Here we go, it’s the end of 2018 and 2019 is right around the corner.

I know many of us small business owners are thinking about what we will creating and launching in the coming year. This is why it’s so important to not forget your search engine optimization strategies (SEO) in your strategizing.

To be frank, we really need to change this ‘search engine optimization’ to ‘search people optimization’ does ‘SPO’ work? Probably not.

It’s important though that at the end of the day, even though you are making changes to your content/site so that the search spiders can index you best, it all comes down to how people interact, engage and share your content that matters.

This is why you must always build with the User in mind (you just need to make sure you use techniques that the spiders like).

Ok. Now that that point has been made, let’s get down to the 5 strategies that all business owners need to make sure they are implementing in 2019.

I want you to always keep what I stated above in mind...how does this help the user have a better experience with my site?

No more suspense, the strategies you need to focus for 2019 are:

1. Mobile optimized site

2. Visual content and Alt tags

3. Content that engages

4. Link building

5. User experience

Let’s walk through each one.

Mobile Optimized Site

I don’t think I can stress enough the importance of your site being mobile friendly. This means that you need to have a site that users can easily interact with from a mobile device.

In 2018 and continuing in 2019, Google will be indexing your mobile site as opposed to your desktop site. What this means is that if your mobile site only has a percentage of your desktop content, you will be missing out on all your content being indexed by Google and therefore, it can hurt your ranking.

It’s also very important that you don’t have a separate site for your business, for all those businesses out there that have an m.mybusiness.com and a www.mybusiness.com, you need to eliminate your m.mybusiness.com and create an adaptive and responsive website.

The good news is that for anyone whose business runs on platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, Wordpress and the like, they have already taken care of this and are on top of it. Yay!

Visual Content & Alt Tags

As we know, visual content is something that has become very important in the last few years. This continues to be the case for 2019 and frankly, I don’t see it changing any time.

What is important though is that you have to make sure your visual content is in line with your business and your messaging. This means that if you are a retailer that sells dog paraphernalia, you don’t all of a sudden start uploading images of dolls and dollhouses. You get the idea.

It all comes down to what I said at the beginning, you want to ensure it’s a great user experience for the person visiting your site. So, if they came to your site, to get stuff for their furry friend, don’t start showing them images of baby dolls and dollhouse accessories.

The other very very important thing you must have when it comes to all your images as a description of what the image is. This is called the Alt-tag, it’s what the search spiders read, as they can’t read images (yet). Having this is also very important for accessibility purposes for your users that are visually impaired.

So, what should you put in the Alt-tags? Keep things simple and put a description of what the image is about. I would not try to stuff keywords in here, as it really takes away from the user experience.  

When it comes to videos, you want to make sure there is a good description of what the video is all about, if you are able to provide caption on the video that would be a big plus.

Content that Engages

We have all heard that Content is EVERYTHING! Well, this is true and not true. Let me explain.

Making sure you have content on your site that you keep updating is important, but there is more to being loved by the search spiders. You need to make sure that your content actually gets your visitors to do things on your site.

If Google sees that all your visitors do is view one page on your site without performing another action (i.e. read more, download information, sign-up for a newsletter, you get the idea), they will start thinking that your site is not that valuable to people and will start ranking it lower.

The solution, make sure that for your blog posts, as well as the various pages on your site, have appropriate next steps and calls to actions for people to continue engaging with your content.

Link Building

Making sure that you have back-links to your site has always been important when it comes to your SEO. What has been changing though is the move from quantity to quality when it comes to back-links.

Google cares very much who is linking back to your site, for this reason I highly highly discourage you to purchase back-links as it can negatively affect your quality score.

You also need to be strategic with who is linking to your articles, blogs, videos, etc. You want them to be from reputable sources, within your industry or related at least, and over time you want them to be from sources that are well known or highly regarded in the industry you’re in.

User Experience

You can say that all the elements outlined above can be categorized under user experience. Nevertheless, there are additional things you need to be cognizant of when it comes to the usability of your website and SEO.

At the top of the list is page load time. This one is critical. If your page takes too long, anything over 6 seconds is wayyyy too long, then you need to make sure that any ads, images, videos, graphics on your site do not interfere with the time it takes the page to load.

It’s also important that the overall navigation experience is one that makes sense to the user. You want to make sure that they are able to get to the information they want to get to and not be hindered by annoying or distracting pop-ups, ads or dead-ends.

There you have it, the 5 SEO strategies your website must have for 2019.

If I can leave you with anything is that your goal is to make sure the the experience for the person coming to your site is the best it can be. You want them to want to spend time on your site and take a look around.

To recap, the SEO strategies you need to implement for 2019 are:

1. Mobile optimized site

2. Visual content and Alt tags

3. Content that engages

4. Link building

5. User experience

I have no doubt that there’ll be some additional things to do once we are in 2019, specially if Google makes more changes to it’s algorithm, but the 5 I have listed above will continue to be important no matter what.

Let me know in the comments if you have any additional strategies that will be big in 2019 for SEO.

Happy analyzing!

Hi, I’m Karla

I’m here to help small business understand and use their website data to take the guess work out of growing their business.

I’ll love to help you start using your valuable website data to help you grow your business, book a FREE 30 minute discovery call with me and let’s get started.