by Shweta Patel
It’s never too early to begin preparing for the future. 2019 may very well be a revolutionary year for SEO. Between virtual reality and augmented reality, or blockchain and artificial intelligence, we could see massive shifts in the way we, as search engine optimizers, do things.
Below we’ve gathered over 15 of the industry’s top experts to give their predictions on what we’re going to see in 2019.
While there are many predictions that come as totally expected (hint; the experts believe in voice search!), there are also several, such as Matt’s or Yogesh’s, that come out of left field.
Here’s what you can expect to see below:
Many experts in the SEO industry have made their predictions for 2019:
Voice Search – According to 1/3 of SEO experts voice search will be at the top for SEO trends for 2019.
Mobile Focus – 10% of experts believe that mobile will continue to dominate over desktop therefore making optimizing for mobile essential.
Blockchain – 10% of experts feel that blockchain is going to impact the way that SEOs interact with websites in terms of technical changes.
Amazon Search Optimization (AMSO) – is going to be trending according to 7% of experts.
For the rest, you’ll have to read on!
Jana Garanko, head of PR at the legendary marketing tool, SEMrush, believes that AI will change our keyword research practices, and rankings will depend on private demographic data even more than they do now.
Artificial intelligence will become more ubiquitous, so SEO specialists must grasp firsthand knowledge on machine learning and automation. A greater number of people will stick to voice search, so SEO specialists will have to adjust to this relatively new type of search. Since voice requests are different from normal queries, the keyword research process is likely to change.
While virtual reality technologies start bringing sci-fi movies to real life, I doubt that VR and AR will have a great impact on SEO anytime soon. This is a matter of years, though, and my guess is that in some 5-10 years this kind of SEO will become more common.
SERPs will get more personalized and will take into account users’ interests, hobbies, location, search history, and certainly gender. SEO specialists will also have to take into consideration a greater amount of content-related factors such as its length, quality, TF-IDF, and its structure.
Currently more than half of searches account for mobile devices, and the number will certainly go up in 2019. SEO specialists will continue to need to ensure that their websites are mobile friendly. Besides, AMP will be on the rise along with new quick SERP features.
Kent Lewis, President and Founder of the Portland based performance firm, Anvil, predicts that both Amazon search and voice search will be trends in 2019.
My prediction is that the biggest SEO trend in 2019 will be Amazon search. 56% of consumers begin searches around products on Amazon (not Google), According to a Kenshoo study. This is a huge shift that we’re seeing and Amazon search cannot be neglected. Amazon really could be the new Google.
The second biggest SEO trend in 2019 will be voice search. The way in which consumers search with be noticeably changed by digital assistants.
When consumers search vocally, their queries are hugely different from how they write them out. The most noticeable aspect of this is that voice search produces many long-tail keyword queries. It will be a challenge optimizing for these terms. Do we create new pages to address each long-tail variation? Do we create a hub page? The additional challenge that is also relatively new is the concept of Position 0 on Google: answers to your questions at the top of the organic search results, above standard listings.
Ray Cheselka, SEO & AdWords Manager at SEO and design agency, webFEAT Complete, predicts that sites with over a two second load time will be penalized, and search intent is going to continue to grow in importance.
It’s safe to say we are now living in the future. The biggest change that we’ll see in 2019 (and that’s already happening) is that keywords are becoming less important. Instead, the intent behind a specific keyword or keyphrase will become emphasized further and further by the rise in mobile and voice search.
For example: Someone searches for “Best way to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving.” That searcher likely is looking for methods to cook a turkey, but with each method he/she may want to know why the method is optimal, how intensive the process is, and what kind of turkey is best to buy. In a way, we can do research and build helpful information into content that users did not even know they needed. This better satisfies search intent, boosts engagement, and increases rankings.
As far as new tools, methodologies and technologies go, there are a few things that come to mind:
Data and Interpreting It :
As time goes on, technology will make it easier and easier to interpret the meaning behind a search query. This will lead to SEOs being able to generate content and offer advice that caters to a much more specific audience and satisfies their needs more completely.
