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The Definitive SEO Strategy Guide For 2019

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This SEO Strategy Guide will serve to break Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into its most basic parts and help you understand how to use all of its elements to construct a successful SEO strategy for 2019 and beyond.

One rather important new element to SEO you should take into account if you haven’t already is Google Rankbrain.

Google Rankbrain is a new concept that you need to understand for when it comes to on-site SEO as well as off-site SEO and how it will shape both in the coming years.

RankBrain is Google’s first machine learning algorithm and it measures how users interact with the results on the first page. It measures exactly what people click on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and whether or not they are satisfied with that result when they click through to the landing page.

For example, if the user clicks on the 2nd result on the SERP, goes to that landing page, comes right back after a few seconds, and clicks on the 3rd result and stays on that page longer – Google could determine this page is better and more relevant and could move it up in SERP rankings.

Backlinks, keywords, and other traditional signals are still important and content and links will still be the foundation of SEO in 2019. Nonetheless, RankBrain is quickly taking over and this year it will continue to do so.

Google for the last few years has said that content and links are their #1 and #2 ranking factors. Google also now states that RankBrain is one of their “top 3” ranking signals.

So, how do you optimize your site for Google RankBrain? Focus on these two things:

  1. Improve organic click-through-rate (CTR) (Improve title tags, write emotional meta descriptions, etc.)
  2. Reduce bounce rate and improve “Dwell Time” (the time someone spends on your page) (Providing an excellent user experience, create relevant, unique, valuable and engaging long-form content)

If you are just getting started, you might be asking yourself why is SEO so important?

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. That’s right, most traffic comes from the organic results people click on when they search for something on Google.

This is because organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements.

For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements. As such, SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of evergreen content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

If you take a look at today’s SERPs you will see that they are filled with more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than you’ve ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are Rich Snippets, Featured Snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, Image Carousels, Knowledge Graph box, and others. And, new SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking and how Google believes its best to answer them.

If you want to get your webpage discovered, Google’s General Guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. And as they dictate, the basic principles you should adhere to include:

When it comes to SEO specifics you have to understand that Google uses more than 200 ranking factors to rank pages on the SERP. Because optimizing and complying with all of them is time-consuming and very difficult, your SEO strategies should be based on the main, high-impact, and achievable tactics for 2019.

These strategies can be broken into three primary areas of focus with the subsequent tactics to implement within each:

Now that we know what to focus on, let’s get to it!

On-Site Optimization

SEO can be broken into 2 components, On-site SEO and Off-site SEO. On-site SEO is the process of making your website search engine friendly. And in order to begin, you need to know where you stand and what things you need to improve. To do so, you need to do a thorough Website SEO audit.

1. Website SEO Audit

A Website SEO Audit is an evaluation of a website that grades the site for its ability to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is not a one-time thing, you should continue to regularly evaluate your website’s performance going forward.

To do an SEO Audit and find your SEO score (and use this as a starting point) you can utilize various SEO checkers such as:

2. Mobile-Friendly and Optimized

Starting in 2018, Google’s Mobile-first index is now putting more weight on mobile user experience (UX) signals and considers your page’s mobile version the “main” version. To make sure your website is truly considered mobile-friendly and optimized you need to assure 3 things:

•  Make your content consistent across desktop and mobile. Basically, your desktop and mobile versions should be very similar in terms of layout and content.

•  Must ensure a positive user experience through consistency. This is fundamental in keeping your users on-site and engaged.

•  Using responsive design should ensure that is done correctly. A website that is not responsive will most certainly get penalized on the SERP.

3. Website Navigation and Links

Site Usability is another important factor in SEO that deals with UX. A site that’s difficult to use or to navigate can hurt rankings indirectly by reducing users’ time on site, pages viewed, and bounce rate (in other words, RankBrain ranking factors).

General good practice you should follow:

Google: “Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on our site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into our internal link structure. Make sure all of the pages on our site are reachable through links, and that they don’t require an internal “search” functionality to be found. Link to related pages, where appropriate, to allow users to discover similar content.”

4. Simple URL Structure

URL length is another component to consider if you want to improve your SEO. The reason is that excessively long URLs can hurt a page’s search engine visibility.

Why? Because simple URLs convey content information while really long ones get cut off in the SERP.

Some best practices to follow when creating your URL structure are:

To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages.

If you find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel=”canonical” link element if you can’t redirect to specify which URL you want to rank in Google.

5. Security

Security is critically important these days for SEO purposes because keeping internet connections secure and safeguarding sensitive data is of utmost importance for anyone with a company and website. 

