2019 And Beyond: SEO in the Future
The search engine industry is advancing at a breakneck pace, meaning that online marketers continuously have to make updates to their SEO techniques. In this article, we are going to outline a few key factors you need to take into consideration when planning your website’s SEO strategy for 2019.
Long-form Content
Google has been rewarding long-form content for a while now and is only set to place more value on it in the future. Gone are the days when you could publish a few 200-word keyword-optimized blog posts on your website and start ranking for lucrative search terms. High-quality long-form content can be expensive, but it is worth investing in it. 2000-word articles article also provide you with the added benefit of being able to target many long tail keywords. Just make sure you structure long-form content correctly, so it is easy to digest. For example, you could use multiple sub-header tags, tables, lists, bullet points, infographics and more.
Mobile Optimisation
A large percentage of the population now use a smartphone as their primary device to browse the internet. This means that optimizing your website for mobile browsers is essential. Google’s 2018 mobile-first algorithm update resulted in many sites losing their top position on SERP. It is sure that search engine ranking algorithms will continue to place more emphasis on the need for websites to be optimized for mobile devices.
Website Speed and Security
Website speed and security are key ranking factors that are often overlooked. Going forward in 2019, ensuring your website is using the lastest HTTPS technology vital for any successful SEO marketing campaign. Furthermore, improving page loading speed is also essential. To increase a website’s loading speed and uptime, you might need to upgrade to a better web hosting provider. Alternatively, you may need to start optimizing some of the data-rich content on your website. While a 4k resolution website header might look awesome on a large monitor, it could also be slowing down your site and impacting its position on SERPs.
Voice Search Isn’t Going Away Anytime Soon
As technology like Google Home, Siri and Alexa have increased in popularity, voice searches have become more and more mainstream. Many online marketing analysts predict that over 50% of all web searches will be voice searches by 2020. This means you need to optimize your business website for voice search keywords. Such keywords often take the form of short commands or questions. Also, people tend to use more colloquial language when speaking, so you might want to conduct some keyword research into conversational words and phrases related to your business niche.
Structured Data
Using descriptive tags and structuring the content on your website using tables, headers, bullet points, makes it easy for search engine crawling bots to classify and index content. You might have noticed that Google search results now often feature structured data from websites above the organic search results and in the website description section. Structured data is going to become more critical in the future of SEO Seattle marketing.
Build A Brand Reputation
While backlinks are guaranteed to remain a crucial ranking factor, linkless mentions are predicted to become more valued by ranking algorithms going forward. Linkless mentions are incidents on trusted websites when your business is mentioned without a hyperlink attached. Consequently, you need to start building the brand reputation of your company, so it gets more mentions from sources with high domain ranks.
Fresh Content
Despite many of the predicted changes to the future of SEO, one thing is for sure, and that is that search engines are going to remain hungry for fresh, quality content. Therefore, content creation should continue to form a big part of your business’s SEO marketing campaigns in 2019.