10 Things You Should Consider While Learning SEO in 2019

Are you someone who started doing SEO for your website a few months ago?

You might have enormous expectations for your website; you even dreamed of getting thousands of organic visitors per day. You invested a lot of time and money in this. But you are not getting the results you expected.

Do you think you can’t do this anymore? Are you confused? Or are you stuck at this point?

Does this sound familiar to you?

Don’t worry, you are not alone.

Probably every SEO has been in this situation.

But they were able to learn from their mistakes, and they understood what the problems were.

If you can rectify these mistakes, you will be able to rank your website and generate conversions.

Here are the 10 things you should consider while learning SEO in 2019.

1) Get the Basics Right

Just like learning any other skill, it is essential to get the basics right while doing SEO. If you get the basics wrong, then you won’t be able to gain considerable results, and you may end up getting frustrated.

Optimising the title tag and meta description are the basic yet significant things you should give priority to. Your title tags and meta descriptions should be appealing to the person who is performing the search. These are the first things a searcher sees on your site, and because of that, it is necessary to give them a good impression.

On-page lays the foundation for your website. If you don't do it correctly, you won’t be able to rank your site properly, regardless of how well you do off-page SEO for your website.

Internal linking and the anchor ratio are the things people ignore so often. You need to link contextually between the pages. You can also create supporting pages for the main page you are trying to rank and contextually link to your target page from the supporting pages.

While building links for your website, you should always maintain a good anchor text ratio. You should use different types of anchor text while building backlinks for your site. Let’s say you need to rank for “Best Gaming Mouse." If you use the exact match anchor text while building links, your website will get penalised sooner or later. It is essential to make your anchor text ratio look natural.

2) Don’t Get Overwhelmed by Knowledge

When most people begin learning SEO, they will start reading blog posts and watching videos. People get overwhelmed because they are bombarded with knowledge. They desperately want to rank their website at the top of Google. But the learning doesn’t guarantee results for you. If you learn too much without trying, then it leads to procrastination. You should give it a try instead of perfecting things.

Because of that, it is necessary to implement the things you learn on your website. Actions speak louder than words; learning SEO without implementing it is worthless.

So if you don’t have a website, you will purchase a domain and hosting and start implementing things. There is no point in learning about advanced SEO strategies when you don’t even have a website. Most beginners will learn things in the best possible way, and they won’t implement even the basic stuff. The best-laid plans go astray!

The best way to become an expert is by implementing it and learning from the mistakes we make.

3) Targeting the Right Keywords

It would be great to rank your website No. 1 for a term like “laptop” that has over 2 million global monthly search volumes per month.

But the sad thing is, you won’t be able to rank for a term like that easily. Page 1 for such keywords would be dominated by authority websites like Wikipedia, Amazon, etc. If you don’t have enough budget and time, don’t go against big brands, especially when you are new to the game.

You should perform keyword research and target medium- to low-competitive keywords for your website. You can use Ahrefs or free tools like Ubersuggest and Keywords everywhere for keyword research.

Let’s say you are running a shop that sells laptops in Detroit. If you rank for a term like “laptop” globally, the traffic you get will hardly generate any sales for your shop. On the other hand, if you can rank a keyword with buyer intent like “Best laptop shops in Detroit” that would lead to conversions, and you won’t require even 1% of effort to rank this keyword compared to ranking a highly competitive keyword like “laptop”.

So many people choose the wrong keywords for their website; either the keyword would be highly competitive or there wouldn’t be any search volume for the keyword. If no one is searching for the keyword for which you are ranking, how are you supposed to receive traffic? Simple logic!

While selecting a keyword, you should consider these factors for generating traffic and conversions.

4) Creating Quality Content

Creating quality content for your readers is essential. If you use low-quality articles on your websites, it is not going to provide any value for the readers. If you offer value to your readers, they will share your articles, and you will get natural backlinks for your articles.

But you don’t have to write like Hemingway to produce quality content. If you use fancy words and write the articles pretentiously, that will make it difficult for your readers to understand what you are trying to convey.

On account of that, you should write the articles as simply as you can. The demographics of your visitors would be different, so it is necessary to write articles in a way everyone can understand. You can use Grammarly to make your writing free from errors.

You can find content ideas using Ahrefs Content Explorer. You can discover the most shared content in your niche easily using this tool.
Content Explorer also offers the option to find articles that are easy to rank by using its filters.

If you are a beginner, you should target low-competitive keywords that don’t require many backlinks to rank.

