SEO evolves every year. So it’s important for all online marketers to stay on top of recent developments in this space.
In 2020, many believe that certain trends will surge in popularity. What trends exactly? That’s what this post is about.
Today, let’s talk about the strategies that will change the SEO landscape. We’ll talk about what they are, why experts think of them, and how you can implement them for your own campaigns.
Ready?
Then let’s not waste any more time and jump right in.
Contents
Voice search is the technology that enables users to make search queries through voice commands.
Open your Google app and tap on the mic icon. Now ask Google “What’s the closest burger shop near me?”. Did Google show you a list of burger restaurants? Then congratulations. You just made a voice search.
As more people rely on their smartphones, you can expect the number of voice search queries to rise. As SEMrush points out, two in five adults use voice search. And by 2020, experts believe that users will make half of all online searches using a microphone.
That means you have to prepare content that’s suited for voice searches.
And that’s what Epiphany did for one of its clients. In its case study, Epiphany described how they improved its client’s online visibility by making content tweaks.
“[The client] had three product FAQ areas for conservatories, doors, and windows. All Q&A pages sat on a single page at a single URL; Anglian was answering multiple questions on a single page, which isn’t a great user experience, as not all of the questions were that closely related.”
The one-size-fits-all, single page that tries to answer multiple questions isn’t the best setup for voice search SEO. The solution was to expand each question into its own page. Epiphany also increased the word count from 50 to 300.
That way, whenever a user has a question, Google can find a dedicated page with in-depth answers.
The result?
The client now gets 13 inquiries from voice search queries. A significant increase from the one inquiry per month that they used to get.
So, what should you do? Here are a few suggestions:
Featured snippets are the brief answers you see on top of search results. Their goal is to answer the question without requiring the user to click on a link.
This feature is nothing new. It’s been around for a while now. And there’s an excellent chance you’ve already seen it in action.
What makes featured snippets coveted is its placement in the search engine results pages or SERPs. Featured snippets always in position zero, the spot just above the first entry in the search results.
The featured snippet comes from one of the top ten results. As a result, the site featured in the snippet appears twice on page one of the results.
But Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed that there will be changes to the featured snippet. Specifically, the entry that’s featured will no longer show up in the top ten results twice.
What does this mean for SEO?
If your site was visible on the first page of Google search as a featured snippet and within the top 10 results, then expect the latest update to bring down your traffic and CTR.
Only your featured snippet will show on the first page of SERPs and your site will appear on the second page.
This is crucial because you will lose real estate on the first page of organic search. And, historically, position # 1 generates more clicks than position zero.
This study from Ahrefs shows that the featured snippet “steals” clicks from the page ranking on the top spot. More, it gets fewer clicks than the top result!
However, it’s too early to make a definitive case that ranking on featured snippets will bring your site’s traffic down.
We are still in the first few months of its implementation, and the best we can do right now is track the progress and see if this is in indeed the case.
Nonetheless, below are ways that most websites land position zero:
In this case, you may try to go against these practices to not rank on position zero. I suggest that everybody monitor any changes that you encounter regarding clicks from position zero.
As we noted earlier, more users use their phones when searching online. That means sites that are not optimized for mobile users are not prioritized by Google in the SERPs.
So you really want to have a responsive website. Google itself confirmed that it’s leaning more toward sites with mobile users in mind in their Google Webmaster Blog post back in 2016.
According to Botify, 37% of enterprise websites have yet to switch to mobile-first indexing (MFI). To clarify, MFI will not stop Google from indexing sites even if they’re not mobile-friendly. But Google will index mobile-friendly sites first.
If your site still displays web browser versions on phones and tablets in 2020, it’s time to make the switch.
In this Vorbly case study, a cafe struggled to attract new business. But the owners quickly realized that they weren’t getting the kind of foot traffic they thought they would.
So Vorbly implemented a plan that included revamping the coffee shop’s website to make it responsive. The new site now provides directions, menu, pricing information, contacts, and reviews.
Thanks to these changes and optimizing the site for local SEO, the shop saw a significant increase in sales.
Here’s how you make your site responsive.
No-click searches (also known as zero-click searches) is a trend where the SERPs give out the answer without the need for the user to click on a link.
Featured snippets, which we discussed earlier, is one example. But it also comes in different forms including knowledge panels, calculators, and dictionary definitions.
One study found that 50.33% of Google searches are no-click searches. And this number could rise as Google makes it easier for its users to find answers.
This could become a concern for most webmasters as it means fewer clicks which translates to poor site performance. But according to Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro and the person who spearheaded the research, this trend does not mean there’s no opportunity left.
“Rich information appearing in Google’s results may be, like billboard ads or press mentions, harder to track than website traffic, but it’s still exposing your brand name to an audience, building familiarity, and sharing information. In my opinion, the brands that find ways to benefit from that type of SERP exposure, even without a click, will be the ones who win at this new form of on-SERP SEO.” – Source
So what should you do?
Start (or continue) optimizing for zero-click searches. Improve your pages to qualify for featured snippets and voice search.
You can also:
Google Discover is an update to Google Feed. This feature is available on mobile devices via the Google app.