Overall, encryption has been confirmed by Google to be a strong ranking factor. Encryption means that a website is secure, which can be seen by the addition of an “s” at the end of the “http” part of a URL.

With the increase in technology from hackers and identity thieves, Google is making an effort to ensure its users are protected from these malicious intruders by making website security a key search ranking factor. Secured sites protect a user’s connection and ensure a user’s activity cannot be tracked or their information hacked.

In this respect, you have probably heard a lot about HTTPS and SSL.

It is important that your website is using HTTPS. HTTPS is a protocol where encrypted HTTP data is transferred over a secure connection and by doing so maintain the privacy and integrity of that data. 

You will also need to make sure you have an SSL Certificate to secure your website domain. You can get it for free or for relatively cheap these days.

6. Page-Load Speed on Mobile and Desktop

Google cares how fast your website loads on desktop and mobile and they recommend that your site loads in under 3 second for mobile users.

Statistically, the biggest mistakes website owners make that increase page-load time are: using huge images, using large-volume multimedia, or other heavy design elements that make the site slow.

Another factor to consider is your server location because it influences where your site ranks in different geographical regions based on how quickly it loads at that location (Miami vs. Kuala Lumpur for example).

Here are some recommended tools to use to figure out your website speed:

7. Broken Links

Broken links on your website can be harmful in two ways:

•  They make for bad user experience – When users click on links and reach dead-end 404 errors, they get frustrated leave quickly and may never come back. By spending less time on your website this results in lower Page Authority rankings and tells Google that your website is not giving users what they are searching for.

You can review all the links on your website using certain WP Plugins or software such as Screaming Frog.

8. Sitemap and Robots.txt Files

A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.

In a nutshell, sitemaps enhance the ranking of a website in search engine results, thus boosting your SEO efforts.

The Robots.txt file tells search robots which pages they should not be crawling or indexing. What does this have to do with SEO? The robots.txt file prevents extra or sensitive information from being crawled and indexed. This will ensure that your website is being indexed with only the information that you want your users to see.

Content

Content is king. You have probably heard that before and many times over. Content is why users visit and why they convert (or don’t). Content is part of every step in your funnel. From the first keyword to the final conversion.

When determining what sort of content you should create, you first need to ask yourself:

With content marketing, you want to win traffic rather than buy it. The aim of your content marketing should be to engage your audience and build relationships, which will ultimately boost sales in the long term. 

Content marketing will help you:

Here’s how SEO and content marketing fit one another:

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important activities when you are building out your content strategy. Ranking for the right keywords should be your main goal.

You might have a list of keywords you want to target and want to utilize because you think it would bring you tons of traffic.

But stop and think about how often are those keywords are actually searched.

It’s important to understanding search volume when you are doing your keyword research.

Long-tail keywords with lower search volume convert better because searchers are more specific and intentional in their searches. For example, a person searching for “shoes” is probably just browsing. Whereas, someone searching for “best price red women’s size 7 running shoe,” is ready to buy.

The more specific you are the better your chances of being ranked well for those specific long-tail keywords.

Here is a simple outline to follow for applying your long-tail keyword research:

1. Determine what long tail keywords you want to rank for by creating a list. Then, take that list of keywords and group them in similar topic clusters.

2. Evaluate the results from the SERP for each long-tail keyword to determine what type and format your content should be. Basically, pop those keywords into the Google Search box and see what the top results are. Things you should determine for those top-ranking results are:

You should ask, “What unique value could we offer to make our page better than the pages that are currently ranking for that keyword?”

2. Keyword Optimization

When it comes to keyword optimization there are several things you can do to help you with your content efforts.

Here are three to take into account.

In order to know your competition and market, you need to have the right tools that will analyze your keywords and content, and give you the answers you need.

These are some tools you can use for keyword analysis:

3. URL of Page

As we mentioned before, URL length and structure are important. URLs that indicate what the content on the page is about and helps improve the user experience. And as we covered, keywords used in a URL also act as a ranking factor.

Lastly, well-written URLs can serve as their own anchor text when copied and pasted as links in forums, blogs, social media networks, or other online sources.

4. Page Title

What is a Page title?

The Page title is the clickable title of a webpage that appears with the result on the SERP. They are within Title Tags on a website. An example of a Page title is marked in yellow below:

Why are Page titles important?

Page titles tell people and search engines the topic of the webpage. They also tell search engines an estimate of how relevant a page is to a searcher’s query. For this reason, Page titles should be as accurate and relevant to your page’s content as possible.

