8 SEO Trends That Will Dominate 2019

With new marketing trends popping up now and then and Google making changes to its search algorithms all year round, the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry keeps seeing new developments year in and year out. One strategy for winning in business and life is to always look ahead in anticipation of the future and plan accordingly. This gives you an edge over the competition and puts you in a position of advantage. Doing the same for your SEO strategy will have the same impactful results. And what better time to do it than now when 2018 is folding and the new year is quickly approaching?

Today, we want to show you some key trends that'll rock the search landscape in 2019 so that you can better prepare to win in your marketing in the coming year.

Ready for this? Let's get to it:

1. BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY WILL DISRUPT SEO

Blockchain is the buzzword of the moment. If you’ve heard of Bitcoin, you've most likely heard a thing or two about blockchain. It is the technology that powers Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The pivot of blockchain technology is that it allows users to conduct transactions securely and transparently without a middleman. Instead of recording data in a traditional database, the technology uses a distributed ledger and consensus algorithms to store data in a decentralized format.

Although still in its early developmental stage, this is a fundamental rethinking of how data is tracked online. Now, blockchain is not just a buzzword. It is actually forecast to disrupt a wide gamut of industries in the upcoming years, and SEO isn't left out of this.

How exactly is blockchain affecting SEO?

In 2019 and beyond, marketers are expected to take advantage of this amazing technology to build trust-based relationships with their prospects and customers.

The technology is still being developed and tested for several types of use cases in marketing. But one that has been tried so far regarding search engine optimization is that, since the quality of an SEO campaign is usually based primarily on the quality of the traffic it gets, experts are working to find ways blockchain technology could help organizations ensure high-quality inbound traffic to their SEO campaigns.
Since blockchain can track the data of each user independently, it'll guarantee the authenticity of inbound SEO traffic for organizations, thereby reducing marketing and advertising frauds and waste.

It is expected that blockchain can be used in SEO for validating not just inbound traffic but backlinks, too.  These and more are already being tested and in 2019, SEO and other marketing areas like advertising, lead nurturing, and prospects’ buying signal tracking will start seeing the results.

2. MOBILE IS THE NEW DEFAULT

At the end of 2017, Google started experimenting with mobile-first indexing, which is all about ranking websites based on their mobile optimization as opposed to ranking based on the desktop experience. This followed an earlier milestone in 2016 in which mobile overtook desktop for the first time to become the default device used for accessing the web.

In March 2018, Google announced that after a year and a half of careful experimentation and testing, they were now migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing. This migration process is still a work in progress, and 2019 will see it in full swing.

Bearing this trend in mind, there’s no excuse to procrastinate with mobile optimization except if you want Google to index something you can’t show to mobile users. But you don't want to go that route. A large chunk of traffic is using mobile to browse the Internet.

Statista reports that in 2018, 52.2 per cent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile devices, up from 50.3 per cent in the previous year and 0.7 per cent in 2009.

So in 2019, keep an eye on your pages to be sure you deliver an impeccable mobile experience. You can start now with our Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.

3. ONLINE VIDEOS: NOW A STRATEGY

With 78 percent of people viewing online videos every week and 55 percent watch every day, viewership of online video — and the sheer volume of video content online — is growing exponentially.

Cisco even reports that by 2020, online videos will make up more than 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic (85% in the US).

Users view more than 500 million hours of video each day on YouTube. If you have yet to push on video marketing, you're losing much traffic and leaving money on the table. 2019 might be the year for you to start making videos.

In 2019, video-based content will become even more popular amongst businesses and consumers.

For those who are already creating videos, you should do more in terms of quality and optimization.

Why?

More and more people are turning to online video platforms to search for products and information. Alexa shows that YouTube is now the second most trafficked site after Google. But with this trend comes the competition. As more videos are being uploaded, viewers now have more options. To stay afloat, not only must you publish good quality videos, you also must optimize them to appear on the search results.
Even Facebook has emerged as a great platform for people to watch videos. In fact, it stands right after YouTube in having the most viewership of videos globally. Therefore, you shouldn’t miss out on the potential of videos and make them a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Pro Tip: If you want to download Facebook video, you can turn to the online Facebook video downloader, which allows you to execute this task in seconds without paying a penny.

4. USER DATA: OWNERSHIP IS CHANGING HANDS

This year, a historic event took place in the world of the web — the European Union enacted the GDPR.

For the benefit of those who were too busy playing Fortnite, GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679). It's a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union and the European Economic Area. But it also affects everyone who uses the Internet for selling, buying, or anything.

The European Parliament and Council agreed upon the regulation in April 2016. It was made to fully replace the Data Protection Directive 95/46/ec in Spring 2018 as the primary law regulating how companies protect EU citizens' data.