Security :
As more of our lives take place online, it is only going to get more important that websites are secure. This means hosting on secure servers, encrypting our sites, and keeping everything up to date. Google already gives ranking boosts to sites on a secure protocol (https vs. http) and this emphasis on security will only grow as time passes. Blockchain may very well be the next iteration of this.
Performance :
The modern user has a very short attention span. If a website takes more than a few seconds to load, she/he is likely to leave. Therefore, it’s really important to make sure that site speed/load time is optimized as much as possible.
Technologies within plugins, the utilization of CDN’s, caching mechanisms, and strategic organization of scripts/css files are currently effective. However, by 2019 a website loading in over 2 seconds could be penalized. Google developed AMP for a near-instantaneous load of websites when implemented properly, so we know performance is on their radar. Developers will need to tighten up code, and truly optimize JS/CSS and overall HTML.
Yogesh Jain, founder of India based digital agency, Concept Allies, believes that augmented and virtual reality, and blockchain may change Google’s organic search algorithms.
Both virtual reality and augmented reality are promising technologies for search engine marketing (both paid and organic). By 2019, the way we search might not change completely, but these new technologies will definitely change the way we build links, engage users, and generate leads through content marketing.
Content strategists are making dramatic efforts to incorporate video into their plans. With AR and VR in the picture, they will surely figure out ways to leverage these. AR and VR content can also replace the role of infographics in SEO. Also, Google already favors mobile-friendly websites. Since AR and VR are becoming mainstream, Google may tweak their algorithm to favor sites with more mobile engagement or maybe come up with a new search engine section focused only on AR/VR – just like what they have for images.
As for Blockchain, the impact will be determined on the basis of scale of adoption. Seeing the current trend, many companies might incorporate blockchain and web 3.0 into their hosting, thus making it mandatory for webmasters to maintain sites on a technical side so that rankings aren’t lost. The schema community is already working to create a markup for the same purpose.
Voice Search Will Make up Nearly 50% of Searches
Dave Gregory, Content Marketing Manager from the UK based performance marketing agency, SiteVisibility, predicts that 2019, and not 2018, is going to be the real year of voice.
Voice search is going to be one of the main areas of focus for SEO in 2019 and beyond. It’s estimated that by 2020, voice search will account for about 50% of total searches and that already 40% of adults currently use voice search at least once a day. Search marketers are going to have to pay attention to how they want to capture this traffic. Currently, we don’t see a lot of people focusing much on it, so we think that the early bird will definitely catch the worms.
It appears that voice search not only contains more words, but also may be more targeted towards what a user is expecting to see. Therefore, practices such as crafting on page content will require a different approach. For example, where previously a clothes company could optimize for ‘Black T-Shirts’, they may now have to consider long tail queries such as, “where is the cheapest black t-shirt?”
We also think there will be much more intent to searches than there is currently. Terms like ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘when’, etc. will all be featured much more prominently. In short, we feel that SEO in 2019 will have to shift focus even more towards answering people’s questions and solving people’s problems. We also feel that as a starting point, the steps taken by people to try and rank for featured snippets will be a good place to start from to explore voice search.
We think SEO in 2019 will see a shift to focusing even more on user intent, problem solving, and hyper locality in order to capitalize on the continued rise of voice search.
Damon Peters, CMO of Auction site, Proxibid, predicts that in 2019, blockchain is going to create trends in SEO previously not possible. He also predicts a continued importance on voice, but also a new type of search: visual search.
In 2019, web-based businesses will adopt more voice-to-text technology to increase engagement and search activity.
Visual search based upon engagement with images and camera data is a big opportunity to foster relevance, perhaps as early as 2019. A user might want to take a picture of an item or environment with their phone and tell the machine “I want this” and move on with their day.
Fake news” will be solved. Authorship attribution and authentication will win the day, or users will abandon channels with terrible content. Subject matter authorities will carry more weight over time, and our tools will assist our search for reliable content or become irrelevant themselves. Blockchain has great promise here.
