The 7 Best SEO Practices in 2019

At this time of last year, we made a summary of the main SEO services in 2018 that website owners could use to improve the ranking of their pages. We hope you have accepted some of these tips and have managed to improve the results of your SERP during the past year!

As we are now in the fourth quarter of 2018, we thought it would be the perfect time to do another SEO summary, this time analyzing seven of the best SEO practices you can use to improve your results as we move forward in 2019.

1. Do not fight for dominion: open your own path

There is a marketing theory called "Blue Ocean Strategy" that argues that companies achieve greater success by looking for an unopposed market space instead of fighting face to face with competitors. (Competing in clear blue waters instead of bloody waters full of sharks, you get the idea).

This is an important principle of SEO. The more crowded the field, the more difficult it will be to attract attention. If you want to get a higher rank in the SERP, you should look beyond what your competitors do and look for new topics that have not been explored.

Sites like Google Trends or BuzzSumo are your friends, here. To illustrate this idea, we next compare the interest in the terms "content marketing 2018" and "content marketing 2019". Obviously, everyone talks about 2018 EN 2018 content marketing, but there are not many indexed pages that cover the 2019 strategies in the middle of the year. As 2019 approaches and the gap narrows, more people start talking about it.

Your job is to find that sweet spot where you can provide advice with confidence before your competitors bleed to death in the waters. When they get on board, your page will be indexed and you will be the established authority.

2. Try to get featured snippets

Everyone loves the snippets of code: those practical text boxes that appear when we search and provide quick answers to our questions without having to click on a link. They are becoming a particularly important part of the UX as comfort becomes the norm and voice and mobile searches increase in importance. Below is an example of a fragment ... in highlighted fragments!

Featured example snippet

However, its role in good old web SEO cannot be overstated: according to HubSpot research, content with prominent snippets doubled their click rates. While the exact process for selecting this snippet of code is not known precisely, the HubSpot research identified some trends:

·         Classification among the first five results of the SERPs.

·         Use of keywords on the page, including its semantic relevance for the keywords searched

·         Gather the structure of your page to support simple and cohesive answers

·         Use of logical subtitles that provide an overview of the article

3. Kill your zombie pages

We know, zombie references are passed. Very much 2010. But your website is probably infested with them, even if you do not realize it. Zombie pages are web pages that do not provide real value to your traffic, authority or presence on the Web, and most of the time they appear as old or obsolete content. They usually take the form of:

·         Duplicate content

·         Outdated blog entries

·         Aging of press releases.

·         Product pages that nobody buys.

·         Pages that should not be indexed (such as search results pages)

Each site has some, and they are not always a big problem. But when your site has hundreds, or thousands, it can be detrimental to your SEO. Zombie pages inflate your site map with numerous pages that Google considers low quality, as they do not gain traffic or participation.

Remove these pages when possible, setting up your results pages as "no index", and redesign the content as necessary (such as combining three old blog posts into a single piece of long-form content that supports participation and encourages greater time dedicated to site).

4. Group your content

Theme groups are a new SEO tool that many sites have not yet used, which is a shame, since search engines are changing their algorithms to favor structured content in this way.

The groups of topics involve changing the structure of your website to have pages of unique "pillars" that act as main information centers. From this hub, each subtopic (or cluster) has its own page connected through the link. Think of it as radios on a wheel. Each part of the cluster content is connected to the hub, with the page of pillars that provides the main anchor point for navigation.

Both users and search indexes like to know how the pages connect to each other at a glance. Pillar pages are an excellent way to structure your content to support this goal.

5. Prepare for voice search

The importance of voice search for SEO in 2019 should not come as a surprise. If you review the search data published by Google, we can see that more than half of all search queries now come from mobile devices, and approximately 20 percent of queries made in mobile applications are now based on voice. And with voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Home increasingly popular, we expect this growth to be consistent for a while.

·         Optimize your content to align it with the type of queries you would hear in voice searches

·         Research long-tail keywords that closely reflect how users actually speak.

·         Make sure your pages load quickly

Prioritize long form content (the average word count of the voice search result pages was more than 2,300 words).

6. Conversions of lands with video

We all know that Google gives rating points to websites with high user retention, longer time on the page and lower bounce rates. Ipso facto, if you attract your viewers, you will rank better in the SERPs.

This applies to all pages on your site, but here, we recommend a particular tactic: Incorporate video into your landing pages. Research suggests that video on landing pages can increase conversions by up to 80 percent by directly attracting viewers, building trust and holding their attention for longer than other media. Naturally, these benefits translate into a longer time spent on the site and a greater commitment to its content.

7. Recognize the role of the user experience

As always, the user experience will play a key role in the 2019 SEO. In fact, most of our previous tips are based on improving the user experience with your brand:

·         Exploring new topics that users will be interested in

·         Provide simple and effective content that will appear in fragments

·         Prune your site from unnecessary pages.

·         Organizing your page in an intuitive and structured hierarchy.

·         You adjusted your content to meet a user preference for voice

·         Taking advantage of the video to provide quick information that supports decision making.

The user experience is at the heart of all marketing and website objectives, and 2019 will not be the exception. Keep this in mind when applying the strategies above. Yes, the quality of SEO is to increase your chances of positioning well in Google, but what is more important, is to establish itself as a reliable and reliable resource with which visitors can count.

And as always, if you need help to bring these strategies to life, the skills of a qualified web development company may be just what you need.