2020 brings with it a wave of new trends for SEO specialists: new algorithms, attention to the local area and focus on user experience are today among the key points of an effective SEO strategy
Each New Year brings with it new SEO techniques and new challenges for those who have to study the best marketing strategies for the months to come. The SEO universe is incredibly dynamic and it is essential to keep up with the times constantly, to know in advance the tactics that will work and will lead to significant advantages in terms of page ranking and positioning in the SERP.
The SEO trends of 2020 are divided between evergreen rules to be respected and growing news, to be monitored carefully to better optimize your website or that of your customers.
Let’s find out together what the new SEO trends are for 2020.
Google Bert
One of the main novelties in the SEO panorama concerns the introduction of the new Google algorithm, Bert, an acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer, the latest revolution, capable of processing the natural language in an extremely advanced way, analyzing the individual words of the query of research in their context and deliver incredibly precise and accurate outputs.
In SEO terms, this means that hyper technical tricks aimed at better positioning are working less and less, in favor of truly quality and useful content for the end user. Google Bert does not require a particular SEO optimization, but an increasingly marked ability to respond accurately to the requests of end users, together with a thorough study of the needs of its target that allows you to always propose consistent and interesting topics. The focus is therefore to be placed on a communication that is as natural as possible and designed with the users’ research intent in mind.
Featured Snippet
One of Google’s goals is to provide more and more information directly in the SERP. In fact, more than half of the searches have become zero-click searches, that is, the user’s request is increasingly given a response directly in the SERP itself, without the need to click on any link.
One way to stand out is therefore to work a lot on Rich Snippets and Featured snippets. The Featured Snippets, increasingly relevant, consist of a block of information shown at the top of a SERP. Obviously they represent a valuable way to be more visible and authoritative among the results, and the percentage of clicks that takes place via featured snippet now exceeds 50% of the total searches.
The first step to take to obtain these types of results is to ensure that the data of your website is structured, so as to transmit clear and relevant information to the search engines and help them understand the requests and generate consistent outputs. The data must therefore be structured in an optimal way to highlight not only what content is present on a page, but what relationship there is between them and what link is present between the different pages of a site.
Voice searches
In a world increasingly characterized by voice assistants such as Amazon Echo, Google Assistant and Siri, voice searches have become an essential focus on which to focus. By now becoming a real trend, they allow users to obtain information in a simple and innovative way, even when they do not have the possibility to type on a keyboard.
Voice searches are not only carried out today via smartphone, but through more and more devices that accompany the user at the most different times of the day. An example are the supports for voice search for home use, often with speakers integrated and connected to the home wifi network, which greatly simplify the life of those who want to carry out a search without necessarily being in front of their PC.
Voice research integrated into automotive systems, such as that of the Apple Carplay and Android Auto systems, which aim to minimize distractions while driving and maximize safety and comfort, is definitely useful.
Local SEO
Local SEO comes into play in a predominant way when users search for products or services related to a specific territory. Anyone who has a physical store will have to take SEO Service, a fundamental point of the strategy, into high consideration when you want potential customers to find their own business.
Google MyBusiness is a service that certainly helps a lot from this point of view: taking care of the personalization of MyBusiness in a precise way allows you to be much more visible among the search results, with evident positive repercussions on your business. In addition, a feature of local SEO is the enormous utility of having as many backlinks considered locally authoritative by Google as possible.
User Experience
One trend that an SEO professional should undoubtedly focus on in 2020 is the user experience. This includes the entire user experience starting from the initial interaction in the SERP, up to navigation through the pages of a website.
All phases of this interaction must be immediate and simple for the user, for which it is of fundamental importance to find highly accessible information and to navigate fluidly from one content to another within the same site.
It is therefore good to plan the structure of your web space in a global and accurate way, to make it coherent in its trees, and to equip it with pleasant and usable graphic and textual elements: from the simple typographic aspect to the links, up to a pleasant color scheme, adapted to the target and aimed at the most positive online experience.
Link building and brand building
To obtain quality links in 2020 it is necessary to focus on creating content respecting some three types of writing, such as:
- drafting of content planned for recurring events, such as black Friday, Christmas or Valentine’s Day
- planned reactive editorial offices linked to a seasonal event, which is expected to take shape but whose history is not known until the moment it is actually held
- contents related to unplanned and unpredictable events, generated by news with a sudden cut.
Building and nurturing users’ trust around their brand is really important, given that as it increases, the chances that they share links and talk about the brand proportionally increase ensuring positive advertising.
In addition to focusing on creating content that helps ranking, those who do SEO should therefore engage in building links that push the brand upwards, enhance it and generate an authoritativeness that inspires full confidence in potential customers.