranking is now based on mobile UX, you now must master SEO by having a mobile friendly website to increase traffic to your pages, otherwise you will miss out.
2. Optimize for voice search
Every second, there are about 65,000 search queries entered in Google. Now that more people are using speech to look up information on their smart home and assistant devices like Siri, Google Home, and Alexa, the number of voice search has increased.
As these technologies continue to become more sophisticated, business will have to start thinking about voice search SEO.
How to optimize your website for voice search?
If you are already implementing SEO best practices, your website is already optimized for voice search.
But there are a few key elements to keep in mind:
- Write your content the way a person would ask a question. You can use Answer the Public to look up how people are asking questions.
- Use longer-tail keywords and conversation words together. For example, write “what are the best restaurants in Canada” instead of “best restaurants in Canada.”
- Write blog post dedicated to answering questions or update your FAQ page.
3. Take advantage of Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are the information box that display on the top of search results list when you search for information. A summary of the answer to the question asked will appear and will have a link to the webpage where the answer was found.
How do I get content featured in snippets?
Unfortunately, the rich snippet comes from Google. For your information to display in that prime real estate, your page must have good organic ranking. Content that are on the first page of a search results lists have more changes of being featured in the snippets box.
If you want to increase your changes of being features, you must choose the right keywords and create quality content that visitors can use.
Your ranking will also improve if you have structured data. This means fixed fields (e.g., author, date, etc.) from your website have been organized in a database and has a clear definition on how the data stored, retrieved, processed and acceded.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a web developer to add structured data to your site. With Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper you can now add this data yourself. This tool will provide you with the missing fields your page needs to increase your ranking in search engines and subsequently increase the probability of being featured in snippets.
4. Use of SSL Certificate
Since 2014, Google included HTTPS in their ranking algorithm and introduced it as a ranking signal.
What is HTPPS?
The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate makes sure that the data is safe and secure between the browser and the web server. It protects users’ connections and secures their sensitive information, like banking information.
If you don’t have SSL on your website, it’s recommended that you do. Not only can it can boost your ranking in search engines and it also reassures users trust when they visit your site.
5. Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence
Blockchain was a hot topic in 2018. This technology has drastically changed how data is tracked online. This is good for consumers as it provides them more control over their data and challenges companies to think of innovative ways on how to use this data.
Experiments are presently taking place to learn how blockchain can be used on SEO. We don’t know how this will present itself, we’ll have to stay tune for the results this year.
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