What are the major changes and trends going to be for the world of SEO in 2020? Well, to be honest…there’s a lot.
There’s no hiding from the fact that Google’s algorithm continuously progresses and shifts the goalposts for how best to rank at the top of search results.
The days of finding and shovelling in keywords, to producing endless content and splurging the internet with low quality blogs and articles, slow web pages and sites not fully focused on mobile are over.
Why?
Basically, Google’s algorithm continues to get smarter.
The need to fully understand all 3 moving strands of the algorithm (content, authority and technical SEO) has never been more prevalent.
Below I’ll walk you through the major highlights for what you need to look out for to help your own site prepare for the major trends of 2020 ensuring you stay ahead of the game.
Sound good?
Here’s what I’ll cover:
- BERT & User-Focused Optimisation
- High Quality Optimised Content
- Fight dropping CTRs
- Continuous rise of video search
- E-A-T
- UX & Technical SEO
- Automation
- Voice Search Optimisation
- Mobile SEO
- Structured Data
- Knowledge Graph Optimisation
- Link Building & Brand Building
- Visual Search – Visibility not just Blue Links
1. BERT & User-Focused Optimisation
It’s Google’s latest algorithm update which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations and Transformers …nope not the Sesame Street character!
To put that in english, it basically means Google is starting to understand the context of searches and the intent behind them.
This is all from the continuous work improving natural language processing.
It’s believed that when this is fully rolled out it will affect around 10% of search results, focusing mainly on long-tail search queries.
By better understanding the main nuances in user queries as well as the context, search results should become more and more relevant.
That’s a great thing! But how will it affect you and what can you do to prepare for this?
I’ll be blunt, if your content is low quality and fails to answer key user queries you need to focus on that…now!
There’s really nothing as an SEO you can do to prepare for this algorithm outside of what we already know.
You need to make sure your content is of high quality, answers key user queries from great keyword research and you’re updating this regularly if needed.
Outside of this, you need to shift your focus more on understanding user intent.
Understanding not simply the keywords your users search when visiting your website but also the motivation is incredibly important.
For example, if a page on your website ranks for ‘best hotels in london’ and the new BERT algorithm change indicates this is an informational search, relevant blogs with key information and options will start to rank in higher positions.
Fantastic if you’ve written a high quality blog or article for these types of user queries!
However, if your page is a hotel product page, you should expect the ranking to be affected.
This is because the user intent is to learn more information about their options rather than wanting a quick link to the best purchase option.
Google wants to answer the questions correctly, quickly and as accurately as possible.
It may also cause a subtle shift in the featured snippet fights.
With Google helping computers to increasingly understand language like humans do, the fight for featured snippets will shift based on perceived user intent behind searches.
Google will always want to offer the best and most relevant information.
Now, as intent is being refined, this could shift some of your featured snippets to competitors or other sources.
If this is the case, it’s time to get back to your keyboard and create content that focuses on balancing keywords with user intent.
This is a great opportunity when optimising for this latest algorithm update and altering your existing content marketing strategy to stay ahead of the game.
2. High Quality Optimised Content
The holy grail of SEO that is content will continue to be the major influence to search engine rankings.
Why?
Basically, as every SEO has mentioned before, without great content that helps the user, with relevant and valuable information, you simply won’t rank.
Content is the real substance behind your site.
Without great content, link building in particular becomes a crazy uphill struggle.
The reason for this – why would anyone link back to any low-quality content which isn’t valuable or relevant?!
Focus on making your content strategy user-centric.
By this I mean continue to do thorough keyword and topic research but make sure you take the time to read into user intent and match your content structure accordingly.
There are so many sites out there producing great content but miss the point of what the user intent is for any target keywords and topics.
Any failure to focus on relevancy, valuable and user-focused content will negatively impact your rankability in 2020 and beyond.
Focus on producing the best quality content on the web for your topics.
Don’t simply look at churning out a quota of blogs and articles. Instead, focus your attention on making each blog the highest quality and best it can be.
This comes with robust keyword and topic research, competitor analysis and best practice on-page SEO.
More and more topic research as a concept is becoming more important.
Why?
Basically, as search engines start to understand context, you can’t simply target a list of keywords and focus rankings only on those.
Instead, by writing in-depth high quality content about an entire topic you not only further open up your creative freedom but also support natural rankings for a greater number of search results.
It’s a huge win-win for writers.
Don’t forget to do the basics and keep producing the best quality content across your major topics.
3. Fight Dropping CTRs
It shouldn’t be any surprise that CTR’s are down across the board.
Some studies even suggest CTR’s have dropped an incredible 41.4% since 2015 on mobile search.
Why is this?
Basically, the rise of zero-click searches has surged in 2019.
By this I mean more often search engines have been able to pull the likes of featured snippets and knowledge graphs more and more into search results.
This massively limits the need for users to click on search result links.
So, what can you do?
There’s basically 2 options.
First, you can focus your time on a number of quick-wins by optimising your URL, title tags, meta descriptions and H1 tags.
To do this properly ALWAYS focus on including your keyword in the page URL, title tag, H1 tag and meta description without fail.
Keyword-rich URLs in some studies have led to 45% higher CTR’s on average.
It’s also been found that using emotional title tags or including power words (e.g. ‘best’ and ‘top’) lead to higher CTR’s – the latter 14% higher.
Second, you can focus another part of your SEO strategy on targeting featured snippet opportunities.
