The year has come to an end and it’s finally a time to summarise and list those important points that will shape the future of SEO in 2019. We would give this year’s credit to Mobile First indexing of Google, which was one of the main focus for SEO professionals.

With 2019, more changes are expecting in terms of SEO. There is a buzz about AMSO which is Amazon Search Optimization. Amazon’s Alexa has already paved way for voice search optimization. With almost, 20 million voice devices sold by Amazon, the future clearly shown the next shift in SEO.

While voice search is one of the aspect to track during next year, we have listed all the important SEO aspects that you should focus on.

Related: State of Local SEO Insights in 2019

Voice Search or AMSO?

Yes, to start with we would continue from the biggest predicted shift in the market. Many experts are of the view that voice search is just a fade and would go away in months time. But as this was with Mobile Devices, voice search too will create the biggest impact in SEO.

According to reports, voice search queries are longer than text. This alone tell us that user are ready to make more personalise and precise searches than the written textual queries. Marketers now has even more number of keywords to worry about and have to be more pacific while answering those user intent.

[ img source: AdSharkMarketing ]

So the coming year is for voice search?

As Wright put it:

“In my opinion, the ‘juice isn’t worth the squeeze’ yet for most companies when it comes to showing up in voice queries,” Wright said. “However, I think more companies will look into a voice optimization strategy next year. As I said last year, voice search is coming, it still just isn’t quite there yet.”

Even though voice search have got big attention during 2018, it is just a piece of a bigger shift, from specific “results” to “answers” as part of a longer “conversational search journey.”

Search Intent and Understanding Your Audience

Your SEO strategy needs to be updated and in align with the latest changes in SEO. Although keywords are crucial part of SEO, they are becoming less important in coming years.

More attention will be given to search intent and how relevant the search results are. Google is trying to provide more relevant results to the users, in short word Google wants to show exactly what the user is searching for. Google focuses on content which is informative, transactional and navigational.

• Informative – Means to have correct and precise content for user’s intent.
• Transactional – content that provides intent to perform some actions
• Navigational – One that is simple and easy to reach from sites.

Let’s face it. The attention span of the user is reducing. This, on one hand, is a bane for websites who do not pay attention to user experience and a boon for the ones who do.

Along with voice search and user’s intent part other aspect to keep track would be generation of video content and optimization, increasing social media indexing, paying more attention to on-page & technical optimization, optimizing for CTR, structured markup data and optimizing for featured snippet.

Also read: Six Digital Marketing Trends for 2019