SEO TRENDS 2020 – You Need To Know

2020 is coming to us… Are you aware of SEO trends 2020 and it changes?

Its time to rethink about content and marketing strategy.

Lets Move On…

Things are going to change in big way and if you aren’t ready or preparing new, then you’re going to miss the boat.

Keep on learning and it’s a curve time for website owners and digital marketers. Think about, what are the most important factors you need to know about content optimization or SEO Trends in next year.

Yeah… Its turns a lot.

Every year Google makes changes and updating search algorithms, that effects on Google search engine ranking for website. Here are some of the top SEO trends 2020.

What SEO strategies and tactics will work and help you to dominate in SERPs and generates more revenue in 2020.

Read the blog, to know what have to consider nextyear’s SEO and content trends headed our way.

Don’t lay back your website content and SEO fall behind.

Trend 1 – Voice Search Optimization
Trend 2 – High-Quality Content and Optimized content
Trend 3 – E-A-T
Trend 4 – UX & Technical SEO
Trend 5 – Mobile SEO
Trend 6 – Rich snippets
Trend 7 – Structured data mark-up
Trend 8 – Search Intent
Trend 9 – Artificial Intelligence
Trend 10 – Link building/brand optimization
Trend 11 – Video still serves 1st
Trend 12 – User-focused optimization

Trend 1 : Voice Search Optimization

Is voice search Trend setter for Digital Marketing???

Lets Check Voice Search Statistics:

• eMarketer predicts that over a third of US population will use a voice assistant monthly in 2019, its up by 9.5% from 2018.
• ComScore predicts that by the year 2020, 50% of all online searches will be performed with voice search.
• According to Adobe survey, the most common voice searchers on smart speakers are asking music (70%), the weather (64%), fun questions (53%), online search (47%), news (46%) and directions (34%).

It’s hard to imagine, 50% of the searchers will be voice searchers by 2020. Start optimizing some of the content for voice search is smart SEO.

How to Optimize for Voice Search:

1. Content needs to rank high in search engine results page – Rank within position 3, Google tend to source voice search results from the content which is ranked in within top 3.
2. Include question and answer in your content – Google picks a page which contains 1.) Questions and 2.) Answer. (FAQs page are great for voice search SEO). Question works like how, what, when, why and where.
3. Get ranks in featured snippet – Google algorithm has works on featured snippets in SERP. Research data revealed most of the search results comes directly from a featured snippet.
4. Local Search listing are priority for voice search.
5. Target long tail keyword phrases – Google is fond of long term keywords which appears in vocal queries.
6. Improve loading time of your website – Website load time has direct impact on bounce rate and should be optimized.

Trend 2 – High Quality / Optimized Content

Content. Content. Content.

Content play major role in SEO and video content has popularity. It improve website structure and internal link building strategy.

To get succeed in 2020, Have to build content which is relevant and valuable for customers. Best content will score the 1^st place over other competitors.

Create goal plan for a year, to generate the best content on the web for what customers looking for. Keep focusing on long tail keywords while content creating it help to build your site authority, direct impact on ROI.

Know before you write;

• Understand about your target audience and what they looking for
• Understand intent behind the questions and solve their problem
• Give them solutions and answers format content for users

Trend 3 – E-A-T

Google evaluates your website based on Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Also known as E-A-T.

E-A-T is Domain Authority 2.0 and will be important key trend in 2020.

Are you evaluating a page which has high or low E-A-T content, following question to ask yourself;

Expertise – What kind of expertise is required for the page to achieve?
Authority – How credible is the content author and website publishing this content?
Trust – How trustworthy is the website publishing content and information?

How to improve your website E-A-T Signals in 2020:

Every page must have a purpose – Page should have user intent content and something teach or inform them.

Do optimize About us & Contact Us page – Include testimonials & ratings, depth history structure of the company and certification history from industry all in About Us page. Contact information is in visible across the site and must include in header or footer.

Display E-A-T related information for your business – Include E-A-T related info in an author bio or give link to a full author profile. Content should be scripted by experts (Professional experiences and relevant certificates and references).

Meta Data exchange information E-A-T – SERP listing / meta data should emphasize trust, reviews, ratings and detailed content.

