Every year brings a seismic change in the world of SEO. New algorithms introduced by Google, old algorithms being updated, strategies that were once acceptable becoming no longer profitable, and many other SEO changes impact your website ranking in Google.
2020 will be no different in the SEO industry. There will be several SEO trends in 2020 that will impact your website’s organic traffic and keyword rankings.
So what are those SEO trends to look out for in 2020?
Here are some of the key SEO trends.
#1. Artificial Intelligence will determine your website ranking:
Google and many other companies have started using the Artificial Intelligence technology to provide accurate results to its users. In 2020, you will see many SEO experts focusing on creating an informative content that matches the user intent.
Because, artificial intelligence will be able to study the characteristics of the content and determine whether the content is valuable or otherwise. And accordingly, ranks web pages in Google search results with a very good precision.
#2. BERT & User Focused Content Optimization will be the key:
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) will play a pivotal role in 2020 for your SEO strategy. SEO marketers should implement BERT model to improve their chances of ranking in the top position of SERP in Google. As an SEO marketer, your content should match the user intent for various search queries used.
BERT is used by Google to understand the meaning of the search query by understanding the prepositions like “on” and “by” better and index the most useful content that exactly matches the user’s intent.
So before you create a content, you need to do a thorough research of the 10 best content ranking on the first page of SERP for your focused keyword.
Accordingly, based on the research, you can write content that matches the user’s intent that could either be informational, transactional or navigational.
#3. Create High Quality Content:
The year 2020 will see a change in your digital marketing strategy by spending less amount of money on ads and instead the focus will be more on creating high quality content. Because in the recent times there are less response coming from the ads and people are more interested in getting valuable information for their specific query in the search result.
So creating well-researched pieces of content will be one of the key SEO strategies that will help optimize your website and improve the keyword rankings. Whether it is for your business blog page or for your product pages, creating quality content should be your main priority. People tend to spend more time on a website that has informative content that helps satisfy a user’s intent.
As a result, Google honors these kinds of websites or web pages and ranks them in the top 10 position of the search result.
Content should be structured well with proper internal navigation system that helps a user click on a link and navigate to other pages within the website to either get more information on the similar topic or to a product and service pages for transactional purposes.
As in the past, in 2020 as well, people are going to value a piece of content more if it is of high quality and appears to be non-promotional. People tend to bounce away from blog posts or web pages that are too promotional. There are also lesser chances of seeing a promotional content getting a backlink reference from high quality third-party referral sites. According to many research groups, it is believed that more than 50% of readers spend less time on content that has a sales intent.
Educational content can be created in various resource format like ebooks, case studies, whitepaper documents, infographics, blog posts, videos etc.
#4. Featured Snippets are here to stay:
Each year has presented new changes introduced by Google to create rich experience for its users. Featured Snippet is one of them that has been there for the past few years and it has continued to be one of the key SEO strategies implemented by many digital marketers.
Featured Snippet codes can be created to highlight the popular pages, with links that are usually listed by Google on the top, before the organic listings. This can be leveraged by creating FAQ page on your website. Provide detailed answer for all the key questions that users search for matters related to your business.
Should your featured snippet be of high quality, then Google evaluates them and lists them on top. Featured Snippet should be your highest priority in SEO strategy as it becomes the entry point for a user to visit your website instead of scrolling down the search results page and not clicking on your website. It is estimated that approximately 50% of clicks come from the featured snippets in Google SERP.
Featured Snippet gives an opportunity to see your website receive more organic traffic even if your website does not rank in the top 10 position in Google.
#5. Voice Search will continue to play a key role:
Voice Search is going to play a key role for your website SEO in 2020. Nowadays, with many visitors coming to your website through their mobile devices, the majority of them use voice search.
So, it is necessary for you to optimize your website with long-tail keywords and add them as a Title Tag for your entire website.
For example, if you are a blogger, in the about me page of your website, instead of using About ‘Your Name’ as a title tag, you should use, Who Is ‘Your Name’. It is what most of the users compute in the voice search in Google.
We come across this strategy implemented by Neil Patel in his blog site.
#6. Influencer Marketing Strategy:
Influencer marketing strategy will be another important SEO trend that will be the key in 2020. Influencer marketing helps in promoting a high quality content that you have created by a reputed influencer. In SEO, influencer marketing would also play its part in generating more organic traffic, get more backlinks and promote your content in social media platforms.
Partnering with relevant influencers to your niche will help boost your website’s reputation in Google and will help improve its domain authority by acquiring more quality backlinks.
#7. Buying HTTPs Certificate is important for your website:
Since June 2017, Google had made it mandatory for all the webmasters to purchase SSL certificate and get their website secured. By enabling HTTPS protocol, it provides a secure connection to your users. This strategy provides SEO boost.
By enabling HTTPs for your website, the users are provided with a secure browsing experience. In this arrangement, we would not be able to collect personal information of the users on our website.
#8. Technical SEO should be taken care:
A website’s dominance in the search result is largely dependent on its structure, user friendliness, search engine friendliness, navigation, loading time, image optimization, mobile optimization and linkability.
These are the core elements that are a part of the Technical SEO that need to be implemented first, before proceeding to any other SEO strategies for your website.
An SEO expert should identify the On-Page SEO issues at the earliest and co-ordinate with his web developers to ensure that the website has no glitches.
Key SEO parameters like XML Sitemap, Robots.txt, Readable URLs, HTML Sitemap, Alt Tags, Code-to-Text Ratio, Page Loading Time and Structured Data should be considered as an important priority for your website optimization.
#9. Content should be long:
It is important to write quality content as discussed earlier in this blog. But at the same time you should ensure that it is long. People are looking for a single source of content that has a complete information on the topic that they are searching for. Web pages with a lengthy and well-researched content usually get more visibility today. These days most of the bloggers prefer writing a blog post with 2000 words or more.
Having said that, it does not mean you should write very long articles if they cannot provide valuable information to the readers. Because if the content is of high quality, only then are we going to see more time spent by the user. And this would result in Google rewarding your website with more organic traffic.
You should regularly update your content with fresh details so that there is a chance of seeing your web page remain in the 1st page of Google search results.
#10. Backlinks will still rule the roost:
Backlinks from high quality websites was always considered as an important factor for Google to rank your website in the search results. It holds true even today. Acquiring backlinks also improves your website’s domain authority.
So, the year 2020 is going to be an interesting period for SEO professionals. Though it is challenging at times, implementing these SEO strategies should help you improve your website rankings steadily.
well written sreenivas. also very informative.