SEO in 2018 has been all about mobile-friendly websites, Local SEO, and doing your best to understand how search engines rank sites and ensuring that you meet all those requirements to either attain or maintain a preferred spot on the SERP. We are in the second half of the year and the same things still hold true. Soon, 2019 will be here and it is important that your business is at par to handle the challenges that will come with the advancement in SEO strategies, tactics, and technologies. Let’ have a look at how SEO has done so far, and where we are headed.
Mobile Ready
In 2017, Google determined that mobile devices were increasingly being used to access the web. From as early as 2012, the emphasis had already been on developing websites that cater for all devices that can be used to access the web. Computer devices have been decreasing in size for the past two decades and the trend keeps on. I don’t know whether you know it but there already is a technology that works with a chip that is implanted inside the hand such that all your information is in the chip and then it can be scanned to pay for stuff as well as determine your personal details. My point here is that soon we’ll be dealing with even smaller and more compact devices. It is beneficial that you are updated with this aspect of SEO. Every post or article you read online this year must mention a thing or two about things being mobile ready. This trend is not going anywhere anytime soon; hence, being informed and including this fact in your SEO strategies will keep you at par with what is happening. In 2019, it’ll be the same old story.
UX Design
User experience is a term that has been thrown around for the past three years but people still don’t seem to understand what it really means or they think they do. Have you accessed a website that had a bottomless webpage; it just kept loading more content as you scroll, and the more you scroll, the more content loads? Have you opened a website only for a video to start playing out of nowhere? Have you been to a website that you visited because the title of the webpage said, “X reasons X is better than your X” only for the page to load and you find only one reason, and then you have to click some arrow to go to the next reason? In such a page, you’ll have to load the page 25 times if there are 25 reasons, or 50 times if there are 50 reasons. Were any of these a good experience for you?
User experience is something crucial for an SEO company because it is what makes a site visitor stay on your site or close the tab and consider another website. There is only so much content that people can consume and users hate it when they don’t have control over things or when they have to keep doing the same unnecessary or annoying thing over and over again. If your site has any of the above features, you may want to reconsider your strategy. Search Engines like Google love sites with a lot of content and those that are updated regularly. However, pay attention to the way you feed content to your visitors. Even if Google gives you the spot you wanted on the SERP, you will still lose if a user goes for another site on the same SERP after clicking on yours, because either they had to keep clicking next, next, next, or they hate it when a page is slow to load because an unnecessary video was loading.
Thinking Outside The Box
‘Google My Business’ helps websites get higher rankings locally. Initially, for local businesses, it was just that simple; add your website to Google My Business and if people within the same local searched for it online, chances are that it would show on the first page of a SERP. However, the ‘Possum algorithm’ proved that things are not necessarily that simple anymore. In 2018, it pays to be more creative and updated with alternative SEO strategies. In fact, the more strategies you know or can cook up, the higher your chances of success. The internet is constantly evolving and only those who evolve with it are the ones who will maintain their favorite spot on the SERP.
