Recently updated: January 4th, 2019

With just a few days left for New Year to kick in, everyone from individuals to businesses is thinking of their resolutions. As a business, driving more traffic to your business or website, getting brand rank higher in search results, and improving your brand visibility would be your goals. And these are going to be goals of most businesses regardless of size and what they do. So competition is going to be even tougher in 2019. But here four steps to a better SEO in 2019 that will help you achieve your goals.

So Let Us Jump To Them Without Much Ado:

Keyword Analysis:-

This is the very first step you should think about. The idea is to understand the market for keywords. You need to know what phrases that relate to your business people are most increasingly using to make online searches. Use that information to analyze your current performance for organic searches and set the goals you would want to achieve in 2019.

For example, if your goal is to get more traffic for a keyword say running shoes, but you are already using a number of keywords or phrases related to running shoes, the more changes are that you will fail to achieve your goals.

So it is important to make the very careful selection of keywords that relate to your business and are easy to rank for. Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner can help you. You can easily aggregate the data so that keywords that have the same words or intent are added together.

For example, you can add running shoes and casual shoes to overall shoe category to understand the value of that keyword theme compared to other forms of shoes.

Analysis of Performance In 2018:-

The next step to make sure you have a better SEO strategy for 2019 is the analysis of your performance till the date for 2018 in comparison with that of 2017. This will help you understand where your SEO lagged in 2018, and what you need to do so that you 2019 SEO strategy can pay you off better.

There are many tools that can be very helpful in this regard (measuring 2018 performance and comparing it with that of last year). For example, Google Search Console that you can use to get the details of the keywords that drove traffic to your website. This is your baseline performance, which you can use to set the next goals you would like to achieve in 2019.

Don’t spend too much time and effort getting the exact numbers — Google approximates them in Keyword Planner. You need the overall details of your current performance that you can base on your further goals.

Look at the pages that drove natural performance. Which pages could be performing better? Is there anything missing from the analytics report? Get information like that as much as you can get. And set your goals to tackle those pages could not perform as they should have in 2019.

Analysis of performance and comparing it with that of last year will give you an insight in where you do focus more and where not.

Goals for 2019:-

Now you are able enough to decide on what should be goals for 2019. Without goals, strategy is directionless. You don’t know where to go and what you need to focus on.

You can use the below technique to set SEO Strategy goals for 2019:

Be specific. Don’t make a goal like improving performance which is too general. Be specific. Get to know what exactly you would want to achieve. For example, are you aiming for revenue growth or traffic? Is your goal like the one that you can achieve with SEO?
Your goals should be measurable. How will you know if you achieved it? So your goals should be measurable. There should be a tool that can help you gauge your success.
They are achievable. SEO is not a magic yard that you can use to get anything you want. So don’t make a goal like a huge surge in your sales overnight. Your goals should like that which is achievable.

Relevant. The goals you set should relate to your business? The goal needs to have a meaningful relationship to profitability. They should directly impact your site’s performance.
Time-bound. There is a timeframe within which a goal should be achieved. A goal without a timeframe contains no urgency.

While setting goals, make sure the list is compact and includes only those that are most relevant to your business.

Your SEO Strategy in 2019:-

Based on your goals, define your 2019 SEO strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase natural search traffic a keyword you want to rank for by 10 percent in 2019 over 2018, what should you do? You may need to optimize the content on certain pages. You may also need to do what can help improve the crawl path to high-demand categories of that keyword. Writing a blog or article around that keyword category would be a good idea that will pay you.

But never divert all focus on the goals to be achieved. Ranking should always be there on the list of your goals. Increasing traffic and driving customer engagement are what must be taken into account when you plan your SEO strategy.