Anonymity will become a premium. We’ve created our own cocoons of news and information from relevancy and preference settings online. The promise of the democratization for online publishing was to empower a broader voice and provide a platform for the authors, but the downside has been realized with sensationalism coming from the vocal minority. Sensationalism will always win, as we’ve evolved to give our attention to threats. We will adopt tools to mute personalization to allow broader viewpoints. We will have a need to travel online in the moment and be unencumbered by our breadcrumbs. Blockchain has great promise here as well.
Mobile and Voice Importance Continue to Dominate
Calib Backe, SEO Manager for Maple Holistics, writes that mobile and voice are going to continue their domination of importance as we rely on desktop less and less.
If you want to know what kind of SEO trends are going to develop in 2019, look no further than the trends that are developing in search in both 2017 and 2018. We’re long past mobile search and voice-search being a ‘trend’ – they are the full on normal now, outdoing desktop search in both volume and SEO-favorability.
Based on this, one can safely bet that SEO in 2019 will heavily favor results that are the most mobile and voice-query-friendly. This means that companies looking to rank for search terms will need to focus on giving digestible answers, as well as posing their information in question/answer form – much the same way one would ask Google over voice-search.
Additionally, as is always the case, search engine algorithms will continue to become more sophisticated. In 2019, you can bet that White Hat SEO will have separated itself even further from Black Hat SEO, and that above all else, providing quality content will be the most important factor for businesses ranking in search.
Chris Brantner, SEO Director at SleepZoo, believes that UX is going to be the pivotal SEO focus in 2019.
Over the last 5 years, SEO has changed tremendously, and I only expect the pace to quicken over the next couple of years.
So what will SEO look like in 2019?
I think user experience will prove to be one of the largest ranking factors. Google is pushing towards more and more personalized search results, so in order for you to perform well, you’ll have to ensure that you provide a better user experience that keeps people on your site. You’re going to need content that engages them, and a site that loads lightning fast to keep them from hitting that back button.
Amy Kilvington, Marketing Executive at Custom Curtains, believes that SEOs are going to have to optimize social media more as Google indexes it and prioritizes it over their sites’ pages.
By 2019, content marketing is set to become an industry worth $300 billion. It goes without saying that this will have a huge impact on search engine optimization across the board; after all, the two come as a pair.
We’re expecting SEO of the future to be even more content and consumer focused. Websites will continue to produce content that’s created specifically for humans, not just the search engine. Brands will become more experimental with the content they share and the partnerships they strike up with influencers.
Social media will also play a big role in SEO of the future. Social channels will continue to integrate with search as a whole, both in terms of more content being indexed and ranked by the search engine (as Google already does with tweets from certain accounts), and users utilizing these social platforms as a search engine in its own right. YouTube is already the second largest search engine, remember!
Joe Goldstein, Lead SEO & Operations Manager at Contractor Calls believes as well that SEOs will need to optimize other platforms for search.
As Google’s search results become increasingly monetized and other platforms such as Amazon and YouTube gain more SoV and search volume, I think we’re overdue for the focus of SEO to shift away from Google. In time, the line between social media management, channel development, and SEO will be significantly blurrier than it is today.
Of course, there are several factors that could speed up, slow down, or even reverse this growth. YouTube monetization has undergone massive changes over the last year which have made it difficult for content creators to rely on traditional video monetization, instead pushing them towards new options like sponsorship and branded apparel. Now that Amazon has entered the brick and mortar space via the Whole Foods acquisition, Walmart has begun to push into the ecommerce space by offering solutions for third-party sellers. It’s also too early to say what the long-term future of VR and smart speakers will be, and whether either of them will have a material impact on search or media consumption.
No matter which platforms have gained or lost ground by 2019, we can expect that the recent wave of SEO ranking factor studies will carry over onto the most prominent platforms. A growing understanding of and access to big data processing means more and more publishers will reverse engineer those ranking factors, setting the state for new tools, brands, and sophistication.
Teresa Walsh, Marketing Executive at automobile site, Cazana, predicts that hyper organic targeting is going to increase its importance in 2019 with more location search and more voice search.
