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As new businesses are bound to pop up in the new year, the competition for your customer’s attention heightens.
Staying on top of the most recent SEO trends will help you make the right choices for your website in 2020. Understanding the current SEO landscape also helps you implement SEO strategies and tactics that will work and help you stay out in front in the SERPs and earn more revenue in 2020.
Enough beating around the bush, let’s get into the top 5 SEO trends you need to implement when 2020 rolls around.
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, more commonly known by BERT is here to stay in 2020.
You may want to apply BERT if you are wanting to increase your chances of ranking on the first page for featured snippets in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
If you create any sort of content, make sure you write to user intent rather than just integrating strings of keywords you think the user may be searching for in relation to your topic.
You need to dive more into what the journey of your customer looks like, too. And, if you are wondering what this all means for you as a content creator, it boils down to focusing your content on how your users are discussing the roadblocks and needs they face. Think about each aspect of the buyer’s journey and how you can support them every step of the way.
One thing to set the record straight on is you cannot optimize for BERT. Simply put, Google uses BERT to improve its understanding of natural language. But do know that you can optimize for the intent behind search queries. Intent matching is crucial when it comes to your content, and the content you’re curating, as well.
In 2020, you will want to keep up with your E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) when it comes to your content and overall company’s brand.
Think about it this way-- if your company does not have a superb reputation within your industry, that will only manifest itself as reviews and feedback about your brand.
If you are not focusing on these three key features of content, Google will not deem you worthy of ranking well in the SERPs. So, before sitting down to write copy, you will want to first break down the top ten results on the first page of SERP for that high-level, specific keyword. You will also want to ask yourself whether your content is relevant and includes the useful, factual information.
From there, ask yourself whether the content you are curating is informative. For example, if your site is offering health and wealth advice, you need to not only deliver relevant content, but ensure the content you are putting out there is correct.
Google is strict when it comes to a searcher’s well-being, since Google wants to be certain as possible they are recommending sites that display a high level of expertise, authority and trustworthiness. This is basically Google’s way of protecting searchers from pages that are low quality.
If you are wondering how you can create content that fits the EAT criteria, here are a couple tips on how you can do just that:
In using these suggestions and following the E-A-T framework, you will be able to keep your site up in the rankings, as well as having a positive online presence in an organic way.
Read: “7 Tips for Stepping Up Your SEO Game”
While we know high-quality content will be important in 2020, we also need to be aware that search engines are still trying to get on track on with what the searcher’s intent is.
With this in mind, you will need to focus on structuring data to help search engines understand not only what is on a page, but also how various parts on that page relates to other pages within the site itself.
You will also want to look into how people are searching for you, which can be done by identifying what keywords people are using. In doing this, you will save yourself time, energy, and effort in optimizing for queries with those keywords.
So by having structured data, Google can search and rank your information faster, since it does not have to search through pages and pages of information to find relevant information or data.
Something to keep in mind is that there are many types of structured data out there based on the type of business, info, page, and industry you work in.
There are also tools you can use to help you create and check your schema, such as:
Structured Data will be even more important in 2020 when it comes to your SEO strategy.
Reason being, many companies are using structured data to dig deeper into what content is driving results, and then using this data to influence their content strategy, marketing, and much more.
So, as we enter and start a new decade, you will want to make sure you have your structured data in place, and that you are using it to better understand your audience and get a leg up on your competitors.
Having a site that’s accessible to all people is an important SEO trend to be on the lookout for in 2020.
Google does its best to serve all users, and ADA (American’s with Disabilities Act) Compliance is a best practice when it comes to search engine visibility.
Accessibility is something you should also be keeping in mind when creating or updating your site design. As an added plus, accessibility helps search engines better understand your site’s content because, when paired with SEO, it helps brands reach consumers.
Not only does accessibility help with SEO, but it also helps with improving a brand’s reputation and customer loyalty by demonstrating social responsibility.
Some ways you can make your site more accessible:
Voice search is an accessibility principle that can boost your SEO, since it makes for easier readability for screen readers and for search engines to parse information from your site. And not only does voice search help with accessibility and SEO, it helps improve your overall user experience.
By investing and using voice search on your site, you can improve SEO rankings and strengthen your brand in the long-term.
Last but not least, one of the biggest SEO trends to be on the outlook for in 2020 is user experience.
User experience includes everything from the user’s initial interaction in the SERPS, to the landing page, to the experience after a user leaves your site.
So now, and even more in 2020, you need to invest in helping your users have the best possible site experience-- dive deeper into what kind of value you can provide to your audience.
Don’t forget about technical SEO, because it’s the best way to improve your keywords, conversion rates, and discoverability. In looking at your technical SEO, you can decrease your site load time, get rid of broken pages and links, and rectify any mixed content issues.
When it comes to technical SEO, Python can help automate repetitive tasks, help you extract and analyze large data sets, and save you time when it comes to undertaking other SEO-related tasks. If you do not know where to start, start with doing a technical SEO audit and then come up with a game plan from there.
With 2020 right around the corner, these five SEO trends will be hard to ignore-- not just now, but in the foreseeable future.
The best way you can prepare your SEO strategy for 2020 is ensuring your core SEO framework and strategies are in place and built well. You should also continually look for ways you can improve upon the current SEO foundation you have in place.
Once you make sure your SEO framework is solid, you can then look to try out new SEO strategies in a way that fits your business, and more importantly, your users, too.
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