As new businesses spring up each day, the competition for the reader’s attention heightens. Staying on top of the latest SEO trends will enable you to meet specific requirements that search engines use to rank websites. Google makes hundreds of changes to its search algorithms every year. While most changes are minor, they could affect your search ranking. These are some of the SEO Strategy trends I expect to see in 2020.
Voice search: People search how they speak
“Google, can you find the nearest taco place near me?”
There were 33 million voice search queries in 2017 alone. Data from March 2019 shows that 20% of mobile queries are voice searches.
As voice search becomes increasingly popular, more people will type search queries the same way they speak
Featured snippets will continue to dominate search results
A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a search query. Google displays it at the top of the SERP result, above paid and organic ads.
They’ve been around for a few years and have led to significant changes in Google’s search engine result page. Almost half of all searches result in no clicks because users get the answers they need directly from SERPs. An Ahref study of 2 million featured snippets revealed that featured snippet gets more traffic than the first organic search result
More marketers will leverage influencers for SEO
17% of businesses spent over half of their entire marketing budget on influencers. The statistics highlight the importance of influencer marketing for companies, especially those in fashion, beauty, e-commerce, travel, and lifestyle.
Online users are overwhelmed with ads. They are looking for authentic information they can trust. Most times, the source of that information are reviews from influencers. They are more likely to trust information from an influencer than an ad.
BERT is here to stay
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) enables anyone to train their question answering system. This is the first major change Google has made to its search algorithm since RankBrain in 2014.
BERT will impact one in ten queries. SEO marketers who apply BERT models increase their chances of ranking on the first page for featured snippets in Google SERP.
BERT will have the most impact on conversational queries where prepositions like “to” and “for” matter to the meaning of the search query.
People will want digital experiences
44% of companies have moved to a digital-first approach to improve customer experience. Whereas,56% of CEOs said the improvements led to revenue growth. Successful businesses understand that building a long-term relationship with customers hinges on customer experience, and customer experience invariably affect search ranking because only users who have a good user experience will spend time on your website.
The video will be the new king of content
Google loves video. It’s a crucial part of your SEO strategy and digital marketing efforts. According to a Forrester Research, video is 50 times more likely to show up on the first page of SERP than a web page with plain text. Embed videos on your website to get more traffic. Remember to optimize your video to your blog’s width. Add copy on the page to help Google understand what your video content is about.
Content length will determine search rankings
Only high-quality content can help you beat the competition to page 1 ranking. But you will also have to consider quantity alongside quality. There’s a lot of arguments around the ideal length of a blog post. Research shows that the average length of the top 10 results is at least 2,000 words. That’s because web pages with long-form, high-quality content enjoy more visibility.
Mobile search will continue to take over
87% of internet users are on mobile phones and 40% of transactions occur on mobile. Google moved to mobile-first indexing on the 1st of July 2019 to improve the mobile search experience. If you’ve optimized for voice search, you’ve also optimized for mobile. Besides incorporating long-tail keywords for on-page SEO, modify the content structure and representation for technical SEO.