SEO is a fast moving animal.
Although you have many things on your 2019 Marketing list, whilst still adding new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and voice search. The constant remains to be SEO. Whatever you did in 2018 needs to be tweaked to include new objectives to be added to your marketing strategy.
We have been on the look out for the SEO must -haves for 2019.
Voice Search:
Voice search wasn’t a gimmick that was going to fade away. In fact, it’s going to increase drastically.
With the increase in voice devices such as Alexa, Google and Siri. Voice search is due to grow to 50% according to ComScore.
Optimising for voice search isn’t easy, especially with the keyphrases you use being different to the ones we type. Instead of researching keywords and phrases, we would need to understand the way in which your target audience talk.
Voice searches tend to be based around long-tail keywords. Instead of robotically saying “SEO help 2019”, the average person would say something like “How do you improve your SEO in 2019?”
Mobile First Indexing:
SEO is unstoppable and when it comes to mobile this is no exception. Making your website mobile friendly means you need to focus as much energy as you do on desktop SEO.
To really prepare you website for mobile you will need to do a few things first.
Mobile page speed is defined by the length of time it takes to display all the content on the page. Every second counts, as slow websites can be a negative factor when ranking.
Although Google has said the average mobile landing page takes 22 seconds, research published by DoubleClick (Google) suggested if the user is waiting longer than 3 seconds they move on.
Structured data mark-up otherwise known as Schema, this allows google and other search engines to pick up exactly what it is you have on offer and display it to people in search results.
How? you ask. Because schema tells search engines what that content is. For example, let’s say the word “Marshmallow Preston” appears on an article. The search engine sees this and produces a SERP entry with “Marshmallow Preston.” However, if I put the right schema mark-up around the name “Marshmallow,” I’ve just told the search engine that “Marshmallow Marketing” is the name of the company, based in Preston, not just a delicious treat. The search engine then provides results that display better information for the user who was searching for “Marshmallow Marketing.”
Above all, ensure your website is responsive so that all users have the same awesome experience.
Social Media:
As the digital world becomes information-driven, Google has taken to using social media as factors when ranking.
Hootsuite ran a test and found that a number of social media pages were making their way onto Google search results, whether it’s a LinkedIn article or Facebook business page.
This only means one thing, you need to spend more time and effort on putting together a social media marketing strategy, that offers value and engages with your audience.
Paid Search:
PPC (pay per click) is a type of advertising in which you are able to bid for impressions and clicks. You search ad will be placed either at the top or bottom of the search results page.
PPC is a complex beast with many tools to help you target your audience, this includes search and display ads, keywords, demographics, location and in-market topics.
We have found that it woks better if you have 10 specific target ad groups, this enables you to monitor ad tweak the best performing ad group.