As for the Optimal title length? Google typically displays the first 50–60 characters of a title tag. If you keep your titles under 60 characters, you can expect about 90% of your titles to display properly.

According to Moz’s testing and experience, keywords closer to the beginning of your title tag should have more impact on search rankings.

5. H1, H2, H3 Tags

Aside from Title tags – H1, H2, H3 tags are other things to consider when creating your content.

These tags should provide titles that represent the overall structure and message of your webpage.

Here is an illustration to show you how these tags are seen on a typical page:

Some common best practices when utilizing title, H1, H2, H3 tags are:

6. Meta Description Tags

When it comes to adding the keyword in the meta description, Google doesn’t use the meta description tag as a direct ranking signal anymore.

However, it can impact click-through-rate, which is a key ranking factor and something that Rankbrain weighs. The meta description is the copy that appears underneath the green clickable links in a SERP such as we have highlighted below:

Research shows that roughly 25 percent of websites have no meta descriptions at all, so ensuring you have them on all of your pages can be beneficial for you in helping you rank better for that page.

One thing to keep in mind when you write your meta description is its length. The actual length displayed on the SERP page depends on how useful or appropriate Google considers your description to be. Nonetheless, try making your meta description between 155 and 160 characters long so it won’t get cut off if displayed verbatim.

7. Content Length

When it comes to content length, studies show that longer content does indeed produce higher search rankings.

Here are some facts about content length:

8. First 100 Words

Aside from having the keyword in the Title Tag, H1 Tag and in the meta description, you need to also have it in the first 100 words because this helps Google understand what your page is all about.

Although it may not be as helpful for crawlers as it was in the past, it certainly can’t hurt to place it in the first 100 words and help make the connection between the content and title for your readers a lot more seamless. If you can’t capture your reader within the first 100 words, your bounce rate and time on page will suffer a great deal.

9. Optimizing Images

You can optimize your photos on your website, by adhering to the basics:

10. Internal and External Links

Both internal and external links are important for your site because internal links pass their link value from page to page and external links that provide trustworthy and informative external links help improve the credibility of your website.

External links that link out to other, relevant pages on the topic you are discussing in your blog posts, helps Google determine its topic further. It also provides a good user experience by positioning your content as a valuable resource. If you do have external links, they should open on a new browser window.

Internal links allow search engines to find and crawl other pages on your site. They also show semantic relations between various pages, helping to determine its relevance to the search query better. As a rule, you should try to include at least 2-4 internal links per blog post.

11. Readability

Readability is an important (although more indirect) factor because by writing in an easy-to-read way, your users will likely spend more time on that webpage. Text that isn’t nice and easy to read will give your audience a bad user experience.  

Considering that most Google searches are now done on mobile devices, readability is more important for SEO than ever before. You should make your content really easy to read on mobile phones.

You can do that by adhering to some basic tips:

12. Multimedia (Optional)

Multimedia, although not a requirement, can still be an important contributor to your SEO strategy.

Multimedia elements like videos, diagrams, audio players can signal your page’s quality and keep users on a page for longer. And in turn, it signals that they find the content valuable and worth perusing.

When you can, you should use multimedia effectively. Video, images, and interactive content will improve the user experience on your website and, as a result, drive more traffic. This is because they act as a content quality signal. Several industry studies found a correlation between multimedia and rankings.

What other SEO advantages does multimedia offer?

Multimedia enables that type of content to be found through search engines as well – for example, video or images may show up through separate searches and divert traffic back to your site.

Links

1. Competitive Analysis

Competitor analysis is fundamental to creating a link-building strategy. By learning which tactics are securing links for the competition, which pages are driving search traffic, anchor text distribution, the competitive landscape, and other factors, you can have a solid understanding of where you stand and how you can improve.

Solid competitive analysis provides:

You will need to create an analysis report about your competitors that will provide valuable insight and will inform strategy development to help you succeed.

2. Review Backlinks

A deep backlink analysis should give you important data about your websites current situation, including:

In addition, there are other insights within a backlink analysis that you can uncover, such as:

In the end, it is important to understand your site and your competitors’ current link portfolio.

There are a variety of tools (free and paid) to help you with the analysis:

3. Link Building Strategy

Once you have conducted your backlink analysis you will need to craft your link building strategy.

Here are 8 relevant link building tactics you can use in 2019:

1. Unlinked brand mentions. One of the easiest ways you can get a link is by figuring out who is mentioning your brand or your company and not linking to you. It’s an easy way to reach out and asking them to link from that content piece to your landing page.

2. Guest blogging. This is still one of the best avenues for driving new traffic to your site. It’s relevant, industry-specific, and gives you the opportunity to brand your company as an industry expert and thought leader.