5) Link Quality

Google has mentioned in their link schemes that “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

On account of that, it is necessary to build quality, editorially placed links for our website.
The days when you used to get results by spamming the comments and forums are long gone. You need to provide value for people when you build links. What value can you offer when you leave a spam comment with the targeted keyword as the anchor text?

You should always prefer quality over quantity when building links.

A single editorially placed backlink from a quality website is far more valuable than 1,000 spam links. These spam links are never going to do any good for your website. Instead, you can create a few quality links in less time than spamming.

6) Testing

You need to test the SEO techniques yourself if you follow what others said, you may not be able to emulate the success they received. What worked in their niche may not work in your niche.

Here are is the result of a guest post campaign we did in two different niches.

Case 1

Case 2

In both cases, we reached out the sites that didn’t have a “write for us” page and sites with “write for us” page. We made sure that we did the prospecting properly by targeting only good sites and by sending personalised outreach emails for each website also we ensured that the email was sent to the right person.

In the first case, we received backlinks from sites that didn’t have a “write for us”, but in the second case, we didn’t get any backlinks from this method.

The first niche was a saturated one, so the websites that have mentioned they accept would be receiving hundreds of guest post requests every day, so they tend to ignore the guest post requests.

The second niche was not a saturated one, and there are not many sites that write about this topic frequently, so a quality guest post was a win-win for both.

Matt Diggity, best known for test-based SEO techniques, has performed a test on TF*IDF for SEO recently. The test result shows the effectiveness of TF*IDF for advanced on-page optimisation.

7) Optimising For UI/UX

If you believe you can rank No. 1 only by doing on-page and off-page SEO, then you are wrong. There is an equally important thing called user intent and user experience.

Let’s say you are running a blog about sewing machines and need to rank for the term “sewing machines.” If the first page is full of e-commerce websites, that means the users searching buy a sewing machine while searching this term, so trying to rank for this term with a blog post is a huge mistake.

Even if the first page is full of blog posts, you need to write your content based on the user's intent. You can analyse the top-ranking pages to get an idea of what people are searching for.

You can also use Hotjar to get insights about user behaviour, and you can make necessary changes on your website to decrease the bounce rate and make the users stay on your website for a long time.

If more people stay on your page than on your competitors’ pages, it also helps you rank higher on Google.

8) Patience

Some people send 10 odd outreach emails, and when they don’t receive any response, they give up instead of analysing what went wrong.
Maybe they have sent an email to the wrong person, their emails may not be personalised, or they didn’t follow up.

Patience is the key; SEO is not something that brings results in a matter of days. When people learn SEO, they are eager to do it, and when it doesn't bring quick results, they quit. If you are a person who needs to see the results right away, then SEO is not the thing for you. Some people take shortcuts to get fast results; the shortcuts may deliver some quick results. If you need to achieve long-term success, you should do the hard work and be patient.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. The people who are now successful have faced so many failures in the past. They didn’t achieve success overnight. It takes time to become an expert. We should learn from our mistakes and try to avoid them. Patience and determination separate successful and unsuccessful people.

9) Tracking Conversions

If you are not tracking the conversions of your SEO efforts, you are making a big mistake. If you need to scale your business, tracking conversions is essential. You need to get an idea of which strategy is working for you and which is not.

You can use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to track the conversions.
If you get an idea about the pages leading to conversions, you can re-optimise the pages that are not giving you conversions and understand why some pages are converting and some are not.

Let’s say you are running PPC campaigns, Facebook Ads, and doing SEO for your website.
If you track the conversions, you would be able to know which channel is generating you more conversions, and if you are getting more conversions through organic traffic, you should invest more in SEO and stop spending money on the channels that are getting you results. It will help you scale your business efficiently.

10) Keeping Up on the Trends

This one is crucial. If you don’t keep up with trends and follow outdated strategies, you won’t be able to dominate your competitors and succeed in business in the long run.

Google is changing its algorithms frequently, and SEO is evolving, so making changes to your strategies according to time is essential. Many businesses are losing their traffic overnight when Google makes algorithm updates.
This is due to the lack of foresight.

You should follow the popular SEO blogs to get information about the latest changes and trends in SEO.
Here are some excellent blogs you should follow:
Ahrefs Blog
Search Engine Journal
SEO Round Table
Neil Patel Blog
Backlinko

You can also join SEO communities to get connected with SEO experts around the world and get insights on SEO. The best way to gain knowledge is by teaching someone. Through communities, you can help out the people and get the help of others when you need an opinion on something.

