Ideas on SEO and marketing

A friend in Europe who trawls through the latest ideas from the USA and Europe, sent me these thoughts, pointing out that, since more advertising tools are equipped with Blockchain technology, A.I. (artificial intelligence) and Blockchain will increasingly shape SEO and digital marketing in 2019.

• • User engagement: Natural user engagement on your page will be one of the important ranking factors in Google. If you get all the SEO factors right but your page has less engagement, it affects your ranking;
  • Link building: It still matters, however if you modify your template very often. This will affect your keyword ranking and result in your keyword(s) fluctuating more in search engine results. It depends on the competitiveness of the keyword or key phrase;
  • Tools: Blockchain and artificial intelligence tools will sell more than non-A.I tools;
  • Social networks: If you have already implemented A.I and machine learning (ML), algorithms will help your website rank higher in search engines. Therefore businesses who are active on social media sites will get better ranking in search engines. The trend will be mainly related to Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo and LinkedIn;
  •  Paid Social Advertising: More companies will invest on social advertising. Many more agencies will be using Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to advertise their products and services. This is reflected in the cost – for example, a paid Twitter trend costs $200K per day in the US. Politicians, governments, film and entertainment industry, automotive and fashion brands are increasingly using this service more. Many companies will invest on paid Twitter trend especially computer games, and governments such as USA, Canada, India, France, Australia and Germany.
  • Governments investment on A.I and Blockchain: This will influence marketing and investment in Europe and North America. France pledged to spend $1.5 billion towards A.I development, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced her plans for a national A.I strategy are likely to be over £1 billion (equals to $1.3 billion). The USA plans to add $2 billion on A.I projects, this is partly because the US Department of Defense is losing to its rivals Russia and China in the race to embrace artificial intelligence. The UK also will invest – £4.7 billion on A.I and robotics. These investments will help tech companies to have more money to invest in marketing their products and as a result A.I tools will increasingly empower the digital marketing sector along with its processes such as SEO.
  • Content marketing:  Google measures user and websites’ data in order to determine user performance, which is why Google will give more prominence to websites which have more user engagement. A portion of these key measurements include user’s time spent on a page, click-through rates, return visits, page speed, mobile friendliness and inner pages performance. If a website has an original research content, it gets a higher ranking on Google
  • Video marketing: Video and podcast curation on social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will increase sales and search engine ranking.
  • Drip feed: will play an important role in keyword ranking in 2019. The longer the drip feed process the better ranking your page gets. Make sure not to rely only on drip feed. Because if you stop using it, your ranking will drop unless you have other ways to keep your rankings high.
  • Social sharing:  sharing  and engagement on all platforms simultaneously will increase ranking a sub-page on Google and the other search engines including Yandex. As for the Chinese search engines, such as Baidu,  they use a different trend in ranking due to censorship in China. Your rankings in China will not be the same as your rankings outside China (it will be interesting to see how this pans out as Google enters the Chinese market -see our report on Google re-entering the Chinese market in past Newsletters).
  • Keyword Ranking:  will remain a challenge –  due to Google A.I and machine learning algorithms. Google search engine engineers keep changing the search algorithm which thus effects keyword performance in search results on both the local and global level. Google local search engines need to be improved for optimum use by its clients.
  • Managing passwords and user credentials for a host of websites and apps has become increasingly challenging for users of digital content and services, like e-shops. To address this annoyance, large online platforms have offered unaffiliated websites to authenticate users through a shared log-in — for instance, “Log in with Facebook.” However, such log-ins are more than just a simple solution to ease user frustration. They also allow the issuing platforms to track user activity across multiple unaffiliated websites and apps, while the content or service providers (such as an e-shop) receive demographic and behavioral data that can help them improve customer experience. There are, however, downsides for the user e-shop –  in many cases, providers become trapped in this data-sharing dilemma. They may have had short-term incentives to adopt such log-ins but they may suffer negative economic impact in the long run. For example, they may be competing with the platform for the same advertising – and guess who wins!
  • Marketers adapt to new standards of engagement: The share of dynamically coordinated channels has grown at a rate of 14 percent since 2017
  • The connected customer. Today, consumers and business buyers alike expect convenient, relevant, and responsive engagement across every interaction. What’s more, they judge companies based on their overall experience, not just their interactions with individual departments. In other words, they see one company, not a series of disjointed departments — and expect those they buy from to act as one. This is shown in statistics – marketing is becoming the cross-functional glue of customer experience: marketers sharing metrics with sales teams has grown at a rate of 21% since 2017. New dynamics up the ante for data unification: The number of data sources used by marketers has grown at a rate of 19% since 2017; and, as we have seen above, AI and trust underpin customer experiences: marketers’ adoption of A.I. has grown at a rate of 44% since 2017