6 SEO Experts unpick the nitty gritty and unpick what the big search trends for 2019 will be. Click the links below to learn more and get even more trends!
Mobile First Indexing!
“In a nutshell, mobile-first indexing means that Google uses the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking. Since March 2018, Google’s started the process of migrating sites to mobile-first index. It might happen that Search Console has already notified you about it.
Bear in mind, a mobile-first index does not mean “mobile-only.” There’s still a single index with both mobile and desktop versions. However, the whole “mobile-first” buzz means that Google will be using the mobile versions for ranking once the site’s migrated.
You get it, right? With your mobile version being the primary one for ranking, there’s no excuse to procrastinate with mobile-friendliness.”
SEO Expert – SEO Power Suite, contributing to Search Engine Land.
More Structured Data
Use structured data whenever possible, said Marcus Tandler, co-founder and managing director of Ryte.
“With AI becoming increasingly important for Google, structured data is becoming more important as well,” Tandler said. “If Google wants to move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world, structured data is key. No matter how good your AI is, if it takes too long to ‘crawl’ the required information, it will never be great. AI requires a fast processing of contents and their relations to each other.”
JP Sherman, enterprise search and findability expert at Red Hat, said you should start looking at and understanding structured data, schema, active and passive search behaviors, and how they can connect to behaviors that signal intent so that the behavior of search becomes a much larger effort of findability.
“Contextual relationships between topics and behaviors, supported by structured markup, is the critical trend we need to start understanding, testing, and implementing for 2019,” Sherman said. “Using information architecture, tags, metadata and more recently, structured markup, we’ve had the ability to give search engines signals to understand this topical and supportive content structure.”
Further, Jamie Alberico, SEO product owner for Arrow Electronics, said you should “leverage your existing content by integrating speakable and fact check structured data markup. These markups are a key link between factual reality and the screenless future.”
SEO Experts, Marcus Tandler of Ryte, JP Sherman of Red Hat, and Jamie Alberico of Arrow Electronics, all contributing to Search Engine Journal.
Optimise for Voice Search
With 30% of web browsing expected to go screenless by 2020, this is a major – and still growing – trend to keep optimizing for (Gartner: 2016). Even though this capability has been making the SEO trends lists for some time now, it’s still relevant as ever. That’s because with technology as recent as this, each year brings new developments, as well as more data we can use to understand how exactly listings are being categorized.
Like just this past year, a Backlinko study of 10,000 Google Home results taught us that the system seems to talk up suggestions that are already ranking high on the SERPs, even more so ones that have landed that special 0th place in a featured snippet. We also learned that finding a way to literally write out a question in your content, before moving on to the answer (FAQ page style), seems to perform well on these voice search systems.
SEO Expert, Joanna Kramer over on the Wix Community Blog.
Standout User Experience
The user experience on a website can make or break a deal of any magnitude. Therefore, business owners who would prefer to keep making a profit with their sites will do their best to guarantee a silky smooth UX. That means an easy-to-understand, intuitive design, a low page load time, and absolutely no technical issues.
A website gives a better impression of a business than any advertisement. Never let your most powerful assets tarnish your reputation.
SEO Expert Web Gareth contributing on Web CEO.
