It’s fun sometimes to try and play Nostradamus and guess at where SEO is headed in 2019 and in the years to come. By predicting accurately enough, it gives you some idea of what kind of SEO services you’re going to need from a Los Angeles-based agency.

Some guesses can be logically made based on current trends, but some of what the so-called experts have predicted seem to amount to little more than shots in the dark. Let’s take a moment to make some predictions that seem the most likely to come true in the months and years to come.

Reviews Will Continue to Matter

While some SEO elements go in and out of style, Los Angeles companies should be able to bank on reviews of their businesses continuing to matter wherever they are found across the web. Reviews are SEO gold because people genuinely care about them when they are deciding whether to use your services and products. If you use Amazon, you know this to be true. You’re far more likely to buy a product that has five stars rather than one that has two-and-a-half.

As this is likely going to remain the case, one of the SEO services that you should demand from your agency is that they do everything that they can to encourage people to leave feedback for your products. Just asking them to do so might not be enough. Your SEO company may need to resort to offering them a discount or some special offer if you want them to weigh in about whether they liked what you sold them.

You’ll also need to keep going out of your way to address negative reviews. You should train your SEO company regarding customer relations if they’re the ones who are going to be reaching out to people who had a bad experience with one of your services or products.

The Growth of Linked Unstructured Citations

Linked unstructured citations have grown in importance from an SEO standpoint lately, and this is likely to continue as well. A linked unstructured citation is when there’s a mention of a business’s information plus a link to some relevant website somewhere online.

The reason these sorts of mentions matter to your Los Angeles business is that they are a non-Google-dependent way of driving leads and traffic. Google is great for your business when you can use it to your advantage, but any time that you have other means of someone finding out about your company, so much the better.

Any source of traffic to your site for which you do not have to pay Google is going to become increasingly precious, so try to actively cultivate linked unstructured citations wherever you can. This is even more the case if you are a local business rather than a huge conglomerate.

Targeting Queries versus Targeting Topics

As it relates to Google and SEO, 2019 has already been a year where we have seen a decline in the emphasis on individual search queries. Instead, it’s clusters of questions around topics toward which people seem to gravitate.

It’s the People Also Ask feature on Google that the public seems to love, because it not only fills them in on possible answers to the question that they initially asked, but also it suggests questions that are tangential to it, the answers to which individuals are also likely to want to know. Google wants people to have a better search experience, and that means expanding their responses beyond answers to only one question.

So, what does that mean as it relates to SEO services in Los Angeles? It means that the agency you hire should know how to feature content on your website that will include keywords which can be the answer to topic clusters on Google. If your content is suitable for answering not just one but multiple queries then you stand a better chance of ranking.

Beyond Website Ranking

It’s also reasonable to assume based on recent trends that marketers are going to focus more on general brand visibility within the SERPs instead of only website rankings. That’s because Google is increasingly doing more to answer people’s questions without them having to go to an actual website.

Because of this, the importance of showing up in a featured snippet is going to be more vital than ever. If something from your website is in that snippet, and what you have to say is interesting enough, then it might entice someone to go to your site to see more even if their original query was already answered.

Business Proximity to Searcher

Business proximity to users of Google in Los Angeles is already a significant SEO factor, and that should continue for the remainder of this year and beyond. It seems that when someone uses Google, and they are on a mobile device, the proximity to a brick-and-mortar location matters more than how highly rated that business is.

If your business does have a brick-and-mortar location, this means that your SEO company should be doubly sure that they have your website optimized for long-tail keywords that are likely to score a hit with local search on Google. Taking advantage of hyper-localized search is going to be vital if you expect to stay ahead of larger companies than yourself which provide some of the same services and products that you do.

Regardless of which of these predictions proves to be correct, the SEO services that you need aren’t likely to remain static for the rest of this year and beyond. While some SEO elements are always expected to be a part of the industry, many are going to morph into something very different from how they are currently constituted, while others will disappear entirely.

Be sure that you hire an SEO company that demonstrates some flexibility and a willingness to learn. Stubbornness in the face of an industry that changes continuously can hurt your business if you don’t decide to switch to a different agency fast enough.