SEO TRENDS & CHANGES FOR 2020

Know About Google’s New Algorithm, BERT

BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is actually many things. It’s more popularly known as a Google search algorithm called Google BERT which aims to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results.

BERT has dramatically accelerated natural language understanding NLU more than anything and Google’s move to open source BERT has probably changed natural language processing forever.

Foundational SEO

To cover your bases with foundational SEO will continue to be incredibly important in 2020, basic things like titles, metas, headers, alt text, site speed, robots.txt, site maps, UX, CRO, Analytics, etc.

UX & Technical SEO

The biggest trend that smart SEO professionals should focus on in 2020 for greater success is UX. This includes the overall experience from the initial interaction in the SERPs, to the overall landing page experience, and even the experience after they leave your site. When we talk about technical SEO and UX, you have to talk about site speed and page speed. 

Schema markup

Schema markup will continue to be really important, FAQ schema, breadcrumbs, business info, etc.The News schema that now is occurring in voice results and we will see this space continue to grow.

What matters for your industry?

Take a clearer look at ranking factors and what appears to be a factor for your specific space, you can better prioritize your fixes and leverage industry information to help you focus. Take a strategic stance on your industry and what's important in your space.

E-A-T & Your Unfair Advantage

Google will continue to look at the overall reputation and E-A-T of a given company and the individuals who publish content on behalf of that company. Especially trustworthiness will be really important for publishers in 2020.

High-Quality and Optimized Content

It’s time to take a hard look at the quality of your content – and optimizing that content for users rather than search engines. Trust and originality are two of the topic for content by 2020. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. 

Repurpose your content

If you want to maximize the dissemination of your content and considerably reduce the effort, reusing or adapting content becomes your first priority. Providing new points of view, changing the post format, adding new information or a new approach, or changing the context are some of the ways you can reuse content.

Visual Content

The more high-quality content you can put out into the world, the more people will actually engage with, like and share that content. Visual content, in particular, is a great way to boost your SEO because 65% of people are already visual learners and visual content is 43% more persuasive than other types – which means that this is one trend you’ll definitely want to capitalize on sooner rather than later.

Optimize for featured snippets

Capturing featured snippets has been a goal of SEO professionals for years, given their tremendous potential for organic traffic and visibility. According to Moz, 24% of search results display a featured snippet, but recent developments have added new considerations to the value of earning these types of results.

Depending on the query, the intent, and the content contained within the snippet, featured snippets may produce a zero-click outcome, or the click-through-rate may be significantly higher for the regular blue links. 

Mobile SEO

By 2020 half of the world's population will connect to the Internet via mobile devices and all of their online reports should reflect information about their mobile performance as a priority. If the primary purpose of a website is to deliver valuable content and a positive experience to its users, we should think of a design adapted to mobiles.

Structured Data

We know high-quality content will be important in 2020. However, algorithms still don’t fully understand context. So we need to give search engines “hints” to better understand and deliver results, based on a searcher’s intent. You want to be understood, found by your customers through any channel and be well-positioned to take advantage of future features from Google and other structured data consumers.

Entity & Knowledge Graph Optimization

Local search is the forefront of entity-based search, so everyone should pay attention to what’s happening in this space. Google is tracking real-world visits already and recently received a patent for using ‘quality visits’ as a ranking signal.

Get relationships not links

The responsibility will rest with SEOs to create media links and locations that drive traffic and drive branding, not just links that help with search rankings. Google is beginning to realize that if content and user experience is important, relationship building is not less important.

Zero-click searches have been a big reality in 2019. On-SERP SEO will only continue to grow in importance in 2020. But it’s more than just zero-click searches we need to plan for in 2020. We need to optimize for much more than blue links.