The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry is a dynamic one. It is constantly changing and effective strategies today might be completely ineffective tomorrow. Thus, it is important to stay abreast of the latest changes happening within it, especially if you are planning to hire an SEO company. Below, we will be going over some of the different trends that you should be aware of for 2020.
Top SEO Trends To Be Aware Of For 2020
Here are the top 9 SEO trends you need to be aware of in 2020:
1. User Experience
One of the main focuses that Google and other search engines are placing on websites in 2020 is a complete user-driven ranking experience. Websites that do not inherently place a focus on providing the best user experience will experience significant penalties. Thus, any website needs to focus on giving the best possible end-user experience.
The websites that manage to provide an exceptional user experience will be rewarded with increased ranking potential. Thus, you should look to optimise your website to provide a highly optimised user experience above all else.
2. Highest Quality Content
Likewise, any website that is not placing an emphasis on delivering the highest quality content will be penalised. Google and other search engines are well aware of how important the content is to its respective user base. Because of this, they are encouraging websites to post and publish the highest quality unique content possible.
High-quality content will continue to be rewarded with better rankings as it has for the past several years. SEO is quickly becoming content-driven and the higher quality content you are able to produce comparative to the rest of the marketplace, the better you will be able to rank.
3. Mobile Focus
Another area that is expected to continue to drive ranking potential is a mobile-driven focus. Google and other search engines know how many people are actively using their favourite mobile devices in order to view content. Because of this, they are continuing to place a significant emphasis on mobile optimisation. If your website is not properly optimised to scale to mobile devices, you will suffer from poor rankings.
The search engines want to provide the best possible experience for each and every user. Thus, having a fully responsive website is key. That way, your website will effectively scale to any device whether desktop, laptop, or mobile. Therefore, you want to look to integrate a responsive theme into your website. That way, you will be able to provide an optimised experience for your mobile and desktop visitors alike.
4. Link Building
Link building might have slowed down in scale, but it is here to stay. While you used to be able to ‘game’ the system by building low-quality links to your website in droves, that is no longer the case. Nowadays, you really have to build high-quality links to your website to achieve any kind of boost from your efforts. Thus, it is important to build high-quality links to your website at a high scale.
You should be looking to link building through guest posting and other high-quality efforts. The quality of your links matter much more than the number of your links in 2020.
5. Snippets
Featured snippets are going to continue to drive a lot of organic traffic through high rankings. Therefore, you will want to look to leverage snippets in a way that brings more traffic to your website. These snippets are there to make it easier for Google users to really find the answers to the questions they are looking for. Therefore, you want to answer precise and common questions that people generally have on your website. This will allow you to be able to drive more traffic to your site because they are going to rank higher than other results.
6. Influencers
Influencers have been very important for a while now. By leveraging influencers with your SEO efforts, you should be able to generate more links to your website and a lot more content that will help drive organic traffic to your site, as well.
7. Security
Having a secure website has never been more important. Not only is it important to build trust with your audience, but it is important to build a credible outlook for search engines. Search engines are placing an emphasis on driving their users to highly credible and secure websites. Therefore, you will want to look to add HTTPS protocol for your site. This will help to prevent man in the middle attacks and it will help to give your site a major boost within the search engines.
Any website that doesn’t have HTTPS protocol is going to continue to get punished within the search engine ranks in 2020.
8. Leverage Video
Videos continue to be one of the best ways to not only drive organic traffic by themselves, but also to get search engines to rank your site better. Everyone loves to watch videos. Along with this, videos are easier to rank by themselves. This is primarily because videos are not produced as much as articles. Therefore, you have a lot less competition to get videos ranked.
By producing and sharing videos across platforms, you should be able to get more people to your site and more people engaging with it.
9. Social Media
Social media continues to have an important role in SEO. Search engines will continue to use social media engagement as a means of deciding which websites should be ranking high within the search engines.
Overall, there are plenty of different things that you will want to do when it comes to maximising your SEO efforts in 2020. By following a lot of the tips above, you should be able to position your website as well as possible to achieve the highest rankings. You want to have a content-driven focus on your website. That way, you will be able to attract more people to your website and you will be able to get the boost provided by search engines. You also want to focus on other forms of content like video which continue to drive traffic in droves.
By making your site much more optimised and secure, you will be able to continue to increase your website’s ranking potential.
[See related post: 5 Search Studies That Will Reshape The Way You Think About SEO]
[Images – Main Photo by Marcelo Dias from Pexels ; Lens: photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash; other images from their respective websites and/or social platforms]
My name is Chris Scott and I am the owner and founder of Brand That Name SEO. I have over 5 years of experience in search engine optimisation and internet marketing. I am always learning new techniques and testing them on my own websites.
I have a burning passion for SEO and helping business owners grow and achieve their goals. Get in touch with me and let’s have a chat about how I can generate your website more traffic, leads and sales.