Voice search will change how we interact with search engines and it will make SEO even more competitive and vital to online success. Context is vital to voice search rankings. When we are searching via Alexa and Siri we are getting 1 search result. This means website owners and SEO experts will need to be on top of their game when it comes to keyword research and keeping the context of their site relevant to users.
More than 50% of all web traffic is via mobile today and 76% of people who use location search visit a business within one day. This number is huge. Location search is growing every year and we are using our mobile phones daily to search for answers and solutions locally to us.
Voice search and location search will become even more important.
In 2019, we’re going to have to optimize voice search answers with CTAs that Google’s algorithms don’t pick up on, but humans do. Dan Mallette, Lead SEO Strategist at both InVue Digital & HearstDMS, predicts that SEOs will have to optimize for voice search and find new avenues as SERP real estate shrinks.
While the fundamentals of SEO will remain the same, the landscape will continue to become more and more competitive in 2019. Google continues to increase quick information in the SERPs, from enhanced product information, expanded reviews, to answer boxes. This real estate gives priority to brands and will only continue to expand as Google puts more and more trust in entities rather than individuals.
Being able to provide clear, concise, and accurate information will take on greater importance with more and more home assistants hitting the market. Outside of business partnerships, voice search currently puts a heavy reliance on the answer boxes in search. This puts a heavier onus on marketers and brands to be able to provide answers to the questions users are asking.
Soon, “being on the first page” won’t be good enough because voice searches do not rely on pages. Being able to answer queries across a broad spectrum of knowledge will be imperative as the market share for voice grows.
Chris Gregory, founder and managing partner at Jacksonville based firm, DAGMAR Marketing, predicts that AI and machine learning will have a big impact on SEO in 2019 and SEOs who aren’t technical will be left in the dust.
The future of SEO will involve artificial intelligence, with the big players investing in machine learning. As just one example of how SEO is evolving in this manner, this huge SEMrush study did not use correlation analysis to arrive at their conclusions. Instead, they used a machine learning algorithm.
We are already noting how engagement metrics, such as bounce rate, time on site, number of pages viewed and so forth, are becoming more of a ranking factor. This is why highly useful long form content is effective today; this type of content, when well done, naturally causes people to stay on the site longer. Google is using artificial intelligence to mimic human engagement on sites and rewarding sites that display impressive metrics of usability. We suspect that as a kneejerk reaction, some people looking for quick wins will focus less on spammy link building and more on finding ways to game engagement metrics.
As a second consideration, in a sense, all that was old is becoming new again. In the earlier days of SEO, the organic search engine optimization discipline was more of a technical skill, of making sites crawlable. Then the focus switched to creating quality content where keywords were used in a natural way. Although quality content is still important, because of AMP, schema, page speed/fast-loading pages, mobile usability and the like, the need for technical SEO skills are once again coming to the forefront. Developers who aren’t already focused on SEO requirements aren’t necessarily keeping up with these changes, which will present a challenge to brands and open up additional opportunities for developers with updated SEO knowledge and skills.
Jordan Harling, SEO Specialist at Roman Blinds Direct, agrees with the consensus that voice search will be the trend in 2019.
With the rise of smart home technologies like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomeKit, we’re beginning to see people becoming more comfortable using their voices to search things on the internet.
What this means is that people are starting to use more natural language when using search engines. People are more than happy to type fragments of sentences like “blinds” into Google, but saying that out loud just doesn’t feel right. With voice people are much more likely to say something like, “Where can I buy blinds?”
While this might not seem like a big deal on the face of it, it could turn out to be one of the biggest changes we’ve faced in years. Search engines are adapting and beginning to favor natural, more speech-like content, so to keep up we have to provide content in the same way. We have to think like our customers and answer the questions they’re asking in as concise and an informative way possible.
In 2019, voice-search will be the dominant way that people search. The people who will be best suited for SEO will be early adopters and those who are able to talk and think like their audience.
Head of Marketing, Matt Edstrom, at BioClarity, a San Diego based health-science company, believes that SEO is going to see a decreased importance in 2019, and SEOs should start making sure they’re competent in SEM.
