SEO Stuff You Need to Know About in 2019

Hi! Welcome to this week’s training. I’m Sherri Wilson, an educator, strategist, and introverted entrepreneur that empowers other introverted entrepreneurs the art of persuasion and influence so you can communicate your message clearly and confidently.

SEO short for Search Engine Optimization, a way to use keywords to get your site ranked better, is going through some major changes that began in 2018 and will continue in 2019.

1. The first significant change you need to know about is mobile first indexing that was first rolled out in March 2018. Google now ranks websites based on the mobile device user experience meaning IF YOU’RE SITE ISN’T MOBILE FRIENDLY, YOU WILL FALL IN RANKING.

There are 325 million mobile subscriptions in the U.S. alone and in 2018 52.2% of worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones. If a website has both mobile and desktop, the mobile one is indexed and the non-mobile misses out on a huge amount of traffic. You can go to https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly to test yours.

2. In 2019, voice search will increase in importance. Twenty percent of Android/Google mobile app queries are voice search. If you currently follow SEO best practices, you should already be in good shape. One thing to note is that people are using full sentences in voice searches and even non-voice searches like “How do I train a cat to use the toilet?” Or “What is the top Italian restaurant in NYC?” It’s important for you to know how your client speaks about your product or service and then research how they ask. You can go to answerthepublic.com and find out the best questions to have in your SEO. You can also increase high-quality traffic by creating a FAQ page and also dedicated blog posts to answer questions from your readers.

3. Page speed. Mobile page speed is a factor for ranking; however, relevant content can still outrank speed. Mine sucks currently so I need to fix it. I found out at http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights.

4. Content relevance versus user intent. You want your content URL’s to be in long form using words that serve your user’s intent when searching like: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/selling-tips-for-introverts. Each of those keywords “selling tips for introverts” will cause it to show up higher in ranking than if it was just the published date of the blog post.