The decade is almost over, with only a few days left until the beginning of a new year. According to Joel House Search Media, 2019 has been an enlightening year for SEO experts, and 2020 holds so much hope for new trends.
Here are seven of these trends you should know in 2020.
Table of Contents
1] User-Focused Optimization and BERT
In the late months of 2019, Google launched Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), which got quite some attention in the tech industry.
Accompanying the launch of this update, Google explained that BERT improves language and context understanding of searched words. It also helps to match desirable results with those queries.
The incorporation of BERT has made searches less about string matching and more about customer intent. This means that contents now have to be written to match how users talk about their problems and needs rather than the way they order words that they may search for. By doing this, BERT focuses on users’ experience and seeks to optimize it.
2] High-Quality and Optimized content
Anyone who knows an inkling about SEO is aware that its lifeblood is high-quality and optimized content. By content, we mean everything from the type of links you use, to the linking strategy, site’s structure and paragraphs.
In 2020, the trend for SEO writers will be to create only valuable and relevant information for users. Therefore, SEO professionals will either hire people who know how to write or learn how to write.
Having the best content from the pool of search results is a feat that many sites will be looking to achieve in 2020, so you’ll need to up your game. A couple of tips to help produce high-quality and optimized content include.
- Find out who the audience is and how they search for their results. Understanding the wordings they use is vital, and will help you decide how to use your keywords.
- Understand why they have asked their questions. This will be key to solving the problem.
- Give answers or solutions in the format they prefer from your authoritative content.
3] Technical SEO and UX
One of the biggest trends that SEO professionals should focus more on in 2020 is UX, user experience. By UX, we mean everything from the interaction in SERPs to the experience of the landing page, and even how users leave your site. The focus will not be on how good your SEO tools are but how much they have helped to improve users’ experience.
To help you achieve this, you’ll need to use technical SEO, which is an important part of UX. You’ll need to work on your site and page speeds, and perhaps need SEO automation for your websites. With the envisaged popularization of Javascript frameworks in 2020, technical SEO and UX is a trend you should know in the coming year.
4] Mobile SEO
It may surprise you to see mobile SEO among the list of the trends to look out for in 2020, but it is definitely one SEO professionals should improve on. And a trip back memory lane to 2017 may just be all you need to equip yourself for mobile SEO in 2020.
In 2017, SEO professionals first built mobile-friendly sites and then made them compatible with desktop. We know that a large proportion of users access sites from their phones instead of a desktop, so this is one trend you need to work to get right. However, mobile SEO doesn’t end at creating mobile-friendly websites. You’ll also need to study mobile SERPs
5] Link and brand building
Link building seemed like a forgotten aspect of SEO, but in the coming year, it may make the difference. However, the responsibility of SEO professionals will not be to build links that’ll help search rankings, but those that’ll drive traffic and push brands to the top of the list. The same goes for brand building.
Customers have evolved and become smarter by expecting more from businesses. Therefore, it is crucial that you build a brand that people want to do business with and that they can trust.
6] Focusing on Visibility
Zero-click searches have been an excellent tool in 2019, and its importance will only be more emphasized in 2020. This is all part of the big plan to make sites as visible as possible. And to do this, you’ll need to focus less on blue links.
Focus on visibility requires your site to top the ranks because any other result below ‘People Also Ask’ will not get as much interest from users as zero-click searches. Therefore, in the coming year, results have to be optimized to produce content that users will jump at.
7] Programming
We know it sounds off, but in 2020, programming languages will be used a lot in SEO. The common ones, that is, Python and R, will help eliminate redundant and time-consuming tasks. When used properly, these programming languages can also help in.
- Creating a better user experience. This works primarily through using the data collected from users to understand their searches and whether the results match their needs or not.
- Speaking the language of customers. The future looks bright, and there are signs that text-to-speech results will become increasingly popular in the coming year.
- Branding
- Automation of SEO processes
The world is slowly moving past the use of Excel for analysis, and now employing more sophisticated skills in SEO. Therefore, programming is an SEO trend that you should know in the coming year.
In conclusion
Looking back at 2019, we can conclude that SEO tools, techniques, and strategies have helped sites become more visible in search engines. They have also been instrumental in improving users’ experience in the year by directing them to the best websites that hold the answers they need.
2020 is almost upon us, and just like how 2019 had trends that SEO professionals looked up to, so also does the coming year. We’ve included in this post, seven trends to know in 2020 that’ll make yours stand out from other websites.
