I already published some episodes on the general principles behind SEO – and those principles still apply.

Google has not completely redesigned their search algorithms.

But: They have made drastic changes – and these days, you have to approach SEO completely different to what you had to do back in 2010 or back in the year 2000.

So, what’s changed and why?

SEO is a branding game

Back when Google started out, all that was really important were Links and keywords.

And that meant that link building was a numbers game – whoever had the most links ranked highest.

Which lead to a lot of shady link building tactics – and Google reacted by placing higher emphasis on the quality of links.

But that still wasn’t ideal – as long as you have only links as a measure for quality, that system can always be gamed.

Today, links are still built into Google’s search engine algorithm – and they are still important. But Google’s focus seems to have shifted.

Instead of just ranking content, Google now seems to identify the brands behind the content. And ranks bigger brands higher than smaller brands.

SEO has become a branding game.

Which makes sense – Google wants to show us what is relevant to us. And brands are important for that.

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Now, before you stop all your link building activities and maybe all your SEO activities, take a second and think about what that means. Because it doesn’t mean that everything changed.

In fact, it’s a logical progression from what has been happening for years. Google is diversifying their algorithm. They are adding more elements and ranking factors, but their primary ranking factor and their primary way of rating websites are still links.

What has really changed is the way they use these links to rank sites. What this means is that there are several types of links – and if you only build one type of links you will have a hard time increasing your search traffic.

But if you take a multi-channel approach to SEO and marketing in general, you will improve your results. This is, in my opinion, the most important thing to know about SEO in 2019.

But what does that mean for SEO – how do you take a multi-channel approach?

A multi-channel approach to SEO

A brand is what other people are saying about you when you’re not in the room. That’s a quote by Jeff Bezos that explains perfectly what a brand is.

The most important aspect of this quote is that you don’t have a brand if no one is talking about you.

The old approach to SEO was to rank high in Google and therefore become known and make people talk about you. But since Google starts to focus on brands on their own, for SEO success you have to make people talk about you while you are doing SEO.

But as I said before – I still believe that Google’s primary way of measuring and determining ranks are still links between websites. They’ve just become a lot better at interpreting the information they already have through measuring the links between sites.

If you think about it, links between websites are crazy important for branding – and if you interpret them correctly you can determine exactly how much people talk about a brand.

When people talk about your website on social platforms, they post links. When other bloggers think your recent post was groundbreaking, they post a link in their next post, when your Youtube video goes viral – hundreds and thousands of links get posted in a short amount of time.

And that’s all information that Google already has! For the change in focus in their ranking algorithms, they only need to interpret that information in more detail.

And that’s where the multi-channel approach comes in. Until recently, successful SEOs usually had one or two ways that gave them guaranteed links. Today, this won’t be enough. If you want to be successful from now on you need to take several marketing approaches at once.

These are just examples of what I see becoming more important for SEO in 2019. Bought links become less valuable, smaller site links in new and current content become more important – and getting people to talk about you becomes really important.

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