3. Mention influencers in your post. When you mention a popular influencer in your post, you get more links because the influencer that you mentioned will most likely share it. That will result in more links. Another option is to reach out to an influencer or influencers in your industry, tell them the topic of your content, and ask if they would be willing to provide a point of view or quote. If they agree to send the post and ask for them to share. You can use www.buzzstream.com for this task to find influencers and their contact info.

4. Creating cornerstone assets such as data and research. Original data and research is an efficient link building method a solid 70% of the time–making it the #1 most efficient link building technique companies use. You have been doing this and should continue it in 2019.

5. Produce 20+ snippets of the cornerstone assets that you can share on social media. A snippet can be any of the following for example: – Variations of the title – Short statements from the content – Short quotes from the content – Statistics from the content

You should go into your content pieces and pull out at least 20 snippets. Then share the snippets on social media over the next several weeks or even months. If the content does well, continue using the snippets.

6. HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Reporters will notify you of any questions or information they’re seeking for an article via this email service. So not only is it just good general PR, but it’s a great opportunity for you to get a link. 

7. Link roundups. Link roundups are curated updates from all sorts of websites and bloggers that link out to their favorite content during a given time period. In this case, you need to find these people that link out to the sort of content you create.

To find some of these people, you can do a search in Google,  for example:

“Keyword” + “link roundup” “Keyword” + roundup “Keyword” + “best of” “Keyword” + today “Keyword” + this week “Keyword” + this month

Once you find the person/website with the roundups you can reach out them and ask for for a link or some other form of collaboration.

8. Profile links. Profile link building refers to websites where users can sign up and create a public profile, for the main purpose of dropping a link in that profile.

The link will help funnel link juice from the profile creation site to yours.

In theory, if the profile link building site is of high quality and authority, then you can create a high-quality backlink.

Profile link creation is a tactic used by SEO professionals in order to gain dofollow (vs. nofollow) backlinks from respected websites.

In profile link creation, you usually go to a website and create an account. Then on the profile section, the website links will be added. 

You can use tools like Moz to SEMrush to analyze the quality and domain authority of those websites.

4. Social Sharing

Search engines favor websites with a strong social presence. Your Linkedin posts or Tweets can make it to Google organic search results, which is a great opportunity to drive extra traffic.

Google says it treats social posts (that are open for indexing) just like any other web pages. So, social media does impact your SEO.

Therefore, here are some good tactics you should make sure to employ:

Monitor & Track SEO Results

When crafting and conducting your SEO strategy it is very important to stay on top of and monitor results. There are tons of tools you can use and through them, you can track and analyze many aspects of your SEO efforts, see the results, and stay up-to-date with any new changes. That allows you to be informed, be ready to react fast to any updates or changes and continue to optimize at all times.

SEO KPIs you should focus on:

Thankfully, both Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush and a few other tools will help you put that all together for you to analyze.  

Future Developments in SEO

The digital marketing world continues to evolve. It won’t be too long before SEO changes again with voice search and artificial intelligence making more of an impact.

As long as you remember what is important – the user – new changes won’t affect you too much. The technical parts of SEO, such as using keywords and link building are just additions that can make what you already have better.

For the remainder of 2019 and beyond, you might need to pay a little attention to voice search as it is growing fast.

For example, some eyebrow-raising facts:

Voice search changes how people search in two important ways:

  1. Searches are longer
  2. Searches are more conversational

Focusing your SEO efforts on long-tailed keywords will benefit you. RankBrain helps Google interpret long tail queries to bring the searcher results. Using more long tail keywords in 2019 can help increase your conversion rate and help adapt to voice search.

Also, behavior and UX signals are becoming a much more powerful metric for Google and RankBrain is just the start. Your content has to be extremely relevant if you want to maintain first page rankings.

Last Thoughts

SEO is a long game. It is very important to keep on eye on trends and new developments in SEO as it is always shifting and you can expect even more updates and changes to come.

There is no “secret formula” to ranking in Google’s search results. Google ranks pages at the top of the SERP because it has determined they are the best answers to the searcher’s questions.

You have to always remember that your pages have to provide value to searchers and be better than any other page Google is currently serving as the answer to that particular query.

Lastly, the benefits of SEO aren’t immediate. While there are things you can do that bring an immediate effect, sometimes it can take up to six to nine months before you see results.

If you need help with your SEO Strategy get in touch with us for a free consultation at info@socialasting.com.

This article by Javier Castillo originally appeared on Socialasting's website and has been republished with his permission.

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