So, it’s January 2019- the month of making resolutions, setting new year’s targets, goals, making a list of new learnings, and much more. I guess for Google in 2019, and it started with making revelations. Recently, Google, on their official blog, revealed the top 3 ways that would make an effective SEO strategy work and help you rank your website. The blog covers a few of the SEO tactics that you should experiment with to improve your site visibility and boosts keyword ranks.
We have been struggling behind what and how Google sees our website and how would it rank. Also, usually, Google is never seen sharing tips and tricks on making an effective SEO strategy. But, I believe 2019 seems to be different for Google, SEOs, SEO agencies, and even for the business owners heavily eyeing on the organic traffic. So, let’s straightaway jump on to those three ways Google said using which it would rank your website in 2019:
1. Focus on simple SEO changes
While making SEO strategies, I often consider larger things first, and I am sure most of the SEOs would be doing the same. The problem is- we invest time and efforts in the more significant things because you and I both believe that would help us rank better and even faster.
But, Google says, “start small”. Though this task in the SEO strategy sounds a little simple one but, according to Google, making small and incremental changes to the website helps in boosting keyword rankings.
The Google My Business website implemented various web fundamental best practices including setting up canonicals. And, to their surprise, with just a few little SEO changes, the website saw an almost 2X increase in organic traffic. Yes, check out the growth the Google My Business marketing website saw after making those little SEO changes:
What comes under small SEO changes?
Whenever you take up any SEO project, start with small things such as-
- Setting up canonicals
- Updating XML sitemaps
- Improving metadata
- Making amazing heading tags
- Working on image ALT attributes
- Putting up internal links
- And, many more
There are many underrated areas that most SEOs ignore. But, as per Google’s SEO strategy, we must consider ‘small things first’.
2. Experiment with making changes
When Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), many businesses and SEO marketers faced a challenge of how to compromise on design. So, the only businesses that took benefit of AMP were the news publishers.
There were two benefits that those news publishers saw to AMP-lify their website-
- Making their website load much faster
- Showcasing their news in the ‘Top Stories News Carousel’
But, Google itself experimented AMP in 2018 for the Think with Google website. Along with AMP, Google also focused on implementing structured data and work on the issues recovered in their Google Search Console.
And, just the way, I find errors while implementing any such new things, Google also found common errors on a few URLs, and they focused on fixing them. After fixing those AMP errors, the impression on those URLs increased by 200%.
Google also suggested that updating content would help us rank better and especially on the featured snippets.
According to a report by Ahrefs, featured snippets steal the clicks from the #1 ranking result on SERPs. And, on the top of that, Google said that whenever their content showcased on the featured snippets, they saw additional 1000 impressions.
This clearly means that Google suggests us to keep updating and improving our content in order to rank our website pages on featured snippets.
What experiments should you do to rank in 2019?
- Updating overall website content
- Improving site performance and loading speed
- Implementing mobile-friendliness
- Bringing in Structured Data
- Implementing AMP (make sure there are no errors)
- Fixing Google Search Console errors
- And, similar stuff
3. Consolidate your efforts
Years ago, most SEOs used to create one main website and multiple geo-specific websites targeting different countries and audience with almost similar content, design and nothing different. You know a few things never change and this is one of them. Even Google revealed that they also followed the similar idea for their Google Retail. But, as per Google, there is one issue in following this idea- this way not just confuses the users but even the search engines.
And, there is only one solution to this issue- having one great website instead of having multiple country-specific websites. Do you know why? Google decided to clean up their six old and geo-specific websites and consolidated everything including their efforts on their main website. Doing this, Google saw a 2X increase in click-through rate on their website’s call-to-action and 64% increase in the organic traffic.
But, here one needs to be clarified- Google did an entire site audit and then they realized the old websites needed a massive overhaul. And, according to Google, you need to know whether consolidating your efforts is possible in your case or not. That’s the reason why I specifically suggest SEOs make sure you audit your website appropriately and know everything in and out of the same. That helps you create an effective SEO strategy.
Here is a step-by-step guide to doing an audit of a website for SEO. Also, if you are looking for some tools to audit your website for SEO, here are they-
- Ahrefs
- Moz
- SEMrush
- DeepCrawl
- ScreamingFrog
- Woorank
- SpyFu
Follow Google’s SEO Strategy to Rank in 2019
We, SEOs, every year start our new year with making new and fresh SEO strategies for our or clients’ websites. This year, we have got a gift of an SEO strategy by Google itself. Just like any other company, Google also works on improving its search presence and rankings. So, let’s create our new SEO strategy focusing on these three ways that would help us drive higher performance, enhanced user experience, and great results. Do you have anything specific that would be helpful for the SEOs and agencies to focus on while creating the SEO strategy for 2019? Share with us.
