Key Takeaways about SEO in the Year 2018

In case you wonder, 2018 has been the year in which a lot happened in the SEO industry. This is due to the fact that Google, the main search engine, kept on updating its algorithms. As a result, there have been developments throughout the year 2018. A few takeaways are worth mentioning in this regard.

The updates have been unparalleled

The rolling out and rolling back of updates had been frequent throughout 2018. The impact of Google Penguin and Panda was also quite huge. Other updates had also been launched. This is the reason that SERPs kept on changing and the SEO pros were not quite sure what happened due to what reasons. There were instances when an update was rolled out and when the professionals were figuring out the impact of updates, the updates were rolled back. There has been a concept about 200 ranking factors in the past. Now, nobody knows about exact number of those factors.

The rule of Google in online world

More people are now using Google as their preferred search engine. It means that digital marketers will need to focus more on ranking their websites and pages on Google if they want to succeed. With this bigger number of users, Google has the authority to dictate its terms in the way it wants. It doesn’t mean that this rule of Google over internet is powered by something unjust. It rather means that they are now doing everything to make sure that the users get what they need from search results. it also means more hard work required from the side of digital marketers.

The impact of mobile first index is not quite huge yet

Although the Google’s Mobile first index has been rolled out, there has not been much of impact on the search results. But it surely means that a direction has been set because the number of mobile users is not going to decrease in the future. And so, they need to be facilitated more.

SEO pros do not like the change

Now, this one is not the drawback. It is rather a human nature that we generally do not like things to be changed as quickly as things are changing in the world of Google. But then, there are many people who are not doing the necessary things to at least cope with the new challenges at some extent. This is reason that many SEO pros are doing SEO audit, reporting, use of tools and other actions in the same old-fashioned manner.

The rise of search intent

Now this may be a bad news for the old-fashioned guys who like to dictate Google to rank their websites with the help of keyword research in the outdated manner. Search intent is out there and it has drastically changed things related to keyword research. Now, if you want your website to rank in the Google search results, you have to make sure that you are focusing on users rather than search engines.

Tips for Keyword Research in 2019 for Better Traffic

For all those years, we have been using keyword research as a tool to improve optimization of the side in order to build links and have better online traffic. But the matter of fact is that keyword research sets the foundation of good SEO. It means that you are going to have to do the keyword research in right way to ensure better foundation building.

Fundamentals of keyword research

Until 2013, there was a discussion about keyword volume, competition and traffic among the people who used to do keyword research. The major tool used in this regard was Google Keyword Planner, and it remains on the top. However, the scenario has been changed quite drastically now. The focus has been shifted from keyword volume to search intent. Google now encourages SEOs to focus on what people want rather than looking for what could make search engines favoring their websites.

Having that said, it would be worth mentioning some tips which may help you to do better keyword research during 2019.

• Despite the fact that search volume can be misleading in some instances, you still need to consider it along with other factors such as traffic and clicks.
• If you want to create content on the topics that can give you a lot of traffic, you need to look at your competitors’ top performing pages. Then you can do a little more research to write something more interesting on those topics to have an edge.
• Analyzing search intent for a certain query is quite important if you want your website or page to rank. The best way is to check the top 10 results against a particular query. The top results are going to tell you a lot about the search intent.
• After analyzing the search intent, you will have to determine if you can serve for the search intent. If you can serve in this regard, you need to assess the difficulty involved in the process. If you cannot serve the search intent, you have got other topics to cover so move on.
• In order to assess the difficulty, you can use Ahref’s Keyword Difficulty score to determine the level of difficulty you are going to face while serving the search intent. If you want best results, you need to make the assessment manually. The main goal is to rank higher than your competitors. While links play an important role in this regard, they are not everything. The content you create is going to have more value.
• Look at the top three pages and find out the keyword they are targeting. The tool you can use in this regard can be Ahrefs’ Content Gap Analysis tool.
• The above mentioned technique is going to give you a list of keywords that you can target. You can create content that would focus those keywords.
• After creating content, you need to build high quality links. Link building now needs to be done in an intelligent manner so that everything could seem natural. The best practice is to write guest posts for the other high authority sites and put a link pointing at your site.

Looking at these tips, you can see that the basics of SEO are going to remain the same. There may the addition of a few things but it is not going to change what you need to do in order to set the basics of your SEO campaign.