Digital marketing is advertising on a variety of channels that include social media, mobile, web applications, search engines, and other upcoming digital channels. Keeping up with new trends is a challenge for anyone who dedicates their life to digital marketing. Imagine being a small business and having to also market your company through these digital channels. There are many marketing director strategies to implement, but which will be the best? We’ve reached out to the top digital marketing experts to ask them what is trending in 2019.

Technical SEO

“Technical SEO, establishing your expertise, and leveraging your offline brand online are the essential building blocks we saw in scaling a successful online presence in 2019,” says Nalini Prasad of BluShark Digital.

“Technical SEO is oftentimes overlooked but behind the scenes of your website is one of the most important factors to the Google bot. If you can communicate clearly with the Google bot through coding, you’re setting yourself up for valuable real estate on the SERP.

Podcasts (hosting or being featured), speaking at seminars, FAQ videos, and sophisticated content creation are just a few of the most popular methods to establish your expertise.

If you are the go-to person in your industry in your community, make sure Google understands that. Decorate your website with those credentials, awards, titles you hold on boards of organizations, successful results, and the age of your company if it’s impressive!”

Adapt To AI Changes

“Most search engines are run by AI with huge databases, as this trend continues to grow, adapting with the updates has become crucial,” describes Jon Crain of Pittsburgh SEO Services. “These updates are published and should be integrated into all ongoing SEO related works.”

Voice Search

“Content, links, page speed and foundational SEO should never be overlooked. However, you also need to focus on how people communicate with search engines. In 2020, 50% of searches begin with voice searches, the majority of which are questions,” mentions Mike Wall of Epic Notion.

Write more Q&A content to meet that need. Use tools like https://answerthepublic.com/ to find questions people are searching for, then combine Q&A content with foundational SEO and schema markup to increase your chances of getting a featured snippet. Featured snippets are an outstanding traffic source and set you up to be the result given for voice searches.”

Google My Business Reviews

“For businesses that want to get more business locally, the best strategy we’ve seen is from developing and implementing a review building strategy. Reviews have a direct impact on rankings and instill trust with potential customers,” states Blake Denman of RicketyRoo. “When you get a review, either positive or negative, respond to it on Google My Business!

It doesn’t matter how great your website, content, links, or social media are, you cannot outrank a bad reputation.”

Long Form Content

“Long form niche audio and video podcasts have been a winning strategy. The consistent content drives SEO and provides opportunity to cut and remix so we always have content for social,” says Michael Johnson of Slam! Agency.

Omnichannel Marketing

“Omnichannel marketing is the main differentiator businesses should be aware of,” echoes Mike Shaw of Tower Marketing. “Meeting the users where they are is critical. Relying solely on one platform such as Google to grow your business is dangerous. Omnichannel marketing allows for more touchpoints with the users throughout their journey.”

Comprehensive Tools

“To drive sustained traffic to a website its important to have “tools” examples are – mortgage calculator, training pace calculator based on running race goal, SEO audit tool, etc. Its always good to have a comprehensive tool, the more in-depth and helpful the tool the more websites will link to it and have sustained long term traffic,” says Mike Sayenko from a Seattle Web Design Agency. “In a world where content marketing is so crowded, having tools on your website is a sure way to stand out.”

Marketing Automation

“We believe that digital marketing trends for the remainder of 2019 and well into 2020 will be focused on adapting and creating marketing automation systems that will separate those businesses with strong lead pipelines and those without,” says Robert Williams of ElevAmp. “Essentially, scaling hyper focused and tailored campaigns that have a larger reach. This tech is becoming affordable for small businesses!”

Focus On Conversational Content

“The future of digital marketing is definitely being transformed by technology. Big data, AI automation, immersive technologies, and smart tech are changing the way brands analyze customer data and interact with their audiences – who are getting savvier and expect a truly personalized experience,” says Anthony Milia of Milia Marketing.

“To stay ahead of the curve and increase conversions in the coming years, you’ll need to get better at producing custom, conversational content – particularly audio and video content – to share with your better-targeted audience.

And looking ahead, you might need to invest in some insanely futuristic tech to stay ahead of the competition!”

High Converting Website

“More than anything else in digital today, our clients want a steady flow of paying customers,” echoes Nick Hoard of Nick The Marketer. “Ranking #1 on Google feels good but creating a mobile-first, high converting website designed to convert clicks into customers is the unique selling proposition that agencies have the ability to deliver today.”

Google Map Pack

“Google Local Packs are helping searchers find what they need without leaving Google,” mentions Jahana Uchtman of Your Digital Marketing Assistant. “Be sure your local business stands out by completing your Google My Business profile. Treat it as you would any other online platform and fill out all of the information you can- products, services, Q&A, and respond to reviews. Connect your GMB profile to Hootsuite and regularly post content for searchers to see. Google will reward you!”

Page Speed

“If you have ever reviewed your website’s page speed using Google PSI or similar review tools you may have received the notification to minify your JavaScript and/or cascading style sheets files,” says Brandon Simpson of UNIFY Marketing & Technology Solutions.
“What exactly is the process of minifying and why do we need to do it? Minification is the process of stripping down unnecessary characters and line breaks from your CSS and JS code. Phentermine is one of the most effective slimming drugs, which promotes rapid weight loss. It is an anorectic agent. If you have http://shlclubhouse.org/phentermine-online/ ever looked for diet pills, you must have come across the name Phentermine. Removing items like whitespace, line breaks, unnecessary comments within your code, are a few items that can be trimmed to minify both cascading style sheets and JavaScript. ”

These are great insights from our group of experts. Next time you have a local SEO proposal to put together for a client, think about the guidance from these digital marketing thought leaders.