Avoid Clickbait while crafting copy – Don’t design page elements intentionally for users. Don’t add up page title and description with false statement or trust for users.

Company Wikipedia page should well optimized – To get high E-A-T rating for your business, must have positive brand reputation, dnt forget to include features, awards and recognition section in website and also in Wikipedia.

Merge thin or duplicate content – To get high E-A-T landing page, merge thin or duplicate content page into one high quality content page.

Trend 4 – UX & Technical SEO

Every website owners tends to works on Technical SEO to make it easier for search engine to fetch your website.

You may face huge drops over keyword ranking and organic traffic, if you have technical issues over a website.

Strategies to improve on page seo for Great user experiences:

Diagnose broken links and Fix it
Fix SEO missing and duplicate meta tags
Make sure website navigation is ease to crawl
Do internal linking
Check site doesn’t have duplicate content
Make sure website load fast and mobile friendly
Use SSL protocol
Use search intent keywords and build content
Optimize images across website
Make sure page or blog readable and user friendly
Create an XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console
Don’t forget to create robots.txt file

Trend 5 – Mobile SEO Optimization

Why mobile optimization is so crucial for seo in 2020. 87% of internet users are on mobile phones and 40% of successful transactions occur on mobile.

Mobile searches are at top position and leaving desktop searches behind. Out 5, 4 customers do online shopping using smartphone. Especially in 2020, if the website doesn’t have a mobile view page, they chance to lose potential customers and revenue.

Google has switched and introduced mobile first index in 2019. This allows google to fetch mobile version of page for ranking and indexing.

You can check whether your website is fully optimized of mobile with Google Mobile Friendly Test

What is Google’s Mobile First Index?

Google’s mobile-first index ranks the search result based only on the mobile version of the page.

Today no matter what device you use for search, google show up result from their mobile index.

If your site is already optimized, its perfect. Make sure with key points;

• Load resources across all devices
• Doesn’t hide content on mobile version site
• Quick load expects mobile users
• Do check UX that’s optimized for all devices that your visitors comes from
• If you not, you may notice ranking drops as google rolls this out

Mobile Friendly Content Creation Ideas:

1. Keep paragraph short (two or three sentences)
2. Breakup text with sub headers. Every 2 – 3 paragraph induce the next header, makes easier to fetch.
3. Use bullets and numbered lists. Helps text to display multiple ideas or hints.
4. While optimizing content for voice search, its important to have trustworthy and quality content.

How to make your mobile content more readable?

• Use atleast 14px font
• Use short paragraph
• Line length between 50 – 60 characters
• Make sure tons of contrast between text and background

Do invest on content in right way, you’ll recoup the money / generate quality leads.

How To Mobile Optimize Your Website:

Use google mobile usability test – Tool found in Google Search Console, let you know if your site has mobile usability issues.

Do google crawl your whole website – Do you usualy bock googlebot from accessing javascript, CSS and other important scripts. No big deal ever, but today it’s a bad idea. Google wont tell mobile friendly unless it crawls everything.

Put an end to interstitial popups – Everyusers hates Popups, yeah google also hate popups especially for mobile users. Infact, google rooled out an update that specifically targets “Intrusive Popups” (If you use giant popup on your site, then could have impact on rankings.

Google gives a few examples of acceptable popups

Mobile Optimize for UX:

Make your content easy to read on phones
Use HTML 5 for Video and Animated Content
Don’t forget the viewport content tag

Mobile UX hacks:

Make header images small
Use lots of negative space – really important for mobile sites
Put social share button as Tab bar (Top or bottom of the content)

Advanced Mobile SEO Tips

• Its time to take your website to the next level
• Fix your mobile CTR and Get More Traffic
• Boost your page speed
• Optimized meta title and description tags for Mobile SERP
  • Desktop – Title (70) Description (155) Characters
  • Mobile – Title (78) Description (155) Characters. If you title has fewer than 70 characters, then your title won’t get cut off on desktop or mobile
• Use Schema structured data to stand out in Mobile SERPs – Structured data can hook up you with reviews, ratings, image, event dates and more

Trend 6 – Rich / Featured Snippets

According to SEMrush, 11,52% of all search results have a featured snippet.

