Miriam's 7 Local SEO Predictions for 2019

[MiriamEllis]

Ah! That's a good one, Michael, but I get why it's more of your wish than a firm prediction. David Mihm hopefully predicted Google would focus in on review spam in 2018 and was sorry to have to report it did not happen. Maybe 2019 will be the year - here's hoping!

Thanks for reading and for adding your smart take. I hope our community will keep this thread rolling with more good guesses!

[MichaelC-15022]

I think most of the community is currently Christmas shopping online...and making decisions based on fake reviews :-p.

[MiriamEllis]

Pahahahaha! Thank you, Michael. That made my morning.

[DonnaDuncan]

Related to your #7, I think citations will continue to diminish in value to the point where unrelated and unauthoritative sources will no longer "move the needle" or be worth acquiring. Local SEO companies are going to shift gears and put more emphasis on providing education and services around reputation management and link-earning. I realize some of that is happening already. I just think we're going to see more of it.

You think there might be a big change in local players this year? That's interesting. Are you thinking of any one company in particular?

[MiriamEllis]

Thank you for sharing your prediction, Donna! Agree with you that reputation management and link building (including linked unstructured citation building) will be recognized as competitive difference makers. I believe structured citations will remain table stakes in 2019 (something you have to have to get in the game).

As for major players, yes, I think there's a possibility we may see a change. I won't go so far as to name a particular brand, but there are several majors who appear to keep making the same mistakes to their own detriment as far as public sentiment is concerned. Unless we see learning and change from these mistakes, they could be in trouble. We'll see!

So glad you added your thoughts. Hope we'll see more community members join in. Wishing you a wonderful new year, Donna!

[JohnSammon]

This is great stuff! Thank you for sharing!!

[MiriamEllis]

Thank you, John! Any predictions of your own to share?

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[jasongmcmahon]

Great read Miriam, It'll be interesting to see how the social media landscape will actually change, people may leave Facebook, but _may _come back once the noise dies down; there is no real competition to them. Just like Bing & Google!

[Andrew-SEO]

Thanks Miriam this is an interesting read.

"Google will continue to dominate and monetize local search" - This is worrying as this directly affects my sector. More of the walled garden.

[MiriamEllis]

Thanks for reading, Joe! Agree with you that Internet users are demonstrating an exceedingly high level of tolerance for Big Tech misbehavior. What's in front of us is a whole new year to see whether we see fundamental change at these brands or more and worse disasters that could bring us to a tipping point. I'm hoping for the former, but worried we may see the latter.

[MiriamEllis]

Glad you found this interesting, Andrew! Thanks for stopping by. Do you have any predictions of your own to share?

[Andrew-SEO]

These are not much of a prediction as they're already happening but.....

I think clicks / pogo sticking is going to continue to influence rankings heavily. We may even one day see internal site navigation influencing this process (possibly through analytics etc - maybe not if GDPR does not allow)

I think we will see more of the idea of less content, in terms of less keyword cannibalisation and one highly targeted, high authority, highly ranking piece of content. _This could be good or bad. I like the idea of less poor content but I'm not sure about single "authorities" on a subject. _

As snippets evolve, schema will become ever more crucial. I like snippets as they are a very immediate form of content delivery however they also have the ability to block people out so again this is a double-edged sword.

The most successes I have had this year has been through combatting index bloat, implementing pagination were possible, getting the index lean, getting the right pages indexed, reconnecting backlinks and improving internal linking. _All these consistently deliver. Pretty basic stuff but it works and should be maintained. _

[MiriamEllis]

Andrew, thank you for sharing such thoughtful observations, especially in explaining what you've seen work best over the past year. Useful!

[TaylorRHawkins]

This is seriously a great list.

And very well-written to boot!

[MiriamEllis]

Thanks so much, Taylor! Do you have any predictions of your own to add?

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[Xiano]

I think one thing missing from your list is the impact of voice search. I think voice search will continue to grow everywhere, including in the local search area.

[MiriamEllis]

Definitely a good addition, Alex!

[sjjani]

I'm also looking for the local SEO solution for my Two Way Radio website that working on the device repairing.