5 Ways your SEO Project can be Turned Around in 2019
For marketers planning their content marketing strategy for 2019, SEO should be a priority. For good marketers, it looks something like this — an SEO plan in place, a list of premium keywords at hand, active blogging, optimized website, a set off-page/ on-page plan and an eye over Google Analytics and SEO tools like SEMrush or ahrefs, CMS/ marketing automation tool reports etc.
For many companies, the process is not as complex. They need to increase their leads, quality website visits. Their content marketing plan needs help and they are sick of seeing their competitors’ name above theirs on their best search keywords. So what do they need to improve their SEO marketing strategy?
General Tips for good SEO strategy
For beginners, there is no shortage of ways to improve your SEO strategy. General considerations must include ensuring load times are kept to the minimum, carrying out keyword research to customize your posts in order to match what people are searching for, updating fresh relevant content, using header tags and linking out to well-respected authority sites etc.
While SEO practices like these are evergreen, there are many things involved in what ranks well. These factors are dependent upon the search engine’s algorithms (that continually change). Thus you need to do more to expect good results.
Here’s what you can do to improve your SEO in 2019
- Prepare for Google search algorithm RankBrain
Google has previously announced that RankBrain- to be one of the most important ranking factors. It is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that helps the search engine platform to sort results.
What RankBrain does is measure how visitors interact with the search results and ranks them respectively.
Like for e.g. You search “best chocolate cake baking tips”- and click on the fifth article that looks the most enticing. You find you’ve come to the right place because the article is genuinely useful.
In the second scenario, you click on the first search result instinctively but find that the article is just a clickbait and so you come back on the main page and go the fifth article which is actually pretty useful.
RankBrain, seeing this pushes article ranked fifth up in positions. How does it do this?
It factors in two things.
Dwell Time, i.e. how long a person spends time on a specific page.
This weighs heavily in how a page ranks. In fact, research by SearchMetrics found that “the average Dwell Time for a top 10 Google result is 3 minutes and 10 seconds”.
Spending more than three minutes translates that you like the content. Google thinks so too and makes it easier for people to search it as well.
The Click-Through-Rate, i.e. the percentage of people clicking on your result.
Google Engineer Paul Haahr implied that RankBrain may sometimes rank pages higher up than they should rank. Like a specific page ranking on first page and having a snippet may sometime be positioned lower than other first result page (which doesn’t have a snippet) according to an algorithm.
Like if a page gets a more than average CTR, then it should get a permanent ranking boost. This isn’t a surprise, why shouldn’t an above-average CTR receiving result be kept on the first page?
Meanwhile, if a result is getting clicked on several times, why would Google keep it on the 10thposition?
- Voice Search Optimization
Voice search is becoming increasingly common. If you’ve used Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Echo or Google’s Assistant then you have used voiced search. Therefore, you need to consider how voice search will affect your SEO efforts.
