A lot has changed over the past few years but there is no need any longer to be overwhelmed by rankings. The most important thing to bear in mind is the fact that some variables are more valuable than others. Your strategy for website optimization in 2019 is to focus on only the essentials. This post will look at these variables and what you need to optimize them.

1. Mobile-first approach

Google mobile-first index has been fully rolled out and it’s an important part of SEO strategy. The list below shows what you can do to make your website mobile-friendly:

• Ensure that your website is accessible to any device such as a mobile phone or tablet.
• Always format your images to be accessed even by mobile users.
• Make use of short meta titles which are easier to read on mobile gadgets.
• Reduce pop-ups that conceal your content preventing visitors from seeing the entire content.

2. Technical SEO

The SEO tools have simplified SEO auditing tasks. The most important thing is for you is to understand the data and how to use it.

Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly and check that there are no status code errors or robot.txt errors. If you find that your website indexing has problems, fix them. Importantly, correct any duplicate title takes as well as meta descriptions.

3. Site speed

Website speed is a critical component that can affect visitors to your site and conversion rate. Slow page speeds cause poor user-experience and visitors will not wait for long for your page to load. For this reason, Google considers page speed when ranking.

You can optimize your site several ways including reduce HTTP requests, minimize file size by compressing them and combining the loading of CSS and JavaScript.

4. User Intent

You can do a lot of things to rank a keyword such as writing appealing content, getting the right links, and optimizing it. Google wants to understand your content and serve it based on the user’s intent. For this reason, choosing the right keywords has become more important than ever before.

Firstly, you must be aware that there are some keywords and queries that might not be ranked for. You should take SEO courses to become familiar with keyword and phrase use. It’s also always a great idea to review at the current ranking websites and the phrases they are using.

5. Content Marketing

Content marketing is still valuable and will continue to make an impact for more years to come. However, the content has to be insightful and serve the needs of the users. Your content must be in-depth, meaning it has to cover the topic thoroughly.

The content also has to be different from that of competitors. Then you have to match the content to user intent. Content is not just text, it includes images, video, slides, and audio. It all comes down to what the user is looking for so that Google can determine what type of search query it is.

6. User experience

User Experience is focused on finding out several characteristics of users including their needs, abilities, and values. For businesses, User experience considers their business goals and objectives. Best practices for user experience aims at providing a high-quality experience to users.

7. Link Building

Links have to be related to your content, and Google considers them as their number priority in ranking factors. It’s ideal to create a high-quality backlink profile that will become part of your SEO strategy. There are various links you need to focus on in 2019 such as editorial links and White Hat Acquired Links.

Editorial Links are related to the backlinks that you get because you are producing exceptional content. On the other hand, White Hat Acquired Links are earned when you are not abiding by the rules such as paying for backlinks.