5 Top SEO Techniques to Boost Your Organic Traffic in 2019

As search engines keep evolving and become more intelligent, SEO remains the most challenging strategy for webmasters. The constant changing of SEO rules makes it hard for online businesses to keep up.

We’ve compiled a list of top 5 SEO techniques that will help you boost organic traffic and outrank the competition in 2019.

1. RankBrain SEO

Among Google’s ranking factors is RankBrain, a machine learning system introduced in 2015. RankBrain uses AI to analyze behavior on search engines in order to rank your site. In other words, RankBrain evaluates your content based on the time users spend on your website and on the number of link clicks.

With RankBrain SEO constituting 15% of all search results, it’s safe to say that 2019 will mark a critical change in SEO and digital marketing in general. As the AI in RankBrain becomes more flexible and able to understand human beings much better, the focus will switch from link building and keywords as main elements of SEO to creating quality content with an aim to attract users. In addition, Google will be able to answer more complex questions, even ones that the user hasn’t asked directly!

2. Voice Search

Although in 2018 voice search was at an early stage, just a quick look at the numbers below is enough to understand how important it’s (about to) become:

• The number of voice searches in 2018 reached 1 billion a month.
• It is expected that 50% all searches will be conducted by voice by 2020.
• Over 40% of users think that voice search is a faster way of conducting searches online, and almost 30% of them also believe that voice search is more accurate than regular search.

VS is so popular because it suits the hectic lifestyle of modern people. And its future is looking bright too. Because of the more massive use of digital answering devices and smart home devices, voice search is expected to increase even more significantly in 2019.

So, what steps should you take to optimize your website for VS?

Since the most popular voice search devices, Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, use everyday language, optimize keywords as conversational phrases.

In addition, make sure to create high-quality, well-written, and well-formatted content because voice search recommends only organic results. This means that, if people like reading your stuff, you’ll eventually be rewarded with higher rankings.

3. Optimizing the Overall UX

One of the factors Google takes into consideration is how much time visitors spend on a page. So, if users stick around longer, Google will regard the page as useful and push it higher in search results.

Reducing the bouncing rates is not an easy task at all. It includes much more than simply using the right keywords and removing annoying pop-ups from the site. However, there are a few simple tactics you can use to improve the overall UX and boost your site’s position in SERPs:

a)    Create more personalized content that is easy to read. Format your text for better readability by writing shorter paragraphs comprised of short and medium-length sentences. Break the text with a sufficient number of subheadings, bullet points, and images. Finally, make sure your content is well-written and original in order to get people interested in reading it.

b)    Pay attention to the site’s usability. Can people find easily what they’re looking for? If they need to scroll around the homepage just to locate the main menu, they’ll leave very soon. Tools like Optimizely and Crazy Egg can help you analyze how users are interacting with your site, identify the problems, and give ideas of what needs to be improved.

c)     Check the site speed. Speed is important for both users and search engines. People don’t like waiting for too long in order to access information. If your website takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, most people will leave. In addition, Google uses site speed as a ranking factor. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to measure your site’s speed and identify the weak spots that slow it down, like unnecessary code or too big images.

4. Mobile Optimization

With smartphones generating more than half of the online traffic on a global level, it is obvious how important mobile is.

Google’s Mobile-First Index, which launched in July 2018, analyzes the website’s mobile version first, thus making it more important than the desktop version. This means that sites which haven’t been optimized for mobile yet should expect a significant drop in rankings in 2019.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a great tool for checking how easily visitors can use your pages on a mobile device. Another important factor is the website’s loading speed. As mentioned earlier, the average loading time should be no more than 3 to 4 seconds. Google’s Test My Site tool analyzes your pages and then generates suggestions to improve the site’s performance across all devices.

5. Take Advantage of Video

Did you know that social video has 1200% more shares than images and text together? Faster internet speeds in conjunction with smartphones and social networks have made video increasingly popular. In fact, it is expected 80% of the total web traffic to be video by 2021.

People have even started using YouTube to conduct their searches, which makes the most popular video platform a search engine we mustn’t underestimate.

To make the most of this trend, start producing and optimizing videos for YouTube. If you don’t know what to start with, the most effective types of videos are demonstration videos, customer testimonials, and video tutorials. Note:

Once you’ve created a great video, it’s time to optimize it in order to get more views. First things first, you need to conduct a keyword research. You can do this by using tools like Google Keyword Planner or monitor competitors and ‘borrow’ some ideas from them. No, you can start optimizing.

a)    Title. Use your target keyword in the title in order to rank better for the term but also make sure that the title is relevant to the video’s content. Finally, keep it short. If the title is longer than 60 characters, it’ll get cut short in result pages.

b)    Description. The character limit for video descriptions is 1.000 characters but you don’t need to use all that space – 300 to 500 words are more than enough to let the viewers know what the video is about. Bear in mind that YouTube displays only the first 2-3 lines of text (approx. 100 characters) so that’s where you should place the most important information, including keywords, links, and CTAs.

c)     Tags. Add at least 10 tags per video and include your focus keywords.

d)    Content length. As a rule of thumb, longer videos rank better than shorter ones. The average length of the best-ranking videos is about 15 minutes.

e)    Promote your videos. Promote your YouTube channel on your blog and social media or by running giveaways and contests. This will help increase your views, build authority, improve ROI, and get you higher in search results.

If your video content is successful, your site’s organic traffic may increase by 40%!

In Conclusion

SEO is constantly changing and this year is no different. We can expect the focus to shift from search engines to humans, which puts the spotlight on organic search strategies.

These are just a few of the SEO tactics coming in 2019 that will help you rank better on SERPs, increase traffic, and beat the competition.

If you still feel lost in SEO, you can hire a SEO specialist or seek help from a growth marketing mentor.