As a SEO professional, your goal is to use various tools and skills in order to dominate in the search engine results page (SERP). By doing so, you will be able to direct more traffic to a website, thus increasing the number of visitors, which usually translates to customers and thus profit.
Since there are many agencies offering digital marketing services, a digital marketing agency that wants to stay ahead in its field will keep in mind trends predicted for SEO in 2019. These vary from technical SEO to voice search and give a good indication of where SEO is headed.
User intent
One of the main trends we see predicted for any field, especially relating to digital marketing Sri Lanka, is the need to know your audience and the user intent. For a long time, SEO was almost entirely defined by keywords. Keywords alone were believed to do the job.
This is no longer the case and it’s important that a SEO professional or digital marketing agency takes time to understand the audience and what they want. Do they prefer text, images, audio, or video? Are there any personal tastes or interests a business can cater to?
Exceptional content
As mentioned above, keywords used to define SEO, but now we see how content that actually answers a user’s query is selected over content that includes all the keywords. The algorithm used to select content for the SERP will take into account the quality of the content, thus making the creation of exceptional content an SEO trend we will be seeing in 2019.
Technical SEO
A trend any digital or social media marketing agency would want to follow is investing in the technical side of SEO. While focus on the quality of the content as opposed to the mere usage of keywords will continue, so will the significance of factors like speed, JavaScript, and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).
Beyond the basics
When we think of SEO, the first and perhaps only search engine to cross our mind is Google. This is because we continue to look at SEO as a function to have a link to a website show up at the top of the results page.
However, it’s not necessarily your website a user may want to visit. If a user wants to install an online shopping app and your rating on the app store is low, they won’t install it. If a user wants to listen to a podcast on tech gadgets and your podcast has low ratings, they will skip it. If your products aren’t available on Amazon, users may look for a different brand that they can add to their cart along with their other Amazon purchases.
Understanding the need to look beyond Google and the traditional search engine is a skill any digital marketing company would want to look into. This trend can also be adapted to suit local markets if, for instance, a company handling digital marketing Sri Lanka wants to look at the wider scope of SEO.
Voice search
When talking about the way users search for answers to a question, the topic of voice search cannot be ignored. Voice search is a part of what could be described as conversational search journey, where users are walked through the various answers to their questions as opposed to being given specific solutions.
How voice search can be used to increase a website’s traffic is an area still being explored, thus digital marketing services can use this trend to show clients why SEO is an ever-expanding area and a worthy investment.
SERP features
SEO requires constant learning and testing. Search engines tend to introduce various SERP features, for instance, featured snippets, that digital marketing Sri Lanka can and should immediately adapt to and optimise for.
AI and machine learning
Whether you are in SEO or social media marketing, there is no way you missed out on the importance and functions of AI and machine learning. With AI, or artificial intelligence, becoming more and more important to search engines, structured data is, as well. On the other hand, machine learning will have an impact on search and is thus an SEO trend for 2019.
On-page optimisation
By investing in ongoing on-page optimisation, a digital marketing company can focus on content that answers common questions, shortened conversion processes, simple ways for repeat customers to restock regularly purchased items, and the use of chatbots.