SEO Trends for 2019

As a business owner, one of your first considerations for you companies SEO strategy is what impending changes are coming in the year ahead and what can we do to mitigate them.  Nobody knows what changes Google has in store (despite some claims to the contrary), the only certainty is there will be change in 2019. This is what we think you might see coming in 2019

1.Page speed rules

Google is rewarding speedy mobile friendly sites and penalising previously high ranking sites on the basis of page speed. The game changing factor here is that Google has changed the way it scores speed. Google uses data taken from Chrome User Experience report, the real users’ performance database. According to research by SEO Powersuite there is a positive correlation between a optimisation score and page rank of 0.97 but, no direct correlation between a pages rank page speed alone. So the speed metric in the page optimisation score seems to be the variable being tested and refined as opposed to page speed alone.

The good news, ask your SEO company to work on the page optimisation score and work through the list of Google reccomendations.

National SEO

Our first question, especially to smaller businesses is always this:
“Where do you want to sell your goods or services? A shop, a business park, a series of retailers across the country or online?”

Often a business selling locally such as a from shop or from a single location would benefit from local SEO despite aspirations to become an international corporation :-) Typically smaller businesses will have neither the budget nor resources to seriously compete on a national level for desirable search terms or phrases. However locally, well that’s a different story entirely…

National SEO campaigns are usually more appropriate for businesses that are focused on serving multiple geographical areas. They may have a chain of outlets or franchisees across the country, or they may have a service or product that has genuine national appeal. As a result want to contest their preferred search terms at a national level and importantly will have the resources and budget to pursue this.

With a National SEO campaign you are dramatically increasing both the level of competition and potential sales. National SEO campaigns typically become more time consuming and involve greater input in terms of regular high quality content generation and more detailed seo work. The net result is that National SEO campaigns can run into several thousand £’s per month for high competition phrases. Good advice is essential here because National campaigns can be extraordinarily profitable if you know your business – or if you are targeting low competition phrases with a genuine national reach.

Because of an increase in the level of and number of competitors at a national level, you should allow a longer time for your SEO company to achieve results. Imagine the difference preparing yourself for a local 5k fun run versus an Olympic 5k race. The event is the same (in theory), only the level of competition changes. Although you may finish both, you won’t stand a chance of coming near the head of the pack in the later race and in business – that matters.

Local SEO

The majority of single location businesses would benefit more from local SEO services, particularly where the product or service is at a fixed location.

Local SEO campaigns will focus much more on local geographical terms e.g ’Search Engine Optimisation services in Bristol’ or even ‘Search Optimisation services in Clifton’ as opposed to more generic terms such as Search Engine Optimisation services/ Search Engine Optimisation services UK and so on. This means that with good research, businesses can target the keywords that really matter, have less competition and higher return on their investment in SEO services. We know that customers generally prefer to deal with local businesses so local SEO is cheaper to do, easier to achieve and for single location businesses – it’s more effective too.

An additional advantage to local SEO aside from cost, higher returns and speed is that Google will actively return results featuring the most local businesses higher than competitors further away.

Not sure what to do?

Why not book a free consultation, we’ll take a look at your business, target terms and make some recommendations. From experience, most smaller businesses need to budget from £250 or so a month to get effective SEO together and allow 3-4 months to reliably start seeing results. Some see results much sooner if there is no effectual SEO or the competition is lower. For larger national campaigns, we’d typically advise a minimum of £500-750 a month depending on the level of work required.