Thinking about an SEO strategy in advance is crucial in improving your success. Managing your SEO campaigns is similar to a marathon, not a sprint. Keeping everything consistent is important. These 4 SEO trends for 2019 will keep your company ahead of the competition.

Mobile-first Indexing

Google is an important factor for SEO marketing, and they have shaken things up this year by using mobile-first indexing and ranking. Since March of this year, Google has started migrating sites to mobile-first index. Google will now be using the mobile versions for ranking sites from now on. There will still be a single index for both mobile and desktop versions, but mobile will be the primary platform for ranking.

This means that your site must be compatible and responsive for mobile devices. Google recommends against m-dot and responsive for the same page since it confuses crawlers.

User Experience (UX)

WE DO NOT OPTIMIZE FOR SEARCH ENGINES, WE OPTIMIZE FOR USERS.

The users are the reason we make our sites easier to use, faster to load, and easier to process. These following points should be on your focus in 2019:

Loading speed: It is important to check the time which it takes to load your website. There are various tools one can use, such as Google’s PageSpeed tool. It’s free and helps measure the performance of your site.

Easy to use website: Making your website easy to navigate is crucial. Users are becoming more demanding for simple interfaces that are straight to the point. Google also appreciates this when ranking sites.

Mobile Optimization: More than 50% of searches are done smartphones or tablets. Meeting your user's needs on these other devices are just as important as desktop users.

Page Speed

Google is a stickler for delivering the best User Experience (UX) and delivering it fast. Desktop loading time has been a ranking factor for a long time, but now it has a twin that is just as important – Mobile page speed.

Businesses now need to optimize and improve mobile load times in order to compete in rankings.

With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps, Google shows you how to make your mobile page even faster. Although it may be an advantage for News websites, it still has its limitations. AMPs are devoid of images and structure, they consist of pure text, which is why the pages load so quickly. Not all websites should use AMP.

Featured Snippets

When looking at Google’s search engine results page (SERPS), one can see that there is a lot of competition at the top. Recently introduced by Google, the featured snippets are placed in front of the organic search results depending on the search query. There are also various other “competitors” for the top rankings:

• Local Packs
• Knowledge Graph
• “People Also Ask” Boxes
• Google News
• Google Images
• YouTube Video Pack

How can we rank above or on Featured Snippets?

If you want to rank on the Featured Snippets or even on the top-ranked Organic Results, keep your answers well structured. When it comes to knowledge questions, putting questions and answer sequences on the page can improve organic results. Creating tables with structured information will rank you above organic results. Well, structured answers will provide high rankings on Google.

Understanding what your target market wants helps improve your SEO. Ask yourself what your target market wants when searching the web and then focus on providing them with that content. This will help improve your SEO ranking by giving your customers the information they want.

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