SEO Best Practices of 2019

The new year has finally come upon us, which means new trends are also making their SEO strategy debuts for marketers far and wide. If you want to continue earning the highest rankings for your website, these vital SEO practices for 2019 will be key to your success.

In this handy guide, we have compiled for you the 6 Best SEO Practices for 2019. Keep reading as we show you what new strategies you may need to implement and how these tactics will help you drive more traffic.

Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are handy little text boxes that appear at the top of most Google searches. They provide the most convenient way of showing the quickest answers to our searched questions at first glance – not requiring page visitors to click on any links beforehand. The displayed excerpts come from websites that Google decides as the most suitable form of answer to the user’s main question.

If you want to rank your content in Google’s featured snippets, you can implement a Q&A sequence on your page which answers questions that your customers might be asking when researching on Google. Even if you have some large competitors dominating search terms, “smaller” sites have a fair chance of gaining these top positions; should they be able to supply well structured answers that Google can easily utilise.

High Quality Content

Last August 2018, Google confirmed a sweeping global Core Algorithmic Update that took an entire week to get completed and fully rolled out.

According to SEO-ers like Barry Schwartz and Glen Gabe, this Google update was all about quality – particularly affecting sites that had low E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness).

Google references its advice from the previous core updates, saying there’s “No fix for pages that may perform less well, other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.”

It seems that this massive August 2018 update had a larger impact in the health and medical space, as well as on YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) types of pages. Google’s advice overall has been to make your site, content and user experience better and to keep on working at the small changes that can have a large and immense impact on your site rankings.

Moz also posted their data after this story was published. Much like the rest, they saw more activity in the health industry compared to others.

User Experience

The main key to having a successful online business all boils down to one thing – your users’ happiness. Keep in mind that no matter how good and impressively optimised your website is, if it is not highly beneficial and convenient for your visitors to navigate, it will have zero positive effect on your overall search presence.

User experience is the heart of all website and marketing goals. This is about being well established in the industry as an authoritative and trustworthy resource that your visitors can credibly rely and count on and then having a website that is tailored to your users on various devices. One way of improving this across your website is by hiring a conversion rate optimisation agency who analyses your user journeys and helps you make the decisions that improve their experience.

Voice Search

According to Stone Temple’s most recent voice usage trends survey, more people today are becoming comfortable with the use of voice commands and voice search on their respective mobile devices.

With a survey comprising of over 1,000 people, Stone Temple were able to gain a very precise and detailed data analysis on how people use voice, when they use voice, and why – with a whopping 61% answering YES to the question “Are you comfortable activating/accessing Siri or Google using your voice commands via (Siri/Google/Alexa)?” and only 14% saying NO.

10 out of 12 categories from this next chart also gained a total boost in their usage percentage when compared with the 2017 data – marking ‘office use’ and ‘on public transportation’ as the highest environments that people use their voice searches on.

According to Google, every fifth search query on all mobile devices are now made via voice input. Due to the increasing use of digital assistants and smart home devices, users will most probably opt for Voice Search features more frequently this year and in all the other years to come so its important we tailor to how words are spoken versus how they are typed only.

Google’s Mobile-first Indexing

Back on March 26, 2018, Google officially announced that they were rolling out Mobile-first indexing via their Webmaster Central Blog. According to Google, this meant (and in quote) “We will continue to have one single index that we use for serving search results. We do not have a ‘mobile-first index’ that’s separate from our main index. Historically, the desktop version was indexed, but increasingly, we will be using the mobile versions of content.”

Mobile-first indexing is about how Google gathers content and not about how the content itself is ranked. Content gathered by this procedure has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content.

Google also laid out this 4 key notes regarding Mobile-first indexing:

• Being indexed this way has no ranking advantage and operates independently from our mobile-friendly assessment.
• Having mobile-friendly content is still helpful for those looking at ways to perform better in mobile search results.
• Having fast-loading content is still helpful for those looking at ways to perform better for mobile and desktop users.
• As always, ranking uses many factors. We may show content to users that’s not mobile-friendly or that is slow loading if our many other signals determine it is the most relevant content to show.

RankBrain

One of the biggest SEO practices for this year is the high emphasis on RankBrain. This is a part of Google’s 2015 core algorithm that uses machine-learning to serve users with better search results based on search intent.

RankBrain helps the algorithm interpret complex, long-tail search queries and the main intent behind them. It can “see patterns between seemingly unconnected complex searches to understand how they’re actually similar to each other.” Additionally, it can also “understand future complex searches and whether they’re related to particular topics.”

Artificial intelligence has been responsible for answering the type search query that has never been made before. Apparently, that constitutes to about 15% of the daily search queries on Google. In other words – RankBrain is smart, and the more data it collects, the smarter it gets about the user’s search intent.

How Contevo Can Help Maximise Your Search Engine Optimisation

Here at Contevo, we are driven by one thing – ‘Continuous Evolution’. We help our clients design and execute their sales blueprint so that they can grow and scale their businesses using our advanced market-leading strategies. Get in touch if we can help your business.