It’s been a few weeks since the start of a new year and if you’re definitely late to the party if you haven’t given much thought to your SEO strategy for the whole of 2019.
Then again, coming up with a plan somewhat late in the year is better than having no plan at all. This guide will outline what you need to pay attention to so you can come up with an appropriate action plan.
The changing nature of SEO indicates that strategies also have to adapt. Failure to do so could lead to serious consequences for your brand’s online presence. You could be at the top of the Google rankings one day then find yourself dropped from the first page of search results completely.
Such is the brutal nature of search engine optimization. You need to have a good idea of what strategies work and how you can use them to your advantage.
That said, what SEO strategies should you devote time and resources to?
In-depth Content
Even in the age of Instagram, content still reigns supreme. And there is a growing trend towards the creation of comprehensive articles.
That said, crafting in-depth content about a certain topic isn’t a novel idea. Many successful SEO strategies involve the writing of high-quality content of varying lengths. This time, despite the ever decreasing attention span of the population, longform content continues to permeate different corners of the internet.
Journalists and writers, for instance, have been putting out thousand-word long “explainers” and other informative and well-researched articles on a number of issues. This is much appreciated in a time of information overload. With a lengthy piece, writers can better explain what’s happening to readers who are just catching up or need more information before forming an opinion.
What works in journalism can surely work for your content strategy. Your main product may be a piece of furniture, but you can certainly write content about it beyond what it’s called and its dimensions.
Writing lengthy posts also allows you to showcase your expertise, a fact that customers take into great consideration.
So think hard about what feels relevant and interesting to write about in your niche then lay out a content creation plan. It’s not enough to publish just once; publishing elsewhere matters as well.
Video
Google isn’t the only place where potential customers find information. Sometimes, they even bypass the search engine and head directly for YouTube. So what happens if they type in keywords associated with your brand yet nothing of yours comes up? That’s a wasted opportunity right there.
If there is a platform that makes sense for your business to be in, why wouldn’t you want to be there? Adding a different social media site to those you have to maintain can be a tiresome affair but you lose potential consumers to the competition if you don’t.
Creating video content just because this guide tells you to do so is not a sound strategy. Producing videos means taking time to come up with what it should be all about. Coming up with ideas is where a whitehat digital marketing agency can be of tremendous help. They can help you figure out what kind of video content will work for your business. In content creation – no matter what kind – you always stand to benefit from collaborations.
Content in video format can also be embedded into blog posts to enhance it and also allow people to learn more. Alternatively, you can choose to create a podcast, especially if you find that video isn’t the best fit for spreading awareness about your brand. Or, you can use both mediums to further boost chances of ranking high on Google.
Mobile Indexing
A lot of searches come from mobile devices since that’s what most people are closest to most of the time. As a result, Google considers the mobile version of your site to be the “true” version. This means that you have to do everything that you can to make sure your site renders well no matter the screen size of a mobile device.
Voice Search
Of all the strategies listed here, this is fairly new and looks to be the direction SEO is heading. Google introduced voice search a while ago but this time, content is being optimized for voice search.
How can this be done? People ask questions most of the time so it helps if your content features questions and answers. Apart from blog posts, a good place to implement this in a FAQ.
Links
Links can be internal or external. The former involves linking to your own content, a strategy that keeps prospective customers in your site for longer. The latter can be best described as other people linking to your content, a feat that relies a lot on the creation of high-quality articles that others want to keep referring to.
These are the strategies you should pay attention to in 2019. While it certainly helps to implement several of them, it’s best to choose which one is more feasible for your business at the moment.
