With so many parameters governing your website ranking and popularity, perhaps the one parameter that has remained constant throughout and applies to every business is SEO – search engine optimisation.

Unsurprisingly, SEO is still the most noteworthy game changer for anyone who’s looking to rank their website higher on search engines.

As you venture into the rest of 2019, all sales-hungry and full of ambition, here are a few proven ways to keep your SEO strong:

Get Rid of those Unnecessary Pages

It’s quite common actually for website owners to create extra pages, hoping to gain higher rankings, due to all the keywords they have saturated across those pages. This can be a mistake because dozens of pages that are irrelevant and serve no concrete purpose will become obsolete.

Even though Google will index those pages despite the fact that they are being ranked for irrelevant searches, all that matters a lot less now for your business and specifically what it sells.

Get rid of these useless “zombie” pages so that search engines start giving more preference to business relevant pages that actually contain concrete info on your offerings.

Write Pages for a Person Not a “Bot”

Back in the “old SEO days”, many website owners would optimise content specifically for search engine crawling bots. Trends like keyword stuffing and carefully measuring keyword density for crawlers were big SEO trends. However, they are trends of yesteryear and today, the human element in SEO is more critical than ever.

Instead of specifically focusing on content that “crawls better”, you should be creating website content that actively engages site visitors and delivers true value – something that is worth sharing and talking about.

So where to begin? Understand the consumer base you’re looking to target and then fine-tune content to meet their pain points and underlying needs. The more value you can drive with this content, the more share-worthy and talk-worthy it will be.

Now, how is this relevant to SEO? High-value and high-quality content now appears much higher under SERPs (search engine results pages) because Google knows that the quality is good, people like to read it, there’s value to be had, etc. and therefore, will prioritise it higher than other website which have offer less share-worthy content or content that otherwise offers significantly less value.

Furthermore, higher quality content that engages audiences create better context – this along with relevance are two critical metrics in the current SEO landscape.

Look Beyond Search Engines

We’re halfway through 2019 already – businesses should be looking well beyond just Google like Amazon and the App Store. Your brand visibility doesn’t have to be limited to just search engines.

Well known e-commerce stores and app stores is where a lot of your potential customers might be hanging out. People are always on the lookout for products and services on Amazon, Google Play and the App Store – optimise your product descriptions with the right keywords and you’ll not only see your web traffic growing but also your SEO rankings improving as a result.

Start with these three SEO tips in 2019 and you’re golden.