In 2019, I believe that Google will continue to push paid search ads and claim the majority of the above the fold organic SERP. As we are currently experiencing heading into 2018, Google continues to add more and more add space leaving little to no room for organic listings above the fold. That being said, SEOs will have to work extra hard to either claim local listing space or one of the top 3 positions.
Even then, your organic listing will live beneath the normal top 3 ads that look more like organic listings, as well as under the more recently implemented Google Shopping Ads.
With the depleting Organic SERP space, SEOs will have to take a more diverse approach to their overall SEO campaigns. Clients and marketers will need to begin implementing multiple forms of digital marketing tactics including paid search, social media marketing, local SEO, in addition to SEO if they hope to dominate a given Google SERP.
While some may argue that video is already prevalent in SEO, Michael Lan of Glossika(a language education technology company) believes that we’ve barely even seen the beginning.
With content shifting more and more towards various forms of media such as video and audio, and away from pure text, we can expect search engine optimization to adapt accordingly. Specifically, it won’t be long until we see updates in search engine algorithms that lessen the weight of text based content over time and increase the importance of other forms of content, especially video.
Search engine algorithms will surely crawl video content directly instead of just crawling the text based content surrounding the video. This will gradually phase out the effectiveness of using “clickbait” to draw more attention to the video.
As search engine algorithms adjust to accommodate the change in content, likely towards video, it will be important for marketers to optimize their content accordingly in order to best increase overall organic traffic. This has already happened to a considerable extent, but I do expect search engine algorithms to further zero in on smart phones and video as people become more mobile oriented.
Jason Scott, Digital Marketing Specialist at Archway Cards Ltd, also believes in voice being the trend of 2019 rather than 2018. Since so many people believe in voice search being the trend in 2019, I, Nicole Bermack (this article’s author), am coining the term VSO – voice search optimization.
For me, the three main pillars of Search Engine Optimization; content, links and site architecture will remain for years to come. However, I do believe that voice search will re-shape the way we optimize our websites.
Home assistant devices will continue to grow dramatically in popularity meaning we’ll see an increase in conversational questions’ related searches. Currently, Google’s Home device relies heavily on featured snippets to provide answers. Businesses will need to react to this by tailoring their content to fit these queries and appear in the featured snippets.
Finally, Jonathan Poston, an SEO Manager at both 99 Cent Razor and Wedding Bands For Both doesn’t think anything is actually going to change in 2019.
SEO will remain the same because the existing gold standard tools are behind, often inaccurate, and there is nothing in sight that is any better. Furthermore, Google hasn’t evolved nearly as fast as everyone thinks, which may be why the tools aren’t evolving either.
There are start-up SEO tools that purport to use AI systems, from AI word spinners that pass Copyscape and essentially write like a journalist, to those that promise to automagically update the entire site and put all SEOs out of business. I’ve tested and talked to these types of companies, and none of them are “there” yet.
I believe SEO in 2019 will largely be like SEO in 2018, with the exception of some “big” Google update that wipes out enough websites to make people believe the algorithms have grown exponentially smarter.
Not that I don’t believe things are evolving, I do, just not fast enough to leap into a new world of SEO by 2019.
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So what have we learned? Here’s a column graph of the information presented in the introduction.
2019 will truly be the year of voice.
Other technologies such as VR & AR, and blockchain could make big waves as well, but this may be with only the most savvy of SEOs.
Amazon search and YouTube & Video search need to be taken into account, as search share of voice is given more to platforms other than Google. In fact, if “Social Media,” “Video Utilization,” and “YouTube Search” are added to each other, we see that some sort of video optimization will actually tie for the second largest SEO trend in 2019:
Search Engine Optimization is constantly changing and 2019 will be no different. As you prepare in the coming months to review SEO best practices for 2019 keep in mind the trends listed. It will give you an edge in your work performance and in your industry. In 2019 to create a whole new type of search algorithm gaming, that may almost be viewed as black hat. Be on the look out for this one.
How about you? What are your thoughts on SEO trends in 2019?
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