SEO in 2020 – Trends and Challenges

If you’ve been keeping up with the times in SEO, you’ll notice that the search algorithms are constantly changing. This ends up in your past tactics losing or increasing in effectiveness.

In 2020, like always, Google’s SEO priorities have shifted yet again. For that reason, we’ve put together a list of things you should consider when making your next post or website.

User Experience Is King

The most important thing in 2020 when it comes to SEO is user experience. Now, it’s important to note that the experience isn’t just meant to be made faster, rather, what you should be doing is:

1. Improving the overall website design, making it easier to navigate.
2. Make sure the website is built for everybody and is mobile-friendly.
3. Ascertain that the content is well-organized and readable.
4. Lower your website’s response time.
5. Make sure that you’re using more white space to help your readers focus

Making It Simple

The very second someone pulls up your site, they should know what you do. Make sure that it’s appealing to your target audience. There are a few things you could be doing to improve your lead generation, like:

1. Doing more testing. Try sampling random people to open up your website and give you impressions. Then change the website in accordance to improve navigational issues, bounce rates, and average time spent on page/site.
2. Q&A on your lead generation process. Check whether the form fields are clear, simple to fill up and positioned in appropriate location on the page.

Technical SEO

No matter how many SEO practices you put into work, if your technical SEO is bad, your site will perform badly. You’ll see lots of business owners that are in a pickle because their website isn’t performing well. If you ask why they are not, for a majority of these cases, the answer is SEO.

Technical SEO has shown itself to be the primary SEO factor by a recent study by SEMrush.

• Good performance
• Ability to be crawled on by search engine bots
• Having an index of web pages
• Not having any 404’s or dead links
• Make sure every image has an alt tag associated with it
• All of your headings should be set to a good length and use your keywords.

Make sure that every piece of content you put out follows these guidelines.

Keep Featured Snippets In Mind

Have you heard about featured snippets? They’re embedded search results that Google has selected and put in a separate box on top of all of your results. Google Snippets usually provide a straight answer to the reader’s question. If you ask Google how breathing works the featured snippet will be a straightforward answer.

According to a recent study, getting your content into these featured snippets is the best way to gain brand exposure and clicks. The click through rate of a page jumped 6% (from 2% to 8%) as soon as its content became part of a featured snippet. Its revenue gained from organic traffic was increased by a huge amount- 677%

Keep in mind that generally, you want to be optimizing for one of the following:

• List snippets
• YouTube video Google snippets
• Table snippets
• List snippets

Is Amazon Search The Next Google?
More and more these days, people are relying on search engines other than Google to find their stuff. For example, one would be more likely to check Amazon directly for a new TV rather than Googling “Amazon TV.”

“If potential customers are searching for apps, you need to rank in app stores. If they are searching for podcasts or videos, you need to rank where people search for those things,” Krum said. “Strong brands are becoming multi-faceted, ranking more than just websites. Strong SEOs need to do the same thing.”

When it comes to buying physical products, these days Amazon has the upper hand on Google. Keep in mind that when you’re listing your item on amazon, the SEO is a whole different ball game. Here, reviews, price, pictures, videos etc. reign supreme, as well as making sure that you weave in some keywords together with your description. There are specific do’s and don’t to Amazon’s A9 algorithm which should be carefully considered and applied by ecommerce online shop owners.

The Most Significant SEO Changes In 2020

SEO is a constantly evolving field, and those that lag behind are often left in the dust. The next evolution of SEO is coming soon, regardless of whether or not we’re ready for it. This is why you need to prepare yourself to upgrade your site’s SEO and marketing strategies.

In this article, we’ll be going over the top 8 SEO trends that are bound to make an impact on SEO in this coming year. We’ll also look at the most common pitfalls and troubles that companies encounter while assessing SEO.

Most of you are already familiar with the basics of SEO, however, more advanced things like domain authority, back-linking profiles and similar are beyond many of us. These days, SEO is all about your reputation, rather than technical things like these. Despite this, it’s important to note that reputation doesn’t rise by itself. You need to keep pace with the constantly evolving motions in the field of SEO, forcing you to improve user experience 24/7.

The Growing Importance Of User Experience

It’s well known that long-term strategies that are primarily client-oriented make the most money in the long run. If you’re looking for an example of this principle, look no further than Amazon. This same principle applies to SEO. Search engines love it when you show care for the visitor, making user experience one of the most important factors of Google rankings these days.

Now, you ask, how do you maximize user experience?

– Start by minimizing the number of ads on your platform, especially irrelevant ones that don’t interest your user base.

– Optimize your loading speed as much as you can, you don’t want visitors to wait 10 minutes before seeing your content(hint: they’ll click away.)

– Make sure all of the UI you design is user-friendly. This is important because nobody wants to navigate a clunky interface.

– Make sure that all written content you have on the site is free of error and is written in a quality manner.

– Make sure that your site has white spaces. Your visitors don’t want to be constantly bombarded by information.

– Ensure that your site is extremely mobile-friendly. After all, these days most traffic you’ll be getting is likely to come from a mobile device.

Optimizing For…Voice Searches?

Voice searching via smart assistants like Alexa are secretly taking the SEO world by storm. In fact, Google reports that by 2020, almost 50% of all searches will be voice searches. This staggering trend makes balancing for voice-search SEO very important.

Keep in mind that most voice searches start with “Why?” “When?” or similar,  and they tend to be much longer than most common Google searches.

In addition to this, after someone completes a voice search, they will get the top result as an output. Ranking 2nd when it comes to voice searches is the same as ranking last. This is why it’s especially important to ensure that top spot. It’s also worth keeping in mind that these searches are usually much more specific than your regular Google search.

Today, over 40% of adults are using voice searches in their daily lives. Yes, this means that 40% of people are making at least 1 voice search a day. This is bound to impact the world of SEO profoundly.

