2018 was a great year for me. Truly was, my company did some amazing things in terms of growing our own brands and we also started working with a few great clients and seeing amazing results there. So we really can’t say anything bad about it.
But the thing about SEO is, it doesn’t really matter what you did last year right? It’s a new year, and SEO in 2019 will be somewhat different from what it was in 2018.
The basics are always the same, but stuff that worked a few months ago will not always work now, and probably won’t work six months from now.
So this is my take and my strategy for SEO in 2019
In 2018, and honestly in last recent years, the best tactic I used for ranking sites and pages was the long tail approach. It’s a no brainer in my mind, you just find relevant phrases in your niche that have a few words in them and that have a low competition score with a decent number of searches.
You then create the best content possible for that topic and if you do it right, you can usually rank very well without even building any links to your content.
If you’re not familiar with the long tail strategy, it goes something like this:
- You research your competition or niche in general, and you find a few keyword phrases with at least 3 words in them.
- You make sure that these phrases have a low competition score, if you use ahrefs, a good rule of thumb will be a keyword with a KD score of 5 or below. I sometimes aim at 0, but it depends on how much authority the site I am creating the content for already has.
- You then research the competition for the phrase you chose, and you decide if you can create a better version of the topic in a form of an article. If you can, great! just go on a write it and publish it on your site.
- Share it on social media and send it to your followers via a newsletter and wait to see when you rank. If you do it right, and your content is really better than the competition, than you should quickly rank on the first page of Google for that search term. After a while, if your content is really good, you will hit the #1 spot.
- You can also build a few natural, relevant links to the article to try and speed up the process. But I usually don’t like doing it, and just trust that my content will rank on its own quality and it usually does. And links will naturally follow as people will read and share it with their friends.
So this approach helped me in recent years and honestly there’s no reason it won’t still work in 2019 to some degree. But my SEO strategy for 2019 is all about domination. YES, I am going to scale things up and not only compete in my niches, I want to dominate.
How to dominate SEO in 2019
So like I already mentioned, I am going to shift gears with my SEO efforts in 2019 and this basically means that I no longer try to find the long tail low competition keywords to gain quick wins.
I’ve been in the SEO game for more than 12 years, I feel I am ready to dominate. Over the years I have built many sites and promoted many others, usually with great success and my sites reached millions of people and still do. But I always did it by deploying a deep keyword research and the ability to create awesome content that will rank.
This year, it’s about crushing everyone else, no matter the niche, no matter the difficulty. I am taking on some big challenges this year in terms of SEO and I feel this year what will work best is doing massive things.
Small niche sites or half ass content won’t do the trick anymore, in 2019 it’s about brands more than ever, It’s about authority more than ever, it’s about being the best, the biggest and the loudest than anyone else, that’s how you win in the search, in my opinion.
How to crush the competition in 2019 with SEO
I recently created a massive 5,000 words guide for one of my client websites. It was so big and full of information that it actually combined whole 3 smaller sites within that one article. That’s domination!
Now don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying you must write thousands of words in each article to rank, even though it has a strong correlation and the more words you write, the higher you rank, just look at this data ahrefs blog shared.
But still, i’m not saying you have to, writing just for writing is not going to take you anywhere, it has to make sense and if you have so much info to share that will actually be helpful to your users, than do it.
2019 is about building brands. Niche sites are nice, and they rank, but in order to dominate, you need to build a brand, and building a brand means publishing more content, make it awesome and do it consistently over time to signal both Google and the users that you are here to stay, and that you are the best at what you do.
I think one of the problems with so many SEO guru’s out there and people in marketing in general is the opinion you just need to do a little bit better than your competition and you will be fine, well, it’s not enough anymore. You need to blow them out of the park to be fine, you need to demolish any chance of someone doing it better than you.
That’s how you build a brand, that’s how you win SEO in 2019 and onwards.
So you might ask, how exactly am I supposed to do that? Well, getting more practical, you need to 10x your efforts, if you publish 1 post week, 10x that ( without lowering your quality ). Do other things other than SEO. Improve your site UI and UX. Make sure do attend meet ups and conferences, do old school marketing and media buying, get your name out there.
The more people hear about your site, and see it online, the bigger your brand will be. Again without compromising your quality. A lot of SEO nowadays is actually online marketing as a whole, if you once could just insert a few keywords in your copy and rank, today you need a mix of everything to make it.
Social media is also important. YouTube, Facebook and others are great signals to Google that your brand is strong. Sure, links are still very important, but Google is now looking at mentions of your brand as well, not just links, and I think it’s safe to say that in the future, links will lose their place as one of the top ranking signals.
Voice search is picking up, people will want to get different results than what you think about now. Google will change how they rank their results it’s only a matter of time. To make sure you always stay on the safe side and before anyone else, you have to adopt quickly and improve your game, otherwise, you will be left behind.
I expect great things to come from 2019, and I use the knowledge I have in SEO and in marketing to make them happen, are you? Leave your thoughts below.