Three KEY things to think about for your 2019 SEO Strategy.

This article goes over three key things:

• SEO's you're selling yourself short
• Start making data driven decisions or get left behind
• User experience first, optimising for Google later

SEO's you're selling yourself short.

• Organic Sessions
• Time on Page
• Bounce Rate
• Keyword Rankings
• Leads / Conversions
• AVG session duration

These are all standard KPI's that you should be tracking as an SEO. However, are we selling ourselves short by doing this alone? We have all worked with clients who use another agency for their social/email marketing or maybe they opt to do that in-house. Thats fine, not every agency sells multiple services anyway but what if the social/email marketing team isn't up to par?

As an SEO you create linkable content by doing:

• Industry Leading Research
• Create media such as video content
• Produce resource pages or ultimate guides

These are all valuable link-worthy content, well, if you do it right. The point is though you've created this content that can be utilised by the social/email marketing team. It goes both ways too, the social team could be doing their own research/producing their own content that the SEO team could utilise in their link building efforts.

It sounds simple but your marketing teams need to be sharing their strategies with each other. Stop keeping your departments in their own segments.

You will also engage with webmasters to get backlinks, you'll engage with people to get data and ultimately build up that brand awareness. It's not something you can really track unfortunately, so we need to shout about our wins where we can and that is referral traffic.

If you're not utilising UTM tracking codes - start now. I'll be covering an in-depth guide on UTM codes over at Serpinsights.io soon!

• Brought referral traffic to the site
• Created content that can be utilised by other departments
• Increased email signups

Start Making Data Driven Decisions or Get Left Behind

It's 2019 and there are still so many SEO's working in the stone ages. If you're not utilising some of the newer analysis software out there then you will get left behind.

We have so many enemies when it comes to SEO:

• Three Pack
• Position 0
• Google Ads
• and more...

If your competitors are making data driven decisions they're:

• getting the best bang for their buck
• going to have much more time
• going to increase revenue and traffic for their clients

And you're going to be:

• testing constantly
• scratching your head wondering why those rankings just won't budge
• Making excuses to angry/concerned clients
• Spending more money and effort ranking than you need to.

Examples of software that give you data:

• SERP Insights (word-count, authoritativeness, referring domains, word-count)
• Chase Reiners Bench Marketer (title tag, meta description, similarities, keyword densities etc)

Two powerful tools I'll be using in my strategy for 2019. Check them out if you want to accelerate your 2019 SEO campaigns.

User Experience First, Optimising for Google Later

Google currently has RankBrain as the third most important factor for search optimisation. Times are changing...even if you don't want to believe it links are becoming less important than they once were.

So what is Google RankBrain? RankBrain is a machine-learning AI that helps Google process some of its search results. Its key objective is to gather user habits, understanding search queries and user intent.

A good example of understanding search intent I read was about typing in "rusty cars." This would bring up rusty cars but typing "cars rusty" would bring up the Disney character Rusty from the movie Cars.

So it's imperative that your website is thinking about user intent in 2019.

Sales or Learning Keyword

Here's an example, is the keyword your trying to rank for a shopping focused keyword? Are people searching for it to buy an item or are they searching to learn about an item? If I type in to Google 'Things to do in Glasgow' am I trying to buy tickets to a see a show or am I looking to see what I can do in Glasgow?

I'm running some more tests on this theory but I am pretty confident some keywords are like a switch... its either one or the other.

The core thing to take away from this last point is start thinking about the user experience first and start optimising for Google later on, RankBrain will do its job and put you in the right spot. If you're having users stay on page, browse around your site and offer them the information they were looking for you will send all the right signals to Google, which will ultimately increase your rankings.

We're all looking for that silver bullet but the reality is it all comes down to three things, content, links and user experience.