New SEO Trends

These are five new SEO trends:

Google Might Not Be The Only Player In Town

For years, it’s been a very valid ‘joke’ that search engine optimization should be renamed ‘Google optimization.’ After all, the competition has never inspired much confidence; Yahoo is a shadow of what it once was, and Bing (which now powers Yahoo, by the way) hasn’t made much headway after a decade on the market.

But now, there are search engine alternatives that are changing the way you look at search.

For example, when it comes to e-commerce and purchasing online goods, Amazon is actually king, not Google. A study by ASS shows that more than half of all users go to Amazon first if they’re looking to buy a product.

This means that brands whose primary product can be purchased from online retailers need to get real friendly with Amazon fast, not just Google.

As an SEO marketer, 2019 is the year that you drop the single-minded obsession with reaching the first page of Google and start looking at optimizing for other search-like channels and content aggregators.

Voice Search

The proliferation of smartphones and the presence of smart speakers and voice assistants in more and more homes have both led to a new kid on the block––voice search.

Where people were once typing keywords into search boxes, now they’re asking natural language queries, and the entire philosophy of keyword research might have to change in response.

We’ve already known for a long time that long-tail keyword strategies are the way to go. They’re more competitive in niches, highly targeted, and even improve conversion rates. Now, with voice search on the rise, people are actually including long-tail keywords in their searches, and it falls on search engine marketers to take advantage of that.

In addition, going back to featured snippets, voice search makes it critical to become the number ‘zero’ result on Google and become the featured paragraph answer. Remember that a voice assistant will typically read back the featured paragraph snippet if you ask a question––and nothing else. That means that optimizing for voice often means competing for exactly one spot.

Content Is King

You’ve heard that a million times, but in 2019 you absolutely cannot be resting on your laurels when it comes to your content strategy.

Google’s search algorithm now uses content quality as a major ranking factor, perhaps as the most important factor for SEO. You’ll see it in the organic links, the sharing, and the discussions that pop up across the Web about the quality content that you produce.

Building high-quality, evergreen, authoritative content is going to be one of the top 2019 SEO trends that you need to respond to as soon as possible.

On-Page Optimization

Link-building is always going to be important, but in 2019, you’ll need to focus more on keeping your on-page factors up to speed. Huge changes are coming to the search landscape, and you’ll want to respond quickly if you want to maintain your rankings.

As everyone else’s pages get faster and more responsive, users are getting more stingy about the time they allocate to each site. They don’t want pages that take forever to load or are a headache to navigate. You want to streamline the process of consuming your content or getting information as much as possible.

Chatbots, a more efficient customer journey, better internal site search for content and answers, and a sitemap that provides as little friction as possible are all answers to the on-page question in 2019, and you need to get these fixed pronto.

Structured Data

In 2019’s SEO trends, you’ll find that an old friend is once again making waves in the SEO world. Structured data is becoming more important once again––but for a very interesting reason compared to before.

Implementing schema markup in your content was once primarily for the purpose of getting rich snippets out there. Now, though, several experts believe that structured data will be useful in the AI-driven future of search.

Because structured data makes it easier for machines to interpret the meanings and relationships of information in your content, having that schema markup will prepare your site for a future where AIs are crawling the web and understanding content before assigning its relevance.