With a new year arrives new SEO goals and the motivation to succeed. SEO has evolved into a complex beast over the last few years with a large number of factors now taken into account to help determine rankings. We look ahead to some of the key areas which you need to focus on to help you achieve those new year ranking goals.
User experience signals
UX – (user experience) is paramount to Google’s intent when organising and ranking websites and search queries. There are a number of behavioural factors that are taken into account, with Organic CTR, dwell time and bounce rate all important metrics that you should be considering.
Page speed is another important factor, as you might have the best SEO optimised content in the world, but if your page speed is slow, the chances are people won’t even get a chance to read it. With 53% of people would quit if the website takes longer than 3 seconds.
Google RankBrain is heavily linked to the UX behavioural metrics we mentioned earlier. It wants to see what users are clicking on from search results, which is why optimizing your site for organic CTR is so important.
RankBrain is a machine learning language (AI) algorithm that Google uses to sort the search results. It measures how users interact with the search results and ranks them accordingly. Google also stated its one of the 3 main ranking indicators alongside backlinks and content
Improving dwell time is another positive indicator to RankBrain that your content is relevant to the user, by the amount of time spent on your page. Write engaging, relevant content that will keep your reader interested and consider using video content to increase the time spent on your page.
Voice search
2019 will see a huge growth in voice-activated search queries. 20% of mobile search queries submitted via Google app are already conducted using voice. It is estimated that 50% of searches will be queried without a screen by 2020. comscore
62% of Brits are already using or are happy to use voice-operated devices for shopping, controlling music, searching the web and finding the latest news, according to market research house Mintel.
From Cortana to standalone digital assistants such as Alexa or Google Home the way in which we disseminate results are important. From an on-screen display to a single answer, the way we viewed a list of results and chose accordingly is changing, as is how we type and speak differently to activate a search query, opening up many long-tailed keyword opportunities to target for voice-activated search.
It is important that you optimise your content for
- Long-tail voice-oriented keywords
- Schema Metadata
- Local SEO
Position Zero
Getting your content to appear in Google’s Featured Snippets is a powerful opportunity to beat the competition and dominate the top of the SERPs.
A featured snippet is displayed on top of Google’s search results and gives the user the exact result they desire. It’s usually taken directly from a webpage and can come in the form of quotes, infographics, bullet points or tables.
The key is to ask the question in your article and answer it succinctly. You can use several questions in subheadings to cover more queries and utilise LSI keywords to cover a broader spectrum of search queries
Mobile Index First
With mobile first indexing, Google now considers the mobile version of your site the “real” version. Regardless of whether a user searches from a desktop or mobile. Google’s started the process of migrating sites in March 2018 to mobile-first index with 2019 highlighting the importance of a mobile optimised and friendly site.
More than 60% of Google searches are made from mobile devices. With that figure anticipated to rise to 80% by 2020. That’s 10% for 2019 alone.
Therefore, it is important to make sure your website’s content is consistent across desktop and Mobile, you have a responsive design that works well on all mobile devices and that the mobile version is optimised correctly, checking page speed, image compression etc.
