Understand your Audience and Think User Experience
SEO is not just a keyword story, it's also and above all a user story. Semantic optimization involves understanding the visitor's search intent. Once a visitor has arrived on a page of your site through an initial query on Google, what is he looking for? The search for a user can not be locked into a single key phrase, it is often a starting point for many other questions that must be answered in order to satisfy it fully.
To provide a rich user experience and at the same time ensure good positioning on search engines, a page must answer several questions and not just focus on a single target phrase. This is a change from a few years back where SEOs tended to multiply pages for each combination of keywords to position, so-called "satellite pages".
However, this need to target a page on a main expression remains true for generic and medium-lag expressions, but when it comes to long tail and conversational search, it is much less so. To summarize, in 2019, we must remember that we must:
Address the Right Target
Go straight to the point and answer your target's questions simply
Verify that you are answering the question asked and the other questions that underlie the main question.
Think of other things besides "google" queries, not just those straight out of Google's keyword planning tool.
Do not think that to optimization on Google
Strong brands appear on multiple media to create a rich multi-channel experience. The traditional SEO on Google is very good but to go further, we must not forget:
applications
podcasts
videos
If you're doing e-commerce, do not neglect voice assistants and therefore optimize voice search.
Optimize the Internal Mesh
The internal mesh is a 3 of the pillars of SEO and it will remain so especially with the evolution of sites and technologies used. With the use of more and more javascripts, ajax, with sites that tend more and more to look like mobile applications (Progressive Web Apps), we must not forget the basics of SEO.
Even if Google understands the javascript better and better , it is not guaranteed that Google will correctly navigate a site.
For SEO in 2019, it remains important to ensure an optimal structure of your site:
Make Googlebot accessible to all important pages to index
Do your best to improve the speed of the Googlebot crawl
Have a clear tree structure, with few depths
Properly unbalance the site structure to favor the most traffic-generating pages
Do not neglect your Content
Good content and especially long content will continue to be well ranked. They must meet the expectations of the visitor, explain, provide solutions and motivate the purchase. To give you ideas of what your visitors are looking for, think of forums in your area of activity, social networks, research on your internal search engine, semantic analysis by an SEO expert .
Show your expertise, your authenticity and give confidence in your products.
Google takes into account a site's index of trust in its ranking criteria (TrustRank). We can also mention another algorithm, co-citation, which looks at whether a brand is often cited around terms belonging to the same theme. If so, the brand becomes naturally relevant on this theme.
But beyond these ranking criteria, trust in a brand that often triggers the act of purchase or the last stage of a conversion process.
For all these reasons, it is important to cultivate your expertise to give confidence. In English, we speak of EAT (Expertise, authority and truthworthiness). A good way also to be recognized and even to write viral articles is to call on experts (ex: The 10 key factors of SEO by 40 experts).
Show your sources, make outbound links to other authority sites is also a guarantee of transparency and a sign of confidence that you give to your readers. To show his expertise, we sometimes have to go through business jargon, but that does not prevent us from popularizing to expand its audience.
Do not forget these 3 Technical Points of SEO
The speed of a site is still very important for ranking in Google's results pages. This is even more the case with the new Google index based on the mobile version of a site released in 2018, the mobile first index . Recently, updating the Google algorithm speed update , further reinforces the importance of having a fast site.
Javascript and SEO do not always mix and it is more and more used on the sites. Even if the possibilities offered by javascript can bring benefits for the user, we must not forget the basics of SEO, ie the content remains accessible to Googlebot.
The PWA (progressive web apps), ie sites that look like mobile apps, it's the same. It is often necessary to find compromises, alternatives of navigation, in order to optimize the site for Google
Think about Voice and Mobile Helpers
Voice search is gaining momentum either via Google home voice prompts, amazon echo or a new way to search on mobile phones. Searching for information and local search is particularly suitable for these voice assistants.
Voice research is only in its infancy, but the Gartner Institute predicts that 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020. And by 2022, 50% of consumers use voice search for ecommerce.
This is undoubtedly the future by its speed and ease of use, by its ability to adapt responses based on the location of the user. The potential of personalizing the results according to the data of the user, his history is an asset for both the user and the brands. To go further, I recommend this article on SEO and voice search.
Use the Featured Snippets
Featured snippets or snippets are snippets of responses that sometimes appear before Google's first results. The featured snippets are just some of the elements that optimize the results for voice search. And given the evolution of voice search, it's a safe bet that we will see more and more featured snippets in 2019.
As with structural data in general, people click on these enriched extracts more easily. Carousels, recipes, graphics, etc ... so many elements that improve the clickthrough rate (CTR). It has been proven that these "response boxes" increase traffic to the site.
Machine learning: the AI
Artificial intelligence is the future. 2019 will be a turning point for AI according to many experts. The goal is more and more to respond to the user's intentions more than to questions. The RankBrain algorithm is unwilling to evolve in 2019.
The role of RankBrain, which is based on machine learning, is precisely to interpret the requests of the user to return results that do not necessarily contain the desired keywords.
Digital Age