SEO is slowly becoming more and more focused on solving people’s problems and answering their questions. This doesn’t mean that SEO specialists are already ready to monetize voice searches. In fact, most SEO specialists have no idea how to do this. This type of search is pretty new, presenting a new frontier in the world of SEO.

The best advice to give when it comes to voice search SEO is – be ready for it.  There isn’t much to say while research is being done, however, making sure that you rank on top of Siri is bound to become an extremely relevant part of SEO soon.

AI Is Becoming More And More Important In Keyword Research

While the impact of AI on the internet today is extremely obvious, it cannot be understated as to how much this influence is going to increase even further. Internet smart search results, as well as all the ads you get are based on your previous experiences. These play an extremely important role in digital marketing strategies today.

The internet, as well as smart results,  play a very big role in determining your click through rate these days. Today, you need to understand how AI works in order to properly maximize your SEO. Making sure you do this is one of the best ways to increase your SEO performance quickly.

Given how quickly AI is developing, it can be quite difficult to predict the way keyword research is going to change in the future. With that being said, AI has some trouble with learning consumer behavior, and experts believe that its full potential hasn’t been reached yet. This means that experts are predicting AI’s impact to increase by a massive amount in the next few years.

Think about the way keyword research has been changing. For example, let’s look at the way we’ve been adjusting our keywords for Rankbrain, which is made by Google. Sheer keyword spamming doesn’t seem to be working out anymore, so we’re forced to give keywords new values in order to make sure that we please the AI. This gives us an explanation, or definition of a keyword rather than just mentioning a thousand times.

You’ll Need To Factor In Blockchain

Wait what? Blockchain? In SEO?

I understand your surprise, blockchain technology isn’t exactly the 1st thing you think about when someone mentions SEO.

If you’re not familiar with blockchain (how’s it going Patrick?) Then you should know that it’s one of the newest, and fastest-growing trends to follow. In essence, blockchain describes a set of interconnected blocks with each of them containing all the info about all of them. When a transaction happens, each block confirms or denies whether the trade is valid. This makes it impossible to get away with an invalid or fake payment.

The great thing about blockchain getting integrated into the internet is the lack of fraud. There won’t be any more fear of fraudulent advertisements, scamming websites, or similar things that fool people over and over again every day. This makes blockchain the number 1 paid search trend. This will also help users that will no longer need to be afraid of getting their personal data stolen by websites.

Blockchain will also help in eradicating click fraud. This makes every click visible both to the website owner and the advertiser. The excellent thing about this is that if that is the case, neither can try to cheat the other out on clicks.

VR And AR Are On The Rise

Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few years(in which case, hi! This is the internet.) Then you’ve noticed the uptick in the use of virtual and augmented reality. So far, these two have been excellent for marketing. For example, now you can check how a lamp will look in your room without “borrowing” it from the store. All you need for it is an app on your phone.

VR and AR aren’t aiming to change the way we search entirely, however, they are bound to give a solid shakeup to the common link building techniques, lead generation tactics and how you engage with your customers. After all, it is one of the best ways to present information to your customers.

Infographics, for example, have been a staple of the industry due to being an engaging way to present information. Despite this, AR is much more engaging and is bound to generate more traffic for you when it picks up steam.

Visual Searches Are Growing

Now,  like most other text search alternatives, visual search will never replace it. With that being said, that doesn’t mean it won’t be an extremely useful tool in the future. With the development of search engine possibilities, we’re getting much closer to perfect information searching. Visual searches let your users find things without ever having to type a word.

Visual search is perfect with a variety of businesses, imagine this: you saw an article of clothing you really like on a celebrity online. You simply take a picture, and put it into Google. Now when you find those clothes, you buy them and become a fan of the brand. This is what can happen to your business if you optimize visual searches well.

This is further emphasized because e-commerce has become extremely popular. This creates even more possibilities to get excellent benefits from using visual search SEO techniques.

When it comes to matching these new algorithms, there are a few tips you can apply:

– Make sure you’re including alt-text descriptions for every image you use.

– Mention your main keywords in the image titles.

– Ensure that all of your images have been compressed as much as possible, and are of a good format.

– If your image doesn’t look good on mobile-scrap it, you need to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly.

– Make sure you’re using the correct schema org markup for every image.

– Every picture of your product needs to be HD.

Amazon Search Eclipsing Google

We all know and love Amazon. It sells pretty much anything under the sun. Naturally, this makes people go to it when they want to buy products, rather than going to Google. This makes Amazon Google’s direct competitor when it comes to searching for products. Furthermore, Amazon uses customer reviews and “also buy” algorithms to prevent people from needing to do more than one search.

Sometimes, your preferable SEO platform might be Amazon. In these cases, you should be paying attention to keywords and item descriptions that can transform into quality and user-friendly content that will engage your customers. Ignoring Amazon as Google’s competitor is bound to leave you in the dust when it comes to product sales.

Social Media Optimization

When you turn on your phone, what’s the first thing you navigate to? It’s most likely not Google. Rather, chances are that it’s Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or the like. In fact, Youtube has become the world’s second-biggest search engine. Sure, Youtube is primarily a way to share videos, but it has become a trove of useful materials with a massive amount of information in it.

In this day and age, the benefits of using Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks like Reddit in order to support your SEO strategy are uncountable. If you’re not doing this, it’s tantamount to intentionally gimping yourself compared to your competition.

Closing Words

So, we’ve come to the end! Hopefully all this information you can develop a brand new and improved SEO plan for 2020.

There isn’t much to say in the end other than simply to move ahead and make sure to make your content useful and relevant to your customers. SEO will always follow quality content!

For further reading on getting the most out of your digital marketing activity, check out our how to create converting landing pages article.