The Top 6 SEO Ranking Factors of 2019

Wondering why your website is not ranking on the top of search engines?

Are you worried you are not getting enough traffic and conversions?

Part of the reason for this scenario is that you are still implementing outdated SEO techniques. It’s about time you kept yourself up to date with the latest marketing techniques. Let me share some important search ranking factors with which you can get a strategic advantage over your competitors.

Without a further ado, let’s talk about the SEO trends of 2019. These are some important factors you should be keeping your eyes on:

Mobile Friendliness and Mobile-first index

The use of smartphones is rising significantly around the world. As per Statista, around 5.7 billion people will be using mobile phones in 2019, which means they will easily surpass the desktop users. Search engines respond to websites that are more mobile friendly. In 2015, Google rolled out an advanced algorithm that required “mobile friendliness” as one of the key ranking factors. According to a study by Statista, in 2018, 52.2% of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3 percent in the previous year.

Recently, Google has released an update on the mobile-first index, which will help rank websites based on ranking signals from the websites’ mobile version. However, if your website does not have a mobile version or responsive, Google’s ranking algorithms will fall back to the desktop version of the website. Mobile content is indexed and used for showing listings to both desktop and mobile users. So you have to keep your website mobile friendly to increase your chances of ranking well online.

Web Page Speed for Better User Experience

Would you like to waste your precious time waiting for a slow running website to load up? You likely won’t. Nobody would prefer to, really. Therefore, it is imperative that your website does not consume more than 5 seconds to load up. To this effect, hosting a website on a reliable cloud hosting server like Hostpresto is not only helpful in terms of search engine rankings, but it provides a better user experience and improves the website speed. Google has implemented a tool that you can use to review your website’s loading speed, called  Google PageSpeed Insights that you can use to help your cause, here. You can also use other tools such as Pingdom, Getmetrix, Webpagetest etc. Page load time has been a major ranking factor for a long time, but in 2019, Google will focus even more on it.

User Experience and Usability

Do you know that your website’s usability and performance is affecting your ranking on search engines? Google has been using  artificial intelligence , Hummingbird and RankBrain algorithm to analyze the behavior of users and considering bounce rate, click through rate, re-visit, conversion, sharing etc. This advanced algorithm sorts through the billions of pages it knows about and finds the ones deemed most relevant for particular queries.

In the first two points, we tried to highlight page speed and mobile friendliness as part of the user experience. Google will give more importance on them in 2019, especially in terms of website user interface design, website bounce rate, user query related content, links, website structure, functions and much more. A significant part of user experience is linked to your web site’s usability and performance; which means a good user experience will increase the chances of people engaging with your website. It also encourages sharing, bookmarking, return visits and improves sales. Furthermore, you can use extensions to improve your website’s user experience such as Magento and WordPress. Hence, by improving both user experience and visibility you can considerably improve your ranking on search engines.

Quality Links

Natural linking and high quality content is the key for link building, which in turn is extremely crucial for SEO ranking. If you have backlinks from high authority websites that are relevant to your industry, it is beneficial for your website. One of the major factors Search Engines uses to determine the credibility of a website is through its linking structure. The fact also is backlinks are Google’s internet navigation tool, building a bunch of them to your website helps to boost the average time it takes for SEO to work. 2019 will emphasize more on developing powerful links that will be beneficial in a longer term. Guest posting and influence marketing are two of the best strategies for content marketing and branding.  I would prefer to use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush etc. to find out best link building opportunities by analyzing competitors’ link building strategy.

Business Listings or Local SEO

Are you targeting local audiences or running area specific marketing campaign? You need to understand the importance of local SEO. According to a study done by Forbes, 95% of smartphone users have used their device to perform local searches, out of which 61% called the business and 59% visited. This clearly shows that leads from location-based searches are a major avenue for potential customers, and the numbers will only keep growing.

Google has a local search algorithm that shows results for current location and any other specific city, country or places. For example, if you are searching restaurant from your mobile phone or desktop, Google will show local business listings of nearby restaurants. This will appear like below:

Creating and optimizing your business listings on Google is the best way to get rank on the local searches. If you are not ranking then you need to consider the following points:

NAP

Business name, address, and phone number should be similar on all listings. Even this information should be included on your website too with Schema.

Improving customer reviews and ratings or Google local listings and on relevant directories like Yelp and others will help you.

Voice Search

Mobile and mobile apps are transforming the face of online business. Voice search is deemed as the future, and 2018 is already turning a big year with virtual assistants like Alexa making its way into hotel rooms. According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, 20% queries on mobile are coming from voice searches through mobile apps like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana. By 2020, voice searches are expected to account for 50% of all online queries. I don’t think so everyone is ready to face voice search but its popularity is significantly growing. We might witness a huge list of search queries through voice command in this year and it would be game-changing for the every marketing campaign.

SEO CONCEPT on screen– stock image

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