SEO in 2019 – What’s Working Today

As I’m sure you know, there have been quite a few algorithm updates in the past 12 months and as a result, a ton of sites were affected. Now, we only know of certain industries like health that got hit. But the truth is that no one knows exactly what happened except Google themselves. So for that reason, I’m not going to bother making predictions.

Instead, I’m going to show you the SEO strategies and tips that are working right now based on our own experiences and those of respected members in the SEO community.

Let’s get to it.

Here, is the list of tips that works for SEO in 2019, you will find the detail of each in this article:

The first SEO tip is an obvious one, and that’s to have a mobile optimized website.

Let’s zip through this one. At the end of 2018, Google announced that after two-years of work, over half of the pages shown in search results use mobile-first indexing. This means that Google will predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. So long story short, if your website isn’t mobile optimized, do it.

Next up is to start with topical research. We all know what keyword research is, but don’t confuse it with topical research. Today, more than ever, targeting individual keywords is the wrong way to approach SEO. In our study of over 3 million search queries, we found that on average, the number one ranking page also ranks for nearly a thousand additional keywords. This can lead to a single page getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of search visitors across all its keywords.

So if you want to get more search traffic from a single page, you’ll want to find topics that have breadth. And the easiest way to find topics with high search traffic potential is to see what’s working for your competitors.

The next tip is to build topical authority.

So how do you create topical authority in your niche?

Two things:

First is to get links from topically relevant and authoritative websites. In the case of antivirus software, links from sites like Norton, PC mag or other relevant sites would be the holy grail of relevant links.

The second is to create contextual relevance on your website through internal linking. A great strategy is to create content silos. Basically, you have a top-level page which is usually used to rank for big head terms. You then create subtopics underneath them, where they all link internally to each other creating relevance for users and search engines.

Search intent basically means the reason behind a searcher’s query. And Google’s job is to match the best results to any given query. So no matter how many links you have. No matter how good your technical and on-page SEO is, if you’re not matching search intent, then you’re not going to rank.

The easiest way to identify search intent is to just Google the keyword you want to rank for, and look at the types of pages that are ranking. These will generally fall into the 3 C’s of search intent.

• Content Type
• Content Format
• and Content angle.

Content type can usually be categorized into blog posts, product, category, and landing pages. Content format applies more to blog posts and landing pages. A few common blog formats you’ll see are “how-tos”, step-by-step tutorials, list posts, and opinion editorials. For a landing page, that might be something like a tool or calculator. Content angle is often depicted in the title as the “benefit.” It’s basically your hook as to why someone should click and read your article.

The next thing you can do is to keep your content fresh. It’s generally accepted in the SEO community that Google uses a “freshness” factor in their ranking algorithm.

To identify which pages you should update, ask yourself these questions:

If the answer is “no,” then you should give it more time to rank.

If you haven’t spent time building links, yet the top ranking pages have hundreds of backlinks, then it’s more likely an authority issue over a “freshness” one.

Like I mentioned before, if you can’t match search intent, then you probably can’t rank.

If the answer is “yes,” then the last question is going to help you make your final decision.

This one is a little more subjective and requires a bit of research and common sense. “Best of” posts are a great example of when freshness may be an issue. For example, if you haven’t updated your 2017 guide that used to rank for “best headphones,” then it makes sense why you’re not ranking. Manufacturers are always releasing new models, and people are looking for today’s technology. To get a better idea, just go to Google and search for your target keyword. And if you see that a good chunk of the posts have the current year in the titles and yours is out of date, then it’s time for a refresh.

Not all links are created equal. And as a general rule of thumb, the harder the link is to get, the more valuable it’ll be to your SEO success. Without overcomplicating things, think of good links in 3 layers. The more criteria it matches, the better. First is topical authority of the referring domain. Getting links from websites that are highly-related to your content will likely add more weight than ones that are wide spread.

For example, if your page is on the best headphones in 2019 and you get links from places like Cnet, Techradar, and Bose, these would be ideal links to acquire. Compare that to a link from a travel blog who had a one-off post where they mentioned something about shopping for headphones. When you’re prospecting for links, you can usually gauge a website’s niche by just the domain name. Second is the relevance of the link. Let’s use that example of “best headphones” again, but this time at the page level. Getting a link from another page on the same topic would be ideal. It’s obviously super-relevant to your content. As for the travel blogger, he or she may have written a personal post about their travels to Spain. And as they were documenting their journey, they happened to mention that they bought Bose QC35s because of your guide. But that doesn’t change the fact that the topic of the post is actually about traveling to Spain. Clearly, link #1 is more relevant, and will almost certainly provide more value to your page. Third is the referring page’s “link authority.” Google still uses PageRank today in their ranking algorithm. In general, the more quality links a referring page has, the more link juice it can pass on to both internal and external links on that page.

The higher the UR, the more authority it can pass. If you’re looking for link building strategies that often fulfill these requirements, then the two that I recommend are the Skyscraper technique and guest posting. With Skyscraper style prospects you’ll often find more mature pages where they’ve had time to get links and build PageRank. So getting links from some of these pages can very well move the needle. And the second is guest posting, which is great since you can handpick sites you want to get links from.

The next thing I highly recommend focusing on is YouTube SEO. In the past year, we’ve grown our subscribers 3X and increased views by 10X. Most importantly, it’s helped us generate thousands of new customers. I’m sure you’ve noticed a massive increase in video results in Google’s search results.

So if you want to get more search traffic from a single page, you’ll want to find topics that have breadth. And the easiest way to find topics with high search traffic potential is to see what’s working for your competitors.