It’s a feed—similar to popular social media platforms—that shows you information even if you haven’t searched for anything just yet. It shows you information that Google thinks is relevant to you.
It shows a combination of articles, images, and videos. Regardless of whether the information is new or not, Google will show them if it thinks that you haven’t seen them yet.
What appears on Discover will depend on how a user interacts with Google. So if the user is mainly interested in sports, then the feed will likely show sports news.
It’s a great way to introduce your site to people. If the user expresses an interest in your niche, your posts could show up as the user scrolls through Discover.
So how do you improve your chances of appearing in the feed?
There’s been a lot of talk about AI and the role it will play in the near future. But as early as now, you will find a number of sites implementing AI technology to help with their marketing.
According to Emerj, businesses predict that AI will likely impact the eCommerce industry the most in the next couple of years.
But how will this affect SEO?
In 2020, you’ll need to optimize your content with AI in mind. For starters, AI can collect data from your audience, making it easier to deliver content that’s specific to their taste and needs.
AI is also used in email marketing to send personalized messages.
SEO companies are also implementing AI to improve their tools and services. Instead of having to manually check online mentions, BuzzSumo and HubSpot are now able to send you a notification whenever it detects users who mention you in their posts.
And soon, AI will create better analytics and reporting. This is due to AI having the ability to parse through information more efficiently.
We’ve talked about voice search and the need for search terms that sound natural. This is part of natural language processing or NLP.
As search engines get better at processing syntax, they’re able to tell what a sentence is really trying to say.
What does this mean for you as an SEO?
It means search engines can distinguish well-written sentences from those that are not. So you should do what you can to improve your grammar as well as your topics.
NLP can even tell the emotion behind a post. If your article is overwhelmingly negative, search engines will take note of it. Soon, it will monitor social media activity to determine how users feel about certain products and services. That way, you’ll know how to respond to user concerns more efficiently and share a message that your customers can stand behind.
Based on what you write, search engines can also categorize your posts as they can now tell what you’re writing about based on contextual clues.
So what can you do to make your posts compliant with NLP?
What are “entities” exactly? These are things or concepts that are unique, defined, and distinguishable.
Your name? That’s an entity. Your address? Yup. The school you went to? That counts too.
Today, search engines look at these entities and connect them to see what ties them together. Google is now smart enough to assess the relationship between words and phrases.
Does that mean that link building is dead? No. Links serve a different purpose. They are a vote of confidence. If sites link back to you, then that means you are a credible source of information.
But with the addition of entities, Google can have a good idea of what your page is about. If you have a post about apples, search engines will use entities to determine if you’re referring to the brand or the fruit.
Entities are also used to deliver content for Knowledge Graphs and featured snippets.
Here’s how you can get ahead of the curve.
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. And while that sounds complicated, all it really refers to is a change in its algorithm to focus on conversational queries.
And if this sounds familiar, it’s because we already discussed one of the byproducts of this update, featured snippets.
BERT looks at content quality. So if you’re publishing outstanding posts with useful information, you’re all set.
You can also reevaluate the user intent behind your posts to make sure you’re targeting the right people. If unsure, you can check your competitors to see what kind of posts they’re publishing.
While the impact of the BERT update is substantial, Google claims that there’s nothing you can do to prepare for it. Quoting Danny Sullivan again, he says:
“There’s nothing to optimize for with BERT, nor anything for anyone to be rethinking. The fundamentals of us seeking to reward great content remain unchanged.” – Source
However:
The BERT update means you can reduce the keyword density of your posts. Since Google is now looking at the context behind your posts, keyword stuffing is falling by the wayside.
EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is a new metric system that Google uses to check a site’s content quality. It’s also used to determine how credible a website, blog post, news stories, products, or a company really is.
It was first rolled out for sites in the healthcare/medical niche. EAT aimed to safeguard Google users from sites that have a direct impact on their money and life. Google calls sites that fall under this category as YMYL (Your Money, Your Life). They cover information that affects a user’s happiness, health, and finance.
If left uncontrolled and unmonitored, YMYL sites can ruin lives should they contain information that could hurt users.
By rolling out EAT, Google can check if a site contains facts or if it contains lies or claims that science cannot back up.
According to Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, there are three things it considers when scanning a page for EAT. These are:
Gloyns published case studies to show just how EAT benefited some sites. In one instance, a site in the health niche saw its traffic skyrocket after the update.
Why did it perform so well? There are several factors that contributed to the traffic spike:
The medical site jumped to the number one position for 10 of the main keywords it wanted to target.
Another site—this time in the education niche—saw the same pattern.
This is evidence that sites that focus on delivering strong content will get pushed in 2020. So you better update your pages to be more focused on a specific niche to get better rankings.
All these 2020 digital marketing trends share a similar trait. And that is this:
If you’re going to write content, write with the user in mind and not the search engine.
Google is now focused on delivering results based on context and less so on keywords. So you’ll need to pivot your strategy to comply with what Google looks for in web pages now.
So you should publish stronger content, optimize your pages for mobile users, and use conversational keywords to rank in 2020. If you don’t, you might find your competitors overtaking you in the results pages.
And you certainly don’t want that.
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