The Latest Seo Trends That Will Dominate In 2020
In the coming year, our favorite search engine will strive even more to be the end stop on the way of searching for information. Plus, she will want to get even more data about ourselves from us. Learn about zero-click searches and other SEO trends for 2020 to make your company the best SEO company.
Summarizing the trends in the SEO industry for 2020, we will start with what is already functioning, and in the new year, it will only get stronger. The basis of good positioning is still high-quality content with appropriate saturation with well-chosen keywords.
Nothing changes here, as well as the need to adapt websites to the requirements of mobile users. To rank better on Google, therefore, we must invest in technical SEO, such as speeding up websites. UX – user experience issues are also important, they lived to create a friendly and intuitive website architecture. I recently published a comprehensive guide containing 32 technical aspects of SEO that you should implement on your website. What else? Let’s see.
Zero click searches
Information provided directly on the Google search results page without clicking on any link? Meet your new present, which is the SERP SEO. Everything seems to indicate that Google is striving to achieve a situation in which the greatest number of responses to the greatest number of queries will be available immediately after clicking “Search”. And that’s all.
No need to look any further. This is a big problem for us for several reasons. First, it will reduce your website traffic directly from the search engine. Secondly, it will be even harder to break through with your subpages to the first page in SERPs. Now the fight will be fought not only for TOP3 or TOP5 in Google but for the so-called zero-click searches displayed next to and above organic results in the form of classic links. I wrote more on this topic in February 2019. the SERP SEO affects SEO.
Rich snippets
Another trend in SEO is the so-called rich snippets, i.e. results with extended elements. To be able to prepare such a result, it is necessary to use structured data in the code of the subpage, which additionally makes it easier for the search engine to classify the information available on our website. Rich snippets also appear to users who use voice search.
In Google support, you will find a full list of sample results with extended elements, which is worth learning. They are the future of positioning. Behind this is the same idea as the above-mentioned zero-click searches.
The point of Google is that as much information as possible is visible on the results page itself. That is why, for example, the search engine presents news to us in the form of a carousel “Top articles”, where you can see the enlarged headline and a miniature picture. Another example is searching for books on Google. Many of them can be purchased directly from the search results. In Google itself, we can also compare prices.
Local SEO Trends for 2020
Local SEO is also undergoing major changes that will continue in 2020. First, the way Google presents local services is changing, so website administrators should adapt their sites to the new reality. In practice, this means greater investments in paid links and dedicated advertising services for various industries (eg Google Hotel Ads).
Mainly in the case of hotels, Google wants to encourage the user to make a reservation on a website belonging to them. Hence, the Google Hotels panel pops up first on the list of organic results (under AdWords ads ). They show prices for the same room from different booking sites.
So if your hotel website is not linked to any such portal, it can be hard to get to the top and get the attention of your visitors. In 2020, positioning regionalization will also be important in terms of linking. It should be ensured that links are obtained primarily from local sources (websites and local directories).
BERT algorithm and the so-called stop words
When listing SEO trends for 2020, we cannot forget about Bert. This is a new update from Google, which is being implemented in English-language search results. We can expect that Bert will also reach us within a few months. This is an SEO trend for 2020 that cannot be ignored as it is quite revolutionary and is expected to affect approximately 10% of all search results. What is it about?
Briefly, it includes so-called stop words. So far, when analyzing our queries, Google has omitted short parts of speech, such as pronouns, prepositions, or conjunctions. Additionally, in the case of the Polish language, declension endings should be added (conjugation endings, among others, for nouns, adjectives, and numerals).
In practice, this often resulted in giving inadequate answers to the question. As we know from the Polish language, these small parts of speech are of great importance and sometimes they can completely change the meaning of a sentence.
The aim of introducing Bert’s update is, of course, to better match the content of websites to user queries. It is, moreover, the support of the artificial intelligence of Google, i.e. RankBrain. This is another nod to high-quality content written in natural language (i.e. intended to be read by humans, not robots). In 2020, preparing such texts and adding them to the website will be even more important than before.
Contextual Search
Contextual search is a mechanism that has been operating for several years within the RankBrain algorithm and is closely related to the content on websites. However, it is still unclear in terms of how the SEO industry is to apply to it.
What is contextual (or semantic) search? On matching pages based on the meaning and context of the query. Google groups issues related to the topic, prioritize them, and even takes into account the national and linguistic context using elements of artificial intelligence.
Consider this as opposed to lexical searches, which match pages only on a keyword string. What’s the lesson for the SEO industry? The old methods of playing with the rankings are becoming less and less effective each year.
Thanks to this, valuable content posted on websites has gained so much importance. The whole idea is also coupled with the data that Google gets about us from the search history, from our location or purchases made. SEO trends for 2020 are also ourselves. We can, therefore, expect that the search engine will want to extract even more data from us in the coming year.
Voice search and SEO trends for 2020
I have already written about the growing importance of voice search in the summary of trends for the previous year. Since then (13 months), voice search has recorded steady growth. At the same time, they are changing the way people interact with the search engine. It is estimated (Moving Traffic Media) that by the end of 2020 as much as 50% of information will be searched by voice.
In the coming year, it will have an even greater impact on SEO and the role of natural language should be emphasized again here. Good copywriting will be more useful than ever. Users do not tend to shorten their queries when searching by voice, but rather use full sentences in natural language. This, in combination with the above-mentioned algorithm, gives you a hint on what to improve on your sites in 2020.
