Google is updating their search engine infrastructure on regular basis. There are over 200 different ranking factors, and as trends on the internet keep changing, Google has to change too.
As a result, minor and not so minor tweaks and updates to the ranking signals keep Google search results relevant. Most of those changes happening without our ever noticing significant differences in the search engine result rankings, because of how slowly the changes are applied.
However if you put them in the perspective of a year, these changes add up.
Below, we will look into the 3 most interesting 2019 SEO trends:
- Voice Search SEO
By 2020, half of all search traffic to websites will be coming from spoken queries. Same as the mobile searches took a big bite from the desktop search pie a couple of years back, it is expected that by 2020, spoken search queries from various devices such as Siri, Alexa, Google assistant will account for as much as 50% of all internet queries.Voice searches are quite different from the ones we type in, simply because in the voice search we would use more conversational keywords such as “what should I wear today” or “do I need umbrella today” instead “weather Vancouver”.
This will change the way we will optimize our keywords. So you will increasingly hear more about things like ‘parent keywords’ and ‘long-tail keywords’ in the future.
Is your website voice search friendly? - The second trend is the rise of video content, with video content becoming increasingly more popular.
It is easier to watch a video than read an article, and it’s easier to watch a 3 min presentation about a company, rather that trying to get a feeling about that company through reading the text on their website.
That having been said, it is *much* harder to create a professionally produced video than to write an article, but with new technology, and better and more affordable video equipment, it has put video production in a more affordable range accessible by any company that can afford a professionally designed website.
By the 2020, it is projected that 75% of the mobile traffic on the web will be interacting with video content, and 70% of marketers plan to use video marketing this year.
At this moment, social video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined.
Have you considered getting a video presentation made of your company? If you’re interested in getting a corporate video produced, contact us for more information.
- The third trend is Mobile first indexing.
Up to now Google was using Desktop version of your website to crawl and index, but from now on, Google will predominantly be using mobile version of your website.This development was long coming, as you will have noticed that during 2018, Google was slowly introducing mobile first indexing. As a result, you might have noticed that your website ranks differently if you search for it on your mobile device, rather than the results you see on your desktop or laptop.
What does this mean to you? Probably not much, because most of the websites are already responsive, which means that can support multiple screen sizes in the same time.
Since most responsive websites are device agnostic, and return the same content to a mobile phone as they would to the desktop, you are most likely good to go.
If you are not sure about the quality of your mobile version of your site, you can give us a call, and we would be happy to assist you.