If you want to improve and enrich the positioning of your website in search engines throughout this year, we will tell you which are the most important SEO trends of 2019 that you should not lose sight of.
What is SEO, how and why does it work
SEO is a complex science that requires time, money, effort and constant renewal, in addition to quality content and a good web design to meet the demands and needs of users and be well seen in the eyes of the almighty Google, whose algorithm changes it is necessary to watch closely. Every year, and with the advance of the AI, the machine learning or the higher penetration of smartphones -which increases the importance of mobile search- new and relevant SEO trends arise that you will have to attend with a magnifying glass to implement these tactics in your blog or Web page.
If the unnatural backlinks, saturation with keywords, guest posts disconnected from the theme of the site or keyword meta tags are SEO techniques that have fallen into disuse most absolute, even some as the link farms, being penalized by Google, today you must take into account other strategies and relevant SEO tactics in the present 2019, where Google continues to humanize its algorithms and rewarding more and more optimal user experiences, the original, extensive and quality content or the appropriate structuring of the data of the web.
Let’s look, then, at the most important SEO trends of 2019
Featured fragments
The highlighted fragments will continue to play an important role in 2019 when it comes to satisfying the user’s need for simple answers to a question. The extracts shown come from websites that Google interprets as adequate to answer the user’s question. In addition to the standard search results, on one in five occasions, Google shows rich elements as pieces extracted by the Knowledge Graph in the right column or featured snippet in English.
The usual is that they offer the piece of content on the web with the link to the page itself and the title of it. Due to the increasing supply of content, this year it will be increasingly difficult to be visible in the top positions of the SERPs. Especially around the questions of knowledge, it is advisable to include sequences of questions and answers on your website, as well as tables with structured information. It is also convenient to know more about the target audience and their needs.
Increased importance of structured data
With the evolution of SERPs, Google is accessing more and more data material, while nowadays it can also create its own meaningful meta-descriptions of existing content. In addition, the search engine giant uses structured data to create the named rich snippets, whose available space has been reduced due to a change in the layout of the ads.
It is more important than ever for your SEO strategy that you mark your content in the best possible way, using resources like schema.org. Research around the key words -which can guide the who, what, when, where and why-, analyze the highlighted fragments of your market niche and develop a clear definition of the hypothetical query as close as possible to the top of the page, referencing sources and using original content.
An investigation published by STAT reveals that about 30% of the URLs of the highlighted fragments are classified in the first position organically, while the rest are extracted from the websites classified between Positions 2 to 5 in the search engine.
Optimize based on the user experience
The user experience plays an increasingly important role. Some of the points that generate a good user experience are usability, the usefulness of each one of the elements of the web, the valuable explanations for the user, the design and the quality policy, the search facility within the web -an appropriate menu, with clear sections and search engine-, the security certificate or the creation of value.
Especially we recommend you to improve the loading speed, take care of the graphic aspect -the use of Adobe Flash is strictly forbidden- and satisfy the needs of mobile search.
AMP for mobile devices
Mobile optimization is the standard for creating new websites today. With Accelerated Mobilie Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps, Google shows you how to make a mobile page even faster.
AMP is a more limited simplified version of the web, since they are programmed with their own language, variation of HTML and called AMP HTML. It is a version that eliminates the elements that promote the slowness of a web, such as JavaScript or forms. According to Google, AMP pages load from 15% to 85% faster, depending to a large extent on how the web is programmed in an original way.
Quality in texts
Although Google’s algorithms are improving and improving, you still need content in the form of text to determine the relevance of web pages to a search query. Google has made enormous improvements in the analysis of textual content in recent years and now uses the Rankbrain algorithm to better understand the content.
It is advisable to review the texts continuously and make sure they are unique and offer added value. The length is also awarded by Google, which continues to punish duplicate content, excessive keywords and unnatural language.
Search by voice, the ascendant queen
According to Google, a fifth of search queries on mobile devices is now done through voice. Due to the increasing use of digital assistants and smart home devices, users will increase voice searches in 2019.
To prepare the SEO of your business for voice searches, it is essential to work with mobile SEO, improve loading speed, have a responsive design, use long tail keywords integrated with places and integrated with geolocation, optimize the landing page and Use tools to anticipate possible questions from users, such as Google Trends or Google Suggest.
Priority of mobile optimization
In the last two years, Google has shown that the focus is increasingly on mobile devices, whose optimization was already introduced as a ranking factor in 2016.
Work on local SEO, improve loading speed – avoiding plugins or heavy images -, include geolocation among keywords, have an attractive template or attend to voice searches are some of the keys. Remember to use the Google Mobile Optimization Test.
The linkbuilding is still alive
Although each year anticipates his death, in 2019 the backlinks will continue to play an important role and therefore, the link building strategy will continue to be relevant. The past 2018 Gary Illyes of Google, said in a conference that a good PageRank is still an important signal of classification for Google. To improve the authority, having natural incoming links is essential.
The guest post or the construction of links through third-class portals is no longer useful: you must invest in unique content that users enjoy consuming or sharing. In fact, Google warned more than a year ago about the abuse and danger of the guest format. Try to offer the user added value, use specialized tools such as Open Profiler to know where the incoming links come from and those of your competitors, inform broken links to the owners of the websites and create alerts to establish a follow-up.
Importance of the images
Google significantly improved its search for images in 2017. Many websites even had to deal with traffic losses because users no longer have to leave Google to view images and can click on them as in an image gallery. This new feature should be an incentive to optimize your visual material.
Some ways to do it are to use better photos than your competitors, to take care of the quality and originality of them, to have a size as big as the width of the blog content, to have a loading time of less than three seconds or to remember to include the ALT attribute in the code of each image.
Rankbrain: machine learning
Google has implemented RankBrain, an automatic learning system born originally in 2015 and whose basic function is to improve Hummingbird by transforming words into vectors covered by machines. In other words, RankBrain uses AI to generate meanings around related terms, detecting common patterns that relate them.
Thus, the search engine will solve with ever greater precision the poor understanding before the consultations – due to the context, the polysemy, the spelling mistakes or the plurals – its own self-learning system, using factors such as the rebound rate.