We’ve said a lot throughout our previous blog posts about SEO changing constantly and how you need to keep up with the latest news to be able to know how to manage your audiences expectations. So, what should we be looking out for in 2019? And how will it impact our business?

We’ve come up with three trends to keep an eye on this upcoming year.

Voice searches

Would you believe that 20 per cent of queries on Google via smart phones are actually voice searches? We can go one step further and also tell you that already, one in five searches also come from voice queries.These statistics are not surprising due to the development and new technology built within smart phones. It’s also not surprising because there are also other gadgets such as Google Home and the Amazon Echo which are on the rise.

The ease of using voice searches within your home is becoming extremely popular so it’s important to consider this as a factor within your marketing plans. This means that more focus on long-tail key words used every day as well as the advice we so often give you, which is to create structured content which can be broken down into bite sized chunks, therefore understood much better by voice driven search queries.

Featured snippets

A featured snippet is content which is show in some search engine results pages – these are also known as SERPs. The ‘snippet’ displays content from within one of the pages ranking on the results page, and usually directly answers any questions that a user may be submitting to the search engine.

A small tip here is to ask a common question within a blog or website article which our customers may ask you. This could be displayed as a sub heading or within the content, but make sure it’s clear and stands out by itself. This will enable the likes of Google to pick up your content over your competitors and land you in the all-important position one, where your listing will show above all others.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Search engines are doing their part to integrate AI into search engine algorithms, by doing this, they are able to combine past and present information which will in turn return the most relevant answer to the user by using factors such as location, device and previous search history.

Ensuring that you list your business locally can be a big factor in returning results to the right people and this is something you should do straight away if you haven’t already done so.

Sites like Google can also use AI to pick up on what a user is looking for. An example of this is, is a query has an intent to buy, returned results will include e-commerce sites, meanwhile, users searching for further information will only return results from credible media outlets.

If you want to know more about how SEO can positively impact your business get it touch here today.