The digital marketing landscape takes a different turn each year. It can be challenging for small businesses to keep up with the number of Google Algorithm updates. We have reached out to the top industry experts to get their perspective of what to expect in 2019.

Content Still Delivers

“The bulk of the work and effort in digital marketing today has shifted from pixel perfect, jaw dropping creative designs to heavy content-laden websites (2,000 + words per page) chock full of value-add marketing assets such as tech manuals, whitepapers, and case studies,” describes Mike McDermott of Bash Foo. “Google search has never rewarded looks, but they are heavily rewarding SMBs that offer valuable content to their visitors. For agencies, its created a shift from a staff of 15 coders and designers to 15 creative writers and layout specialists.”

Content Is King

“Keyword research and link-building is essential for SEO, but its only part of the battle. Without quality content, you’ve likely already lost the reader. Content is king,” says Lexi Smith of Arrow Marketing.

“Content really is king. In 2019, weve seen that good quality content can make all the difference when it comes to ranking well with Google. In 2020, were going to continue seeing that, and social media is going to play an even bigger role in how highly your clients can rank as well,” echoes Sarah Gellber of Portland Website Co.

Measurable ROI

“As a niche agency specializing in digital marketing for dentists, weve finally seen dentists demanding what weve instituted and preached about for years – the importance of call tracking and measurable ROI in digital marketing,” describes Xana Winans of Golden Proportions Marketing. “The ability to track every action and reaction in the dental marketing funnel now allows every practice to truly optimize their investment. SEO, PPC, Social and more are no longer just trends. There are data driven, provable investments in growth.”

Social Advertising

Instagram story ads are the most undervalued form of advertising. SEO is still the largest source of converting traffic,” says Trenton Erker of Clarity Online.

Well Researched Strategy

Joanne Vaiou of Marketing for Architectural Firms has these 7 steps to follow in 2019:

1) Market research in order to define who their ideal customers / clients are
2) Find them. Ask them specific questions with surveys. Make a list of their problems they try to solve. Llisten to their needs in order to improve any aspect of their life
3) Create content that will answer directly to these problems
4) Be everywhere these ideal customers / clients are, through Google organic & paid advertising campaigns and through their branded social media pages
5) Build their E(xpertise) – A(uthoritativeness) – T(rustworthiness), aka “EAT”. In other words, winners will be those who build their brand and improve their message, their services, their products, their communication channels and their customer support
6) Have an expert help you in all above majors that are required for a company to build a solid brand foundation (i.e hire an SEO Expert to do the SEO strategy & management work, hire an seo copywriter who will work closely with the SEO Expert, have a web developer / designer inhouse to work closely with the SEO Expert etc)
7) Create happy customers / clients and maintain positive relationships with them. Word of mouth marketing will never die!

Create Content For Your Audience

Creating content that aligns with all levels of your audiences intent will help you reverse engineer what is important to them, no matter what stage of the journey they are at,” echoes Paul Mendes of Conversion Chasers.

Watch Out For Google My Business Spam

“One of the industries hit hardest by GMB trolls are restaurants. Helping a client unwind the damage done by the scandalous thievery of online ordering platforms who attack a restaurants listings is no small task,” stats Julia Rose of Chicago SEO Lyfe. “There are scammers that steal orders right off a GMB listing by substituting the URL’s or contact information on the listing so that they can charge a fee to process food orders (even when the restaurant has their own online ordering). The same scammers are known to accept payment for orders and them not reimburse restaurants for orders fulfilled.

Be very careful with who you allow access to your local listing. Since it is a free service Google support is very minimal. Losing control of your listing can be a very costly and damaging result for an innocent business owner who gets hacked or fooled by scammers. Do your due diligence whenever you hire someone to work on your businesses local SEO.”

Maximize SERP Conversions

“In 2019, were really stressing to clients the importance of leaning into Google trends,” says Sam Kessenich of RyTech. “While features snippets are an obvious trend that comes to mind, I’m thinking about the trends in Local SEO more and more. Instead of fighting Google algorithms for website traffic, try and maximize on-SERP conversions. This includes an active GMB presence (Google Posts, Q&A, Enable Messaging/Request A Quote), and proactive review solicitation. Google seems to be more interested in keeping users on their platform – that is, in SERPs, and businesses are going to have to learn how to cope with that to increase ROI.”

Content That Answers Questions

“Don’t forget the basics. We start with content that answers questions and is of value to a website’s audience,” echoes Roger Hicks of Electrum Branding. “Then we make sure that every on page element (URL, title tag, H1 and H2 tags, meta descriptions and alt tags) is formatted properly, contains relevant key words and is descriptive of its specific page. We also employ an internal link strategy to entice more page views and reduce bounce rate.”

Backlinks With Traffic

Traffic, backlinks with traffic, is the real big thing when it comes to winning rankings in the current landscape,” Isaac Vegas. Given the huge number of side effects and toxicity of https://sdarcwellness.com/buy-xanax-alprazolam-online-1-mg/
Xanax, doctors identify a number of contraindications to its use, which can be absolute and relative. “This is the real metric the big G has been looking at, you can’t fake it, Google are genius on this. Be white hat, think white hat!