Here are some amazing Facebook groups that you should join:
SEO Signals Lab
White Hat SEO Network by Chase Reiner
Bloggers Funda
Superstar SEO
The LAB
Lion Zeal Mastermind

Here are insights from some experts on the things we shall consider while learning SEO in 2019

“In 2019, you should pay close attention to the diversity of SERP—featured snippets, knowledge graphs, and ongoing Google experiments with SERP.
Remember to put more media in your content (where it’s appropriate) and track your rankings in these elements.”-Daria Khmelnitskaya, SEO specialist at SE Ranking

“Do everything you can to make sure your pages and top-performing keywords align with what kind of intent your user has—informational, navigational, transactional, etc. If you find you have mostly transactional pages, for example, yet most of your users’ search queries seem to be informational, create some new landing pages for those keywords and users.” – Elizabeth Young, SEO specialist at Glamping Hub

“Create content for readers, not search engines. SEOs too often rely on optimisations or tactics to improve content or rankability rather than spending on great, comprehensive content. If you create awesome, optimised content that readers love and read to completion or near completion, your website will rank in no time for the keywords you’re targeting.” – Nicolas Straut, SEO Associate, Fundera

“You must start to optimise your website for voice searches. All you need to do is target long-tail keywords or questions because that’s how people search through voice. You can create an FAQ and give compact answers to the most common questions.” – Sadi Khan, SEO Manager at RunRepeat

“Google has increasingly been displaying “People Also Ask” sections in SERPs, which caters more towards users who are seeking information. To drive these types of users to your site, write FAQ-style content in the form of blog posts or landing pages that answers questions about your product, your service, and your industry.” – Audrey Strasenburgh, SEO Strategist at LogoMix, Inc.

“You need to understand your audience and user intent—does your target audience prefer text, audio, video, or images? Your target audience can change their tastes very quickly, so remaining on top of this is vital.” – Ollie Smith, CEO, ExpertSure

“Generating new content that communicates authority in your industry is more important than ever and should be clearly backed with a strategy to optimise the mobile experience.” – Tyler Gibson, Business Development Project Manager, UberPrints.com

“One of my top SEO tips for 2019 has to be using the power of TF*IDF to optimise your pages for the correct terms and relevancy. This entire process involves some complicated math, but there are plenty of free tools out there that can do it for you, such as tools like Seobility.” – Sam Carr, Marketing Director, PharmaVaccs

“We’re going to be keeping a close eye on Amazon’s search engine. While Amazon’s search engine isn’t universal, it’s algorithm is similar to that of Google but for internal Amazon page use only.” – Igor Gramyko, Owner of High Water Standard

“One of my top SEO priorities for 2019 is networking with influencers and webmasters. If you are trying to rank a local business, building a connection with the local bloggers and webmasters will help you a tonne. So don’t just try to get as many links as possible, but rather good quality links!” – Dean Davies, Content Manager, Fantastic Services

“Don’t forget about the topical relevancy. Topical relevancy is all about how relevant your articles or videos are to the overall topic of your blog. A lot of people focus on keyword research and end up targeting topics that are not closely related. This hurts the rankings despite having great on-page and off-page SEO in place.” -Sumit Bansal, founder of CraftofBlogging.com

“In order to succeed in 2019 with your SEO strategy, you need to be ready to adapt. You might have thought it was more important to tackle one objective, but then Google decides it doesn’t matter. That can be infuriating, but that’s the nature of the game, and you just have to help your website evolve along the way.” – Gabriel Shaoolian, Founder, DesignRush

“The most important thing to remember about SEO in 2019 is the importance of internal linking. Although many organisations now know just how crucial it is to do backlink outreach, something that slips between the cracks is the importance of continually revising and adding or removing internal links so that you can easily show search engines how your pages connect.” – Tatiana Morand, Content and SEO Manager, Wild Apricot

Bottom line

The power of search traffic has been increasing over the years. If you are a marketer, blogger, or business owner, SEO is indeed a skill that you should learn. If you leverage the effectiveness of the search traffic, you will be able to take your business or blog to the next level.

Search traffic has always been an evergreen channel to acquire quality prospects for your business. You can drive a more targeted audience to your website with intent if you can rank your site for keywords related to your business, so the amount of conversion you get would be higher than you get from any other advertising channel.

In 2019, SEO is not as easy as it used to be. Google has been making algorithm updates frequently to get the best possible results for their users. Still, if you do it right, there is no better alternative than to grow your business and take it to the next level.

Webandcrafts is a reputed Web Designing Company in India aiming at creating the best front face for websites in a blend with the finest technologies. We also offer result-driven Digital Marketing campaigns and SEO services with a well-planned storyline.