Current SEO Trends You Must Know

You need to know the current SEO trends in 2019 and make them work for your own website content. What does your audience prefer?

Text? Images? Videos? Audio? Knowing this is most important in 2019. You need to understand what someone is expecting to find when they query a word or a phrase in a search engine, and you need to provide them with an answer in the simplest way possible.

Once upon a time, ranking in Google was one of the easiest things to do. You just added the keyword enough times to your content and you stood out. Things have changed. Now it’s like a game of strategy.

Even if the content on your website is top-notch, it won’t grow into business if it is for the wrong audience. You need to make your content more attractive to search engines. The time is now to stop matching keyword phrases and start making sure that your content comprehensively answers questions your audience is asking via search.

Now to keep up with this shift in 2019, you have to be an SEO consultant, or you could just read this article in which we offer a few insights about SEO trends.

optimise website content for voice search

High Quality Content

Content is king. That’s something you’ll hear a lot. However, high quality content is god. You need to make sure any content you have is good quality. When Google changed the way it ranked, it started looking for content that answered a searcher’s question. It was no longer about content that had the most number of keyword references but had the quality to back it up. Using a copywriter is the best way to get high quality content.

If people click away from your site within the first 15 seconds, your site gets dinged. The trends for SEO in 2019 involved detailed content.

Those 300-word page may be necessary for the minimum wordcount for Google, but they’re not going to rank well up against a site that has 1000-word blog posts. More and more people are looking for all the details in one page. They don’t want to have to keep searching or click a number of links.

Make your content as detailed as possible. You can add in links, but you don’t want to force people to go elsewhere for the extra information. However, links in a contents table at the start of your post are good. You can give people the titles so they can click and go directly to a section they want.

Quality content means:

  • thousands of words
  • multiple images
  • complex information in tables
  • bullet points for ease of reading
  • links to other pages / websites
  • optimised for voice search
  • useful information so that users stay on the page

Work to Gain Good Backlinks

Having a backlinking strategy is essential. It’s one of the top SEO trends and it’s going away any time soon. If people are linking back to your content, Google realises that you’re someone to trust.

However, you want to do this properly. Paying someone to link back to your content isn’t good. That person you’re paying is legally obliged to make your link “no-follow,” which means Google doesn’t pay attention to it. It can also be spammy.

You want people linking to you because they recommend you. It’s important to get people linking to you from websites with higher domain authority to you, showing that you’re worth Google’s time.

Making the most of this trend in SEO in 2019 means work on your part. You’re going to need to reach out to others within your niche or even in a niche where you can cross over. It’s important to network and make connections. Because so few bloggers and web owners want to do this, you’ll immediately get the advantage.

Rankings are extremely beneficial, and you can get them with backlinks, starting at the tail-end and working your way up to the higher rankings. As your ranking grows, you get links naturally and site hits grow.

Getting links is perfectly sensible. People want to link to great content, so outreaching can reap a lot of success.

However, the link must be based on a relevant website that Google wants to rank.

Search Engine Results Page Optimisation

Search Engine Results Page Optimisation

The business model of search engines is fairly simple: Copy the content of all the websites in the world and make it searchable to sell pay per click ads.

Now, what you need to do is use your listing to full capacity. Search engines like Google have been optimising their SERP design so that as many as possible people click on their ads. This they accomplished by using favicons next to website titles.

Legally, you are required to have a small [Ad] symbol next to it. In recent years, this symbol has been made less noticeable, hereby, increasing the click-through-rate(CTR). Now that favicons (the same size as the Ad symbol) have been added, people become blind to it.

‘Lo and behold, an increase in CTR.

Another way to increase CTRs is to feature snippets. Though it is uncontrollable, you can get them if you put the right content on your website. Snippets are tricky but extremely valuable. As long as snippets exist, people are more likely to click on your informational pages.

To get picked for snippets, you need to provide information that is listable and easy for a computer to understand; use bullet points and HTML tables.

Use attractive snippets and inner links to sections on the page to attract clients. Moreover, by increasing your width, the more likely that you’ll get noticed and bring valuable traffic.

Smaller File Sizes

Want some hot news? GIFs, JPG, and PNG-they are a thing of the past and have been replaced by WebP.

Google likes it when it sees WebP images on your website, which save you 50-60% of the total image weight. Who wants GIFs that are only 8-bit colours and take up a big chunk of your page.

All of this is for the benefit of website speed and user experience.

Step Back from AMP

Unless you’re a new site, you want to step away from the AMP (accelerated mobile pages). But don’t you want the mobile pages to load fast? Well, yes, but at the same time, you want the mobile pages to have a similar experience to those who are searching on desktop.

AMP strips out the branding, the colouring, and the images. It offers a lazy load, which can be great for those running on data, but it’s not the excellent web experience they would expect from your website. Use WebP instead to help make the most of the experience.

Good quality content and great backlinks are the top two SEO trends you need to pay attention to. Everything else will fall into place.