If you've been wondering who owns the data generated by users’ interaction with web properties online, because of this law, it’s users who do going forward. Not the businesses who collect it, as it used to be. GDPR has started (and will continue in 2019) having a massive impact, not just on businesses but on how they do marketing (including search engine marketing).

For example, you have to be open about what user data you collect, how you collect them, what you do with them, how you keep the data safe, and so on. And users can now request to see what personal data your company has about them and ask for its correction, export, or even deletion.

If a company does not comply with the regulation, it can be forced to pay stiff fines of up to €20 million, or 4% of its worldwide annual revenue of the prior fiscal year. As a matter of fact, Google already decided to make changes in its Analytics. Now all personal user data expires after 26 months of collection.

This includes demographic and affinity data (earlier kept perpetually by Google), but not sessions and goal completions.

But in any case, if you have no European customers, you can go to Google Analytics and switch to the “do not automatically expire” option. However, if you do so, the user data responsibility will be on you and no more on Google.

5. MORE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS COMING

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to stay. 2018 was a great year for technology as it made an incontrovertible headway in several digital economy sectors, including marketing. The coming year will see even more advancement of the tech.

Google already started out on the AI front with its RankBrain, an AI-based, machine-learning algorithm which has significantly reinvented search. In line with this, the search company made it clear that RankBrain is among the top three most influential ranking signals (out of hundreds) along with content and backlinks. However, it is expected that in the future, Google will touch on the algorithm to become even more intelligent and semantics-savvy.

But RankBrain is not the only Artificial Intelligence factor expected to drive or hit SEO in 2019. Google and other stakeholders will continue to dig into ways AI can help improve search marketing.

6. THERE WILL BE A NEED FOR SPEED

While Google had since 2010 said that page speed was a ranking factor for desktop searches, the company only started using mobile page speed as a ranking factor in their mobile search results in July 2018. They called the update the “Speed Update.”

This was following the launch the AMP project in February 2016, when Google began to show the AMP versions of webpages in mobile search results. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and it is a Google-run website publishing technology designed to get mobile web pages to load faster.

The Google “Speed Update” only affected a small percentage of queries, which are “pages that deliver the slowest experience to users” according to the search giant. We advise that you use the new updated PageSpeed report and tools like PageSpeed Insights (or even our Page Speed Test Tool) to measure and improve your page speed.

But do note that the problem with PageSpeed Insights is that because the data for the metric is taken directly from Chrome User Experience report — the real users’ performance database — it doesn’t have enough data to measure smaller websites reliably.

So the speed part of the report is unavailable for those type of users. Also, the report reflects how your site loads for each visitor. Thus, it's difficult to measure how fast each visitor’s device loads your site. As a result, you're unable to get that metric through local tests.

Optimization scores are still available, but that’s not enough to allow sites to tell if they have slow pages. So even if your site is slow, its ranking may not change. Given this limitation, it's likely that Google is just testing out this ranking factor. Perhaps in the coming year, they'll push out more on speed metrics.

7. VOICE SEARCH: MORE TALKING THAN TYPING

The search market witnessed a rather swift surge as voice search swept across the industry without respite in 2018. Alpine.ai at the beginning of the year, Alpine.ai reported an estimated one billion voice searches per month. Another firm, comScore, added that by 2020, voice searches will account for 50 percent of all searches.

These statistics only mean one thing: voice search is becoming mainstream.

The surge that happened in 2018 will continue in 2019 but at a much higher intensity. Consumers will continue to acquire and use more voice-controlled technologies. In contrast, products like Google Home, Amazon Echo, Siri, Cortana, and Amazon Alexa will continue to gain momentum across the web.

As a savvy SEO, you ought to prepare your online properties for this trend by optimizing for voice search. Google even mentioned that up to 20 percent of all Android searches come from voice.

8. QUALITY CONTENT DEVELOPMENT IS STILL A THING

If there's any trend that keeps coming back year after year, it is content quality. You cannot play down the quality of content the Internet demands. Day by day, users will always demand and drift towards content that delivers true value. That's why developing quality content is an all-year-round trend and topic.

2019 will be no different. Suppose you want to win the hearts of existing customers and potential users and get favours from search engines. In that case, you must continually deliver quality content relevant to your business and answers users’ questions.

CONCLUSION

Want to take your SEO game to another level in 2019? You don't have to wait until next year starts. You need to begin now! The thing with search engine optimization is that to win at it, you have to follow the trends; you have to become acquainted with what stakeholders like Google are working on and intelligently reposition your strategy to fly accordingly.

We've painstakingly researched these SEO trends to give you a way to prepare assuredly for the coming year, 2019, and make your SEO efforts count. The next step? Start creating and implementing strategies that roll with the trends!

In accordance, we will be updating some of our tools here at SmallSEOTools.com and also add new ones to reflect the changes happening in the SEO market. You can expect this and more in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, if you need to perform any SEO-related task, our existing tools are more than capable of helping you. Start using them today for free!