41% of questions have featured snippets and yes, featured snippets stealing a huge number of clicks.

Lets scroll down….

To know how to get your content to appear in Featured Snippet?

What are featured Snippets?

A featured snippet shows up as block on SERP, that contains exact answer for search query. It found above the 1^st organic google search results, so its called as Position “0”

Types of Featured Snippets:

Paragraph – This snippet shows as paragraph type answers to questions like why, how, what and when. Paragraph snippet is most popular type.

List – Answers comes with bullet points or numbered or list under this snippet type. List snippets apply mostly on the post like recipes or how to do’s

Table – This snippets shows up for the comparison post or charts. Table snippet applies for prices, rates, years and other numerical data.

How to Optimize for Featured Snippet:

• Do keyword research and list out question type search queries.
• Look over the “People also ask” below the snippet box.
• Ranking on 1^st page, have more chance to appear on featured snippet
• Use reverse format or pyramid style – Start off by providing answer and then proceed with details  for the rest of your content.
• Use the words and queries which are likely to generate featured snippet – Words or queries are Free, Rankings, Comparison, Reviews, Best, When, definition, meaning, cause, last and more.
• Pay attention to formatting – Put your answers as list or tablet format to target featured snippet.
• Use Optimal word count – Most featured snippet have a length of 40 – 50 words.
• Add Q& A page or FAQ page in your website.

Tips to format your blog post for Featured Snippet:

1. Write descriptive headers and use heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc)
2. Use short sentences, help to provide direct answers
3. Use numbered list, bullet points, tables or comparison graph / charts
4. Add relevant image along with snippet query

Trend 7 – Schema / Structured Data Mark-up

Don’t know to about schema markup?

Well, its time to think about schema. Its quite hard as its technical.

Schema feeds all the data to search engines in a structured way and helps search engine to provide better results for users.

There are 3 structured data formats that google supports – JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa.

However google always recommends using JSON-LD format for structured data since it has java-script format.

Benefits of using JSON-LD for Structured data:

Supported by all major search engines
Easily embedded it anywhere on the webpages
HTML format doesn’t need to get changed
Developers can reuse it since it follows the JSON syntax
Doesn’t impact the performance of a page

Reasons why website needs Schema?

Content recognition
Brand Awareness
Local Businesses
Event Promotions
Display business information

Top 6 Schema Markups:

1. Organization schema markup
2. Product / offer schema markup
3. Local business schema markup
4. Breadcrumbs markup
5. Video schema markup
6. Event schema markup

Why does structured markup important for SEO?

• Use of structured data markup isn’t technical a ranking factor of google. But it help in different ways, helps to enhancement the page appears in search engine result page
• It helps to gain quality click-through rates for a site
• Study says 35% increased CTR, if your site listed in search engine result page with rating snippets
• It helps search engine better understand about content in page, so you can gain better traffic

Trend 8 – Search Intent

Google doesn’t use exact matching keyword optimization. It looks at query context and analyze the possible search intent to deliver better results.

Search Intent is most important topic in 2019. If content doesn’t match search intent , then they wont get rank.

Do remember, Search Intent is Must for 2020.

Types of User Intent:

Informational Search Intent – Strategies to grow an email list & Best seo tips 2020
Navigational Search Intent – Twitter & Linkedin Login
Commercial Search Intent – Frozen 2 Posters & Best drone cameras
Transactional Search Intent – Online medical insurance & Buy groceries online

How to optimize content for Search Intent:

Identify search intent keywords – Figure out your target keywords
Create content what they actually looking for – Analyze the SERP and create content for search intent match
Re-optimize your old content – Tweak your old content to make better search intent fit

Trend 9 – Artificial Intelligence on SEO

AI is one of the most important technology. AI used in wide variety range of industries to create unique, personalized information for customers

Google use AI to deliver better search results for users. When you do search for something on google, the SERP consider bucket of information from users like Location, Search History, Website You Visits and do consider about other similar users what they have clicked for a similar search query

Google Algorithm learns from search users as how people are clicking on the search results and consider most relevant factors to decides for each search

AI is revolutionizing SEO by using user search experience, big data and machine learning to generate better search results to meet users expectations

Inject AI into SEO strategy to get a top edge and to beat your competitors

Trend 10 – Backlinks / Link Building Still Leads You

Content and links still leads SEO in 2020.

