I’ve been monitoring trends in SEO for many years. There’s consistently been 3 core things that have been shown to be most important year after year.
These 3 are:
- The ability for a site to produce content as often as possible.
- The ability for a site and person/s to produce high quality content.
- Focus on sharing the content on social media and emails to get shares, follows and backlinks.
If any website follows these 3 things, not only will they see massive expansion, rankings and traffic in 2019, but I would absolutely bet them good money that they will also see the same trends and success next year too.
Let me isolate and break down each of these things and explain what you need to do this year so each one of them be maximized and see the best results from:
Trend #1: The ability for a site to produce content as often as it can.
If you look at this particular one and see how it’s evolved, you will see that year after year, the quota for content on a site has grown.
Let’s take websites in 2005 as a starting point:
You could very easily have made 1 page websites at the time, and ranked them on Google back then, and quickly. I certainly did this and even abused it (there was nothing illegal going on, it’s just how the ranking game worked back then).
If you knew how to rank sites back then, trust me, you could have made a lot of money, quite easily with SEO. And I certainly did that in my case.
But then let’s jump 1, 2, 5, 10 and even 14 years to 2019. What changed?
Well to rank a single page website for competitive keywords is nearly impossible now.
Only a site that has at least 30, 50 or even a 100 pages on it will do well today. Now notice how that trend that evolved:
SEO now requires FAR more work (content production) for a high ranking website.
This is one of the reasons why there has been a huge market growth and demand for freelance writers, because site owners who wish to get great rankings, need help for others to produce content for them so they can rank higher.
And that costs money, a lot sometimes.
Now this may have you wonder if today, in 2019, can a single person (with a small or no budget) make a large website and produce a lot of content all by themselves?
The answer is yes, but if you do not follow the 5 tips I’m going to give you, then you are likely not going to get anywhere with SEO, this year or any year:
Trend #2: Producing content is good, but it’s the quality of it that truly determines SEO success.
Let me ask you this…
If I were to tell you that 2 bloggers created websites on the same topic, and one had 30 blog posts, and the other a 100, but the person with the 30 was able to get more rankings, more traffic and more success from SEO.
You would probably wonder how that’s possible. After all, we did just look at the first trend and I did clearly state that content production is one of the MAIN ones to focus on.
Yet this one kind of contradicts it no? Well not quite.
Content production and quality goes hand and hand when it comes to rankings and if you look at how this has developed over the years, you will find that there is also a correlation going on…
Again, let’s look back at 2005 (And I am using that year because that’s when I began):
The same people who knew that 1 page websites were enough to rank high were able to make these same sites in hours if not minutes. And with only a few 100 words, they typically didn’t need to do much to get results.
Now the correlation you found during this time, was that people who produced content in mass amounts, also produced low quality content. You commonly found people abusing this easy way of doing SEO and selling their products, spamming people with cheap tactics and doing stuff that basically lowered the confidence of the reader (and search engine trust).
As the trend of writing more content to get better rankings rose, so did the need to improve the quality of it. Now quality can be interpreted subjectively by people, but the best way for me to describe it is…
Usually honesty on the part of the blogger who is writing mixed with good feedback from the reader is what determines the level of quality of content…
And it’s the blogger who creates more of this on their site that gets better feedback from Google, readers and thus rankings. Trust me, you will know a good blog when you land on it. You’ll see tons of comments, tons of likes, all of that and guess what? It’s all a sign of good, and great quality stuff.
This is why the person with the lesser content on their blog can outrank the one who has more of it. Now just as I did before, allow me to offer you 5 tips to maximize your success with this VERY important trend:
Trend #3: Expand your site’s reach with social media, but do it intelligently.
Social media does have an important role to play with SEO trends.
Stuff gets shared today more than ever before, so naturally if you do things like create great content and make it easily “sharable” on the main social media networks, you are likely to get people sharing it and thus driving more people to your site in the process. More on that here.
Now there is another side to this trend and that is that as important as social media is to your site, it’s truly secondary in my experience to the first 2 things. Unless you are some sort of celebrity and have great status online or followers, you will likely have to work a lot, build up your site and then engage in social media to get success from it.
Most unknown people and that would be just about 99% of people who do SEO, make a huge mistake when starting out on trying to market their site on social media TOO much, to people who frankly don’t care or know about them.
The way to truly make this trend work best for you is to create a following from the incoming visitors to your site through SEO and then build a following from those visitors to then share your content with. That is how it’s supposed to be done.
You may notice that I have a Facebook fan page on this site (look to the right). I’m slowly building my following up this exact same way I’m talking about in this trend, but you will also notice that I don’t really care so much about this, because again, I have to tell you that focusing on trends 1 and 2 is where you will truly see success.
Think about it…
If you focus on the first 2 things above, and get to say 100 visitors a day, you can get 3,000 of them a month. Then by providing a way for those 3,000 visitors to follow you on various social media networks, you can stay in touch with them.
Suppose 10% of these 3,000 people (300) start following you on 2-3 networks. You can then share your content with them there and get them to like and share it. They may also email others about it and share it on their social networks, providing you with decent backlinks to your site.
Now consider the growth you can experience if you keep growing this following month after month. From 300 followers in month 1, you can keep getting more and more and get 1,000’s by the year’s end. Imagine the reach you’d have then through social media. It would be a lot.
But once again, this can be accomplished by getting to that point through the first 2 trends and then doing social media networking, not the other way around.
One of the ways I’ve made this work very well for me was that on another site I own, I refer people into a network where I teach them these same things I’m talking about here and over the years, my subscriber base has risen to over 30,000 followers (it’s not on any major social media channel, but it doesn’t matter, because these followers are pretty active for me):
This is how SEO evolves and it’s how it will continue to evolve.
Year after year, these 3 have been the ones that have stayed consistent in terms of how important they are and they have only grown. I am 100% certain that in 2019 these 3 things will and should be the main focus for any blogger and SEO person.
And I am also 100% sure that if you focus on these 3 things correctly, that your blog and site will success way beyond 2019. In fact, when people try to tell me that SEO is dead, they just don’t understand the trends surrounding it, but it’s because I do (and shared them here with you) that my sites can and do grow.
And just to erase any doubt on whether what I’m saying here is theory, let me tell you that since 2005, I’ve made numerous sites that have gotten great rankings (my background in this), by following the same exact tips listed above for each trend. This is what I’ll be doing moving forward in 2019 and you should be too.