Top 5 SEO Trends That Will Matter Most in 2019

Google’s heavily investing to be the best. SEOs are trying to adapt to changes that follow. That’s how SEO trends are born. Let’s view what trends will make a difference in 2019.

1. 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.

If you are looking to hire a digital marketer in India keep in mind that the right person focuses on mobile marketing as well. Nowadays, with the growing use of smartphones, there is no surprise to stats which says that 50% of the Google searches are made through mobile. Google also announced in their March 2018 announcement that they have started migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile first indexing.

2. Understand Your Audience & User Intent:

What your audience like? Text? Video? Images? Even if your website has an amazing design, your website content is perfect, it doesn’t mean that you get the benefit of your business, because you are targeting the wrong audience.

Make sure that when creating content, you focus on keywords which relate to users behavior and their search queries. We have to make a strategy to get the real output of content. User intent is the purpose behind the user’s search.

We have to take our content a step ahead focusing on marketing strategy and targeted keywords. You have to serve the customer as per their intention. So in 2019, It’s very important to understand your audience and user intent to get more output with minimum efforts.

3. Voice Search

This trend is with us for the whole 2018, It’s looking like that 2019 will have all hallmarks of being called the year of voice search. It is time for local business to take voice search seriously. Above 20% of the search queries on smartphones are made through voice as said by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. People using Siri, Alexa, voice-activated home assistants like Google Home and other smart devices for searching an answer.

Thinking about optimizing for how people speak instead of how they talk. Companies should present information in the form of answering questions and they can solve users problems. To optimize for voice search, make sure to focus on conversational, long tail phrases that have greater chances to express a searcher’s intent. Because of the increase voice search query day by day, we should focus on long tail keywords when optimizing content.

It is said that by 2020, 50% of all online traffic will be coming from spoken queries.

4. Page speed

Google’s nuts about delivering the best UX and delivering it fast. Desktop page loading time has been a ranking factor for a while. In July, it got a twin sibling – mobile page speed’s become a ranking factor for mobile.

This crucial change calls for understanding which metrics matter for Google in terms of page speed evaluation.

People now want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible. Over 50% of visitor expect your page to fully load within only 3 seconds, so there are no other options apart from joining the race. Apart from that, Google also announced page speed as a ranking factor. From July 2018, page speed is consider ranking factor for mobile devices also.

Google Pagespeed Insight, a tool that checks the performance of your webpage and evaluated your site on the basis of technical parameters. Google latest research says that the chance of bounce rate increases 32% when the page load time goes from 1s to 3s. 1s to 5s increases up to 90% and sites that take up time to 10s, the chance of bounce increases to 123%.

5. GDPR

Let’s bet you got annoyed this spring when your inbox got filled with GDPR and Privacy Policy mails. What’s this thing?

GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation passed in the European Union. It regulates a very nagging issue – who owns the data created by users’ interactions online. From now on, it’s users who do, not corporations which collect it. Consequently, users can now request to see what personal data the company has about them and ask for its correction or export. If a company doesn’t comply with the regulations, it can be hit with severe fines (€20 mln or 4% of the company’s annual profit).

This regulation affects the EU companies and customers. However, international companies should also comply with GDPR. As a result, Google’s decided to introduce changes into its Analytics. Now all personal user data expires after 26 months since it was collected. Such data includes demographic and affinity data (earlier kept perpetually) and doesn’t include sessions and goal completions. However, each site owner can change this data collection default period. Plus, it’s now possible to delete the data of individual users upon their request.