If you’ve been keeping an eye on all the things changing for SEO lately, you’ll agree that Google has been spending a lot of time tweaking their search engine’s algorithm. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably already trying to figure out what your game plan will be for 2019. I have spent a lot of time figuring out how to get my clients websites the kind of attention their owners expect.
However, for website development and SEO challenges for 2019, I’ve put together a list of important things you should consider as well:
Improve the User Experience
This is the top most important factor and will help you get the right kind of attention from all your visitors. When I say make the user experience better, it doesn’t directly mean to make it faster, which most people seem to understand from this. The user experience can be made better by:
- Improving the overall design of the website. Make sure it is responsive.
- Making it easy to navigate the website.
- Make sure the website is accessibility friendly and built for everybody.
- Concentrate on readability of your text and organize things well.
- Make sure your website works well on different sized devices.
- Improve your websites response time.
- Use white space more – let your readers breathe.
I know most of these tips are not new and exciting, but their importance cannot be overlooked if you really want your website to perform in 2019.
Make It Easy
From the moment someone opens up your website, it should be pretty clear what you do. It should also be appealing and effortless on the users part to give you their information. Here are a few things you can do to improve lead generation on your website:
- Do more testing. Have random people open your website and ask them what they think it is about. Make changes to your website based on the feedback.
- Ask a few people to go through your lead generation process, ask them how it could be made easier. Get feedback and improve your whole process till its seamless.
Invest in Technical SEO
Having an optimized website is a blessing. We see many business owners complaining that their website is not performing the way it should. Even though it’s all pretty and fancy, it is not attracting the right kind of leads that convert. You may ask why? Well, the answer is all mighty SEO aka Search Engine Optimization. Unless your website is fully optimized, you won’t be able to rank for your targeted keywords and the traffic coming to your website will most likely be spammy.
A study by SEMrush shows that a number of websites present today are plagued with technical SEO issues. It is, therefore, necessary to perform a regular SEO audit of your website so you can make sure that search engine bots are able to crawl your website and index your pages with no issues.
When considering technical SEO, you want to make sure that your website is:
- Performing well
- Can be crawled by search engine bots
- Your web pages are getting indexed
- Your website is not linking to any 404 or dead links
- All your images have alt tags
- All the heading tags(h1,h2..) are set right and are using the keywords in the right way, and are of the right length.
It’s a best practice to regularly perform an in-depth technical SEO audit on your website to make sure that search engines are able to crawl and index your pages without a hitch.
Get Organized – Use SEO and Marketing Tools to Track Your Performance
With so many Google updates going on, you want to make sure that you remain on top for keywords that you have tried so hard to rank for. This is the reason you need an SEO and marketing tool to track all your keywords and rankings. As soon as you see that your ranking is dropping for one of your traffic-generated keywords, you can develop a strategy to get your rankings up again.
There are many tools that you can now consider looking into. While SEMrush and Ahrefs are some of the big players, Hike, Accuranker, and Serpstat may be something you will find comparatively more affordable.
Try Optimizing for Featured Snippets
Featured Snippets are selected web results that are featured separately in a box on the top of the Google page below the ads. This position is often referred to as “position zero.”
Google Snippets are aimed to provide the exact answer to the user’s question. Here is an example of what featured snippets looks like for a search term “how to hammer a nail.”
If you can get your content in these featured snippets, you will get more brand exposure and click through rate. According to a case study, the CTR (click-through-rate) of a featured page jumped from 2 percent to 8 percent when it’s content was placed in an answer box aka featured snippet, with revenue from organic traffic was increased by 677%
There are four different kinds of different kinds of featured snippets:
- Paragraph snippets
- List snippets
- Table snippets
- Youtube video snippets
Now how to optimize your content for any of these snippets? We will discuss this in our future blog posts.
Amazon Search – Competing with Google?
SEO is not just about Google. It’s about showing up when people search for a particular product or service or any query online.
“If potential customers are searching for apps, you need to rank in app stores. If they are searching for podcasts or videos, you need to rank where people search for those things,” Krum said. “Strong brands are becoming multi-faceted, ranking more than just websites. Strong SEOs need to do the same thing.”
Amazon is now a competitor of Google when it comes to searching for physical products. It’s relatively easy to make a buying decision at Amazon’s homepage than at Google. Why? Because all the factors that you need to consider when making a purchase are listed right there on the product page – customer reviews, price, pictures, videos, comparison tools, similar product suggestions and ‘ buy with’ algorithms.
Thank you for reading to this point. I hope the SEO challenges and trends that I discussed above will help you to consider your next steps while preparing an SEO campaign for 2019.
Please remember, no matter how many SEO techniques or trends you are keeping track of, all of them come down to serve one single goal – Make your content useful, relevant and accessible.
Adnan loves programming and is always keen on learning about new technology related to web development.