To generate quality backlinks, without content is still not possible and Without N of backlinks you cant get rank at 1^st page

Google recently said still link plays a key role in algorithm

Link Building Do’s and Don’ts;

Do’s:
Insert Long tail keyword while building links
Social sharing drives more traffic

Don’t:
Do not stuff same keywords

What Types of Backlinks are Valuable?

Do focus on quality backlinks, Not all the backlinks are equal.

Eg – A single backlink can be more powerful than 1000 of low-quality backlinks.

High Quality Backlinks Traits:

Link from Trusted, Authoritative websites.
Include Target keyword in link’s anchor text
Link you website topically related to your site
Check and link on Do-Follow link
Domain hasn’t linked to your website before

Trend 11 – Video induce better conversions

Video is more important than ever before, one of the top SEO Trends in 2020.

Include video in your content strategy. Video marketing has the tricky power to make customers stay along while comes with content.
In fact. 83% of marketers believe that video is chance for better branding.
Include video in your email marketing to increase CTR by 63%
Video shared on social media 1200% more than images and text combined.
Over 78% of people watch online videos every week and 55% videos watch online every day

The above stats proves why company needs to get video marketing trend!

Optimize video for each social platforms – Helps to enhance viewer’s experience and make sure all your video content is high quality and meets social platform dimensions.

Video Marketing Trends Best Practices:

Have you started thinking to get board a video marketing trend, you’re right. Lets check some best practices ideas to follow;

Focus only on topic – Be straight and get the point quickly.
Don’t forget to keep videos short – Peoples loves shorter informational videos.
Use ideal length for each platform : Twitter – Not longer than 30 seconds, Facebook – 1 minute, Instagram – Should be26 – 30 seconds and Youtube – about 2 minutes.
Include CTA (Call to Action) at the end of your video.
Add subtitles in your videos – most of the views from mobile devices so better to have subtitles so they can still better understand your message.
Embed Videos on Blog Post – It can decrease bounce rate

Important things for video content for featured snippet:

Organize your content with clear sections – Google may understand your content in video.
Optimize your videos for SEO – Use TIlte, Descripiton and keywords tags to figure out what is video about.
In fact, a small HubSpot study of 165 Video Featured Snippets found that 80% of them contained a keyword in the title.
Captions Must – Upload a transcript, youtube and google understands every word of your video.
Make sure to include video marketing in your strategy, it helps to increase your engagement, CTR, Likes, Shares, Comments and More.

Trend 12 – User focused Optimization

Google launched BERT algorithm in 2019, and got more attention.

What is BERT?

BERT stands for Bidirectionsl Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a neural network based technique for natural language processing pre-training.

Simply, it can be used to help google better discern the context of words in search queries.

Create content with user access points to search and align content based on that.

In 2020, smart SEO’s will help to rank up to reach customers so they can find what audience want from them. So marketers market their services & products by using user intent keywords to target their audience.

Do research and club up SEO with your marketing strategy for user focused optimization.

Ready to Start!

SEO is most important to focus in digital marketing industry and it helps to connect users with proper website through search engines.

Each and every time marketers should think about SEO Changes, we need to keep our hand on the challenge button, and start to adjust your work based on updates.

Google keep on updating and optimizing search results based on user intent rather than focus keywords to match the content.

Action items for SEO Trends:

• Works for featured snippets and dominate your competitors in SERPs
• AI helps to create better content thorough keyword research
• Create quality and long form content
• Include video in text blogs, email marketing and landing pages to improve CTR
• Consider LSI and relevant keywords to include in your blog context.
• Use Schema and Rich Data to boost your CTR and improve rankings
• Optimize your page for voice search by optimizing
• Works hard to build quality backlinks (Guest post, Press Release and Social Media)
• Build landing pages by considering search intent
• Update web pages according to local searchers
• Monitor sub domains and sub folders that are important in SEO

Invest in SEO as a long term strategy for lead generation, to stay top on trends to avoid layoff your competitors.

If you’re already aware of those seo trends, that’s great. You move work on double the traffic so that you can generate more targeted traffic from search engine.

Happy New Year 2020 Wishes to All