Year after year, the field of SEO becomes more sophisticated, pushing companies to use a combination of proven strategies and new techniques to position themselves in front of SERPs.
Developments in the search optimization industry such as semantic search, artificial intelligence and visual search have dramatically changed the way people discover and access content online. At the same time, the rise of personal assistants, as well as the implementation of new data protection laws, presented new challenges that SEO must continue to face in 2019.
1. Optimizing for Voice Search
With advances in voice recognition technology and the proliferation of PDAs such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri on the market, there is no doubt that voice search is rapidly becoming the new standard. According to statistics, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020, which is why it is now more imperative than ever for all companies to optimize their websites for voice search in 2019.
2. Mobile-First Indexing
In March 2018, Google began migrating sites that follow best practices for mobile-first indexing. For the uninitiated, mobile indexing first simply means that Google’s robots will first use the mobile version of the website for indexing and ranking in the SERPs. because there are now separate tabs for speed and optimization in the PageSpeed Insights tool.
3. Linkless Mentions
Backlinks have been an essential element of SEO since the creation of PageRank by Google in 1996. However, with the SEO landscape constantly changing, unrelated mentions can soon become an off-page signal of equal weight. If you want to take advantage of this trend growth in 2019, start by following all the online mentions about your brand and start increasing your mentions by carrying out awareness initiatives with relevant websites.
4. Latent Semantic Indexing
Google processes billions of searches each day, most of which were extremely complex to decode and understand for its search engine algorithm. This is why, in 2015, they published RankBrain, which uses machine learning to understand the context of the content it explores, thus providing more relevant results for the intention of the researcher’s user. of LSI in 2019, you need to optimize your website content by using the appropriate word and phrase correlations that a searcher would naturally use in real-world conversations.
5. Secure Socket Layer
With the release of Chrome 68 in July 2018, Google made it clear that unsecured websites were not worth the ranking and therefore gave an extreme warning to visitors to that site before continuing the visit. As data hacking becomes more common and more common, such Google action is well received, however, if you have not yet migrated your website to HTTPS, this is another problem that needs to be addressed if your goal is to survive in the search optimization arena for years to come.
6. GDPR Impact on SEO
The recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has caused heckling in many industries, and SEO is no exception. Indeed, this EU regulation requires companies to implement all the systems and processes necessary to ensure that all of their European customer data is protected and secure. In terms of SEO, this means that you must update your Privacy Policy and Conditions pages, especially if they are visited by EU citizens, in order to avoid the heavy penalties due to non-compliance with the clauses of the right to know the rules.
