As we all know, SEO is continually evolving and 2019 will be no exception. The requirement to match the evolution in your SEO agency and digital marketing strategies has never been more prevalent to keep your business on track, online.
In this article, we will look at trends and techniques that will require your full attention in 2019 as the landscape changes. Touch on the challenges ahead and what pitfalls to look out for on your way to high rankings.
On this page
Many of you reading this will be very familiar with how the search engine worked in the recent past and are no doubt intrigued by its current evolution.
Google’s new focus on UX and UI as an integral basis of rankings has caught many by surprise and have been playing catch-up as a result. With your clients becoming more fastidious every year, the requirement to embrace new technologies and improve your UX has never been more relative to an SEO company and their ability to provide search results, and in 2019 there is nowhere to hide.
The SEO Challenges on the Horizon
The Ever-Increasing Influence of User Experience (UX)
It’s no secret that the long game has reaped the most benefit for companies over the past two decades and more, keeping their customer engaged with various new ideas and forms of marketing to keep their brand at the forefront of their consumer’s minds has paid dividends and SEO is no different.
Now search engines are rewarding companies who care for their audience as UX has now become a fundamental factor for Google’s ranking today.
The contributory factors to successful UX are:
Engagement and entertainment; keep them on your page and keep them active. Don’t get the wrong idea and turn your website into a theme park, keep it natural and easy on the eye.
Here are the basics:
- Avoid annoying ads and overselling
- Engaging quality content, not endless content
- Sensible use of white space – Give your reader time to absorb information
- Provide mobile-friendly experience – over 50 percent of all global traffic is now mobile
For many of you, this is nothing new, but it never hurts to be reminded not to stray off-track, yes SEO is evolving but keeping and doing the fundamentals well sets you up so your SEO agency only has to tweak rather than overhaul in 2019 and ensure you stop your customers from sliding back to searching the web again.
Voice Searches
The estimation is by 2020, around 50 percent of all search engine searches will be voice searches.
With the rise of digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa helping to organize people’s work schedules and personal lives, this is a sector of continuous growth moving forward.
As of today, they received hundreds of thousands of requests daily from users using the same searches quotations:
Why?
When?
How?
This will increase fourfold during the course of 2019.
When you break it down, it’s easy to see why the trend is gravitating towards this, instead of getting thousands of answers over hundreds of pages you get one answer
The Most Relevant
Voice search is simple, fast, efficient, and above all else convenient. Something that the new generation demands of its hardware and software in today’s society.
So SEO is moving towards the focus of problems solving and answering direct questions. This presents a new equation for SEO specialists as, as of yet how to monetize voice search is somewhat of an unknown quantity. A recent study of a Kuwait SEO company suggested that the Arab world is set to take on voice searches in multiple languages with new application development due out of Kuwait in the coming twelve months.
The only sure advice as of final quarter 2018 is to treat voice search as the top priority for research and development within your company and how to make a profit from it and push your clients to be at the top of the most relevant searches.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its Influence on Keyword Research in 2019
AI is already a significant factor in internet practice today, but for many is under the radar or relatively unnoticed.
Already relevant ads based upon previous searches and smart search results are numerous and are being used successfully in marketing strategies and campaigns.
Understanding the way Artificial Intelligence behaves is key to SEO outcomes. It’s fair to say that keyword research is mutating as a result of this. However, it’s not time to push the panic button just yet as the consensus is that machine learning algorithms will need time to learn and understand human and consumer behavioural patterns to become standardised. So the full force of AI’s impact on search engines won’t be realized until 2020/21.
Let’s take a look at an example of how keyword research is morphing.
As you will be well aware keyword-spamming is a thing of the past, to be effective we give our keywords semantic value to coerce with AI. In effect we are explaining and defining the origin of the keyword rather than a simply implanting the keyword itself, this can bring further keywords into play and subsequently attract more organic traffic to the page.
SEO Meets Blockchain Technology
If you are not familiar with blockchain technology, it is one of the more advanced and sophisticated innovations in recent times. Currently, widely used in the cryptocurrency world it is one of the most secure payment gateways created to date.
It functions whereby each block contains a crypto hash of the previous block which acts as a timestamp so by design. A blockchain is resistant to modification, so no fake or invalid payment can be processed, so certainly an upgrade to your standard SSL certificate!
Once fully integrated blockchain will help us by gaining consumer confidence. We will break free of the shackles of people ingrained fear of fake news, phishing, scammer websites and the various bad elements which can misguide and defraud users on a daily basis.
Once realized blockchain would become the number one paid search trend. Making the search results credible and transparent to a point where even a miss-click wouldn’t result in people sacrificing personal data.
Blockchain like AI is likely to be entering its pomp in late 2020/21, so getting ahead with how to push it for SEO now will help position your clients at the top of the search engine for keywords such as ‘secure payment gateways’.
Conclusion
Numerous SEO challenges await us in 2019. As we have witnessed Google, have been extremely active in 2018 and goalposts have moved in various ways, expect more of the same next year.
Keep the fundamentals of how you got the ranking success for your clients the same. The one staple with Google is they remain a constant, but attention to UX and UI, along with gaining a better understanding of AI, voice searches and blockchain technology is a must to keep yourself ahead of the curve, and the realisation of how big a curve is will be with us next year.
