Online marketing is going to experience a significant change in 2019. The bad news is, people are not going to like most of the changes happening. We are not talking about changes from the competition standpoint. We already know that every year, digital marketing gets more competitive and a lot more expensive.
That is already a given. If you can do your due diligence and research what is happening in the online marketing world, you will be surprised to know that Google’s annual revenue has been making a lot of money in the past years. If fact, Google didn’t have a down year.
One of the reasons why we see changes in online marketing so much is because of the changes in technologies. Another reason is the internet is getting a little saturated. As of today, there are more or less 2 billion websites (active or inactive) on the internet. It means that there is one website for every four people in the world. If you think about it, that is pretty crazy. Do let us take a closer look at how digital marketing is going to change in 2019.
Search Engine Optimization will not look the same
We are starting with this one since we know people are going to hate this. Search Engine Optimization is beginning to move into the voice search direction. In 2018, two out of every five people used voice search application every day. In 2020, at least 50% of all online searches will be done using voice search application according to American media measurement and analytics company, ComScore, a company that provides marketing data and analytics to businesses.
And it will not just be people who will be speaking into the microphone of their smartphones, laptops or desktop computers, at least 30% of internet browsing will not even take place on devices with screens. It means a lot of people will be using tools like Alexa or Google Home to look for the product or services that they want to buy or use.
For example, if you’re going to search Contractor SEO Spartan, you do not need to visit their actual website.
All you need to do is talk to devices like Alexa or Google Home, and they will instantly answer your queries. We know people do not like this because every time there is an article about voice search, people do not really read them.
It is one of the topics that Search Engine Optimization wish does not exist. You know the reason why? It is because being on page one does not matter when the voice search is used. Either Google pulls information from the websites, or they don’t. Another reason is, conversion from this application will be a lot lower because people will not go to websites personally.
Google will just be giving people the answer to their queries. But instead of looking at this application as a bad thing, we can think of this way; people do not care about reading articles about it, it means a lot of Search Engine Optimization will not be prepared for it. Because of this, you will have a chance to take advantage of this technology and get ahead of your competitors. You can gobble up all the traffic before the internet shift to using voice search application.
Although it sounds a lot, it isn’t. Two years ago, there were thirteen updates and a year before that, there were eleven. In other words, search engines like Google have been averaging at least twelve updates every year. If you combined that with the confirmed and the unconfirmed updates, that is quite a lot.
Let us take a closer look at older updates. On July 2015, Google released an update, the Panda 4.2. Experts knew that people hated the Panda update, but it was not too bad at all. Google got rid of all the spammy websites that have low-quality contents. Google did not want to rank sites that had a lot of 300-word post with duplicate contents.
Could you blame search engines like Google for that? Another update was made by Google on September 2016, the Penguin update. If you create spammy links, Google will not just penalize your site; they will also devalue the links. It means that you did something that is violating Google’s terms of use like buying a lot of backlinks and Google caught you doing that.
The links that you bought will be just devalued, making it useless, instead of banning your whole website. If you take a closer look at the latest algorithm updates, they are getting more complicated and it is getting harder and harder to beat. It is because the technology is evolving at an exponential rate.
Google does not need to look at the metrics like backlinks and content count to know if a website is doing well or not. They can look at the user metrics like:
Users are spending a lot of time on your website compared to other ranked sites on the search engine like google.
People are bouncing off your website and going back to Google’s listing page.
Increasing brand queries over time.
People do not see your site as a brand.
People find your website very appealing, in short, a higher click-through-rate.
To know more about backlinks, click here.
If you want to beat search engines like Google, you need to change your mindset. It is not about knowing and understanding Google; it is about knowing what the users want and needs. Google has only one goal in mind: rank websites that people love to visit at the top. It causes people to go back, keep using the search engine and increase their revenue.
If you put yourself in the consumer’s shoes, you will be better suited to do it. The first thing you need to do is to know when people perform a search for specific keywords or phrases; they are not just doing a search; they are looking for an answer to their questions. By knowing the intent of the consumer’s search, you will be more likely to solve their queries. Once you do that, you will be able to make the best possible experience, the best services and products that your target market deserves.
