It’s the time of the year when you, the conscientious website owner, takes stock of activities that boosted online business in the year gone by and weighs aspects of business that need to be done better. SEO can always be improved upon. The reason is simple. It’s a dynamic feature of your website. Developments in website design, search engine algorithms, and types of media available mean that you need to stay on top of the SEO game.
Here’s what you can expect from SEO in 2019.
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project was launched in February 2019, and since then every indication points to the fact that this isn’t just another Google fad. Mobile is where the audiences are, and Google, through this open source initiative, aims to make content generation for mobiles and mobile browsing a smooth affair. AMP is a new standard and, if you’re planning to create a new website, then use this technology. Already websites that are AMP-compliant are doing better on the search engine results pages. The AMP WordPress plugin generates dynamic AMP versions of the content on your website.
Go easy on the 3xx kind of redirects. Even though Google has declared that such redirects will not cost you PageRank, there is evidence to suggest that topical relevance of anchor texts of pages that are the targets of such redirects is reduced. This has implications for your internal linking. You don’t want a well-ranked page to be the target of a 301 redirect only to see its outbound links lose their mojo. Applied Tactics can run a website audit to check your website’s redirects and we can suggest remedies to boost SEO.
Backlinks are never going to go out of fashion. For the past couple of years, citations for local businesses – NAP details, were considered the new yardstick for SEO success for local businesses. Getting NAP details on Yelp and Foursquare is fine, but this does not dislodge backlinks from its preeminent position of being the most valuable SEO criterion. If you’re running a local business, then aim for backlinks from relevant sites…not necessarily authority sites. You’ll do well to do some serious backlink hunting as a part of your SEO practice in 2019.
Competitor analysis is another aspect of SEO that is evergreen. You can save yourself time and money, generate ideas, and make money by simply doing a good audit of the SEO practices employed by your competitors.
Optimize your site for voice searches and featured snippets. If you can get your website to rank for even a couple of answers that Google features at the top of the SERPs, you’ll experience a serious upsurge in traffic. Voice searches yield more featured snippets than do text searches, so it makes sense to optimize for voice.
The time to gear up for and implement SEO ideas is now. Applied Tactics can help you implement the latest SEO techniques so that you get the best returns on the time and money you invest in your online business.