SEO Trends in 2019

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic and visibility of a website or a web page to users or potential clients. SEO refers to the improvement of unpaid results (known as “natural” or “organic” results), and excludes the purchase of paid placement. Search engines like google, Bing and yahoo invests a lot on their platform to enable customers easily find businesses or products online. I have taken some time to research on the new SEO trend for 2019, that you can apply to your website

AI (Artificial Intelligence)
AI is expected to revolutionize the way in which internet users conduct online research using keywords. AI will dictate the future of SEO by providing a number of personalized experiences teamed with automation. Automation is expected to come in as an important element to save time in digital marketing in addition to introducing the concept of machine learning. Through machine learning, digital marketers can automate a number of everyday SEO tasks like reporting and data analysis. Thus, machine learning will be able to improve the abilities of the SEOs so that it can yield efficient and quick responses to online searches.

Voice Search:
Instead of typing keywords in the address bars of search engines, voice search is now trending. When using google Research suggest that by 2020 VS will account for close to 50% of the total number of searches, this trend therefore calls for SEOs to think and speak the language of their online audience to come up with matching voice search strings.

V:isual Search

This is the new-age concept to conduct a search through image and data gathered from a camera. All the user has to do is to click on a picture of an object on their phone and upload the image to the browser. They can then ask for the article which is featured in the image and will order it online.

Augmented Reality and Visual Reality:
These two modern technologies are all set to alter the manner in which links are built, leads are generated and how users engage with compelling content. With these technologies gaining ground, it is up to content creators to tap into their potentials.

Blockchain:
Don and Alex Tapscott the authors of a 2016 book called “Blockchain Revolution”: have defined Blockchain as “An incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value”. In order words you can picture it in the form of a spreadsheet. But you may ask how does blockchain impact the SEO?
As transactions occur, the spreadsheets are simultaneously updated. If someone falsifies data on their spreadsheet, the blockchain would notice the discrepancy from the majority of the records and nullify the bad data. Because it’s nearly impossible to alter the data on all the ledgers, a blockchain is a very secure way to verify and move or exchange assets. It also creates a permanent trail from start to finish. That trail can guarantee the legitimacy of key aspects of SEO — determining if web traffic is human or not, detecting black hat methods much more easily and reducing the staggering amount of money lost to digital ad fraud. Below is a chart showing the blockchain mechanism:

Roles of Blockchain in SEOs

(a) Link Building
Link building has long been an important part of SEO. That doesn’t mean the same tactics that applied in the 90’s can work today. For example, it’s possible to see some ranking boost from blog comment linking, but those look more like spam every day and their weighting is significantly less than it used to be. Natural link building has long been the most effective strategy. Blockchain will make it way easier for the major search engines to detect and penalize any website they catch buying paid links. Though it’s discouraged today, enforcement is difficult and under-utilized.

(b) Verified Data
User interaction data matters a lot. It’s helpful to your marketing team and necessary for web crawlers to rank your site. That data can be diluted by bot traffic and hurt your rankings. Implementing a blockchain solution can verify human traffic and separate it from the bots, giving you better insights and higher rankings. Paid digital advertising is full of fraud because it’s currently impossible to tell if an ad was clicked by a human or bot. Blockchain technology is a very viable solution to this multi-billion dollar a year problem by connecting advertisers directly with verified potential customers.

(C)Keyword Research
It’s difficult to determine just how a keyword plays out in different settings. The results vary across devices, location, users etc. With a token incentive, keyword research could utilize background space on thousands of devices to create an in-depth aggregate of data-heavy results.
While the full impacts are still uncertain at this junction, it’s not likely to be long before technology leaders start to leverage blockchain as a means for securing and processing interactions as much as they do transactions. And that means that you, as a marketer, have a whole new ballgame to learn. Thankfully, it’s likely to be one that rewards good SEO habits and practices, stamps out bad, and works to create a more democratic playing field.
In internet, search engines transmit data from various websites to users with Blockchains. The presence of middlemen does not exist, this paves a way for transparency, hence build trust amongst internet users, weeding out false users. Therefore, blockchain will be needed to play an important role in SEO to counter the occurrence of online fraud.

Video Content:
Statistics suggest that videos have the power to increase user engagement by a stunning 80% when compared to simple text or audio clips, with so much affinity with video contents by users, 2019 will see search engine algorithm’s crawl audio-visual (AR) content directly avoiding the crawling’s or exclusive text content surrounding the video.

User Experience:
The User Experience is expected to become a crucial element of SEO in 2019. With many changes taking place in the domain of google rankings, google will start attaching higher rankings to links that deliver user-centric and personalized search results. It therefore means that e-commerce stores will have to concentrate on delivering a higher level of user experience to maintain their search positions.

Mobile-First Indexing:
In the mobile first indexing, websites are now ranked based on the quality of user experience they provide on mobile devices. If a site has mobile and desktop version, the index adds the mobile one, if there is only a desktop version, it gets indexed the same as normal. Therefore, there is need for one to master mobile SEO. You must have a mobile friendly version of your site else google will index something you cannot show to mobile users and a large traffic will go past you.