As some SEO’s say, position 0 is the new position 1.
By this they mean, stealing featured snippet opportunities with great content, well structured and correctly applied structured data or schema can increase your chances of delivering featured snippets in search results.
Structured data covers a huge range of opportunities to use a technical SEO trick to better signpost your page content for search engine crawlers (I’ll explain more on this below).
Examples of this include, blog postings, articles, webpages, breadcrumbs, recipes etc. There’s even structured data in the beta phase for speakable schema.
4. Continuous Rise of Video Search
Video traffic keeps on stealing more of organic search clicks!
Cisco even claims video will make up nearly 80% of online traffic by 2021.
Video featured snippets are starting to dominate more and more screen real estate across search results as Google tries to give the most relevant sources of information faster.
So what can you do to jump on the bandwagon?
Well, if you haven’t already it’s time to restructure your video content.
For starters, YouTube allows you to divide your video content up into clear sections.
This helps video snippets more easily take the user to the right section of your video most relevant to their query (e.g. if I want to know how to edit an image, I can skip the irrelevant ‘how to download the software’ section!).
Next, focus on the basics.
Use your video title, description and tags to more effectively target relevant topics and keywords.
This, just like written content helps the search engines to more easily understand what your video is about.
Some research even shows that 80% of video featured snippets were videos with primary keywords included in their titles.
Third, provide a transcript.
It might take more time to do, but submitting a transcript allows you to fully control the captions and more clearly signal where your video is relevant and valuable to users.
It simply helps search engines and YouTube understand what your videos are about much quicker.
Lastly, if you haven’t focused more time on it already, start focusing more effort on YouTube.
Even after all these digital years, YouTube is still rapidly growing as a channel.
Start shifting your written content to video or simply add video content production as another output from your keyword research (e.g. a blog AND a video).
Source: Tubular Insights
Keywords are not just for written content.
Find key topics and keywords within your niche and start creating videos!
55% of Google searches contain videos. By producing a greater mixture of videos and written content you can start to build traffic through a mixture of new sources.
5. E-A-T
Your overall reputation will continue to be more important in 2020.
The E-A-T (expertise, authority and trustworthiness) of both companies and individual experts is another trend focused on the credibility and value of a given source.
This means SEO should no longer simply be an element of your marketing strategy, but it ties together every part of your company.
Source: Ian Booth, 2019, Moz
For example, Google is now looking at your entire company’s reputation as a ranking factor.
If you have poor customer service, your trustworthiness and rankability in organic search is going to be impacted.
It’s now essential your business and individuals are experts in relevant niches.
This trend is partly there to combat the rise of fake news.
Google has dabbled with author authority in the past.
Authorship markup was tested in 2011 when author bios started appearing in search results.
Google’s main aim at the time, however, was to link content from multiple sources to individual expert authors with their Google Plus profiles (can you see what was in it at the time for Google!).
The idea was to drive users to Google Plus. That did not work at all!
They then removed this markup in 2014 when they finally accepted defeat from their Google Plus strategy.
However, the concept of author authority didn’t die. Instead, they are looking to align authors to E-A-T.
This in theory should lead to higher quality content for users. It focuses individuals to focus on delivering value in their niche, and gives clear incentives for users to build up credibility over time.
Google doesn’t want me giving medical advice, but it does want medical professionals to.
Individual authorship will likely be a ranking factor in the not too distant future as a result.
If you haven’t already, it’s now the time to focus your content strategy solely on your defined niche and take ownership of that space.
6. UX & Technical SEO
Perhaps the biggest trend this year in SEO is going to be the influence of UX (User Experience).
The game has shifted to not only give users the information, but to give them a great user experience.
I know, since when did your web pages need to turn into Alton Towers!?
This involves the experience of the following elements:
- Your SERP results
- Your websites landing pages
- Pages users visit after clicking on your website
That’s a hell of a lot pages to think about!
The way to think about it is first to map your key user journeys. Use a data-led approach such as Google Analytics – combine this with Hotjar user tracking and heat-map data if you have it installed on your site.
Then look at optimising and improving the main user journeys you identify on your website. It’s the same technique you would apply when setting up an effective email marketing DRIP campaign.
For example, look at the steps your users take to make sure they consume the right content, and also a receive a great experience on their whole user journey.
Source: Darren DeMatas, 2019, Eccomerce SEO
Then there’s where technical SEO comes in.
This takes the form of the likes of correct usage of hreflang tags and canonical tags (signposting the main URL and the correct language varieties if applicable). But most importantly, it’s now all about site speed and page speed.
There’s no hiding from the fact that the shift to mobile has happened.
In fact one study found a whopping 47% of users expect a web page to load in less than 2 seconds.
SEOs have had to look into the technical doldrums to find ways of reducing site and page speeds to meet UX requirements and the inevitable growing impatience of users around the world.
This includes lazy loading, server response time, asynchronous javascript loading, compressing images, consolidating CSS stylesheets and even AMP (accelerated mobile pages) pages amongst all other options.
Source: Sasneh R, 2018, Techwyse
The bottom line is without fast page and site speeds, your UX is going to be massively impacted. Without rectifying this quickly, your rankings are going to continue to be negatively impacted in 2020.
It’s time to pull out the technical SEO services now.
7. Automation
For many, ‘Automation’ is just another buzzword used to kill jobs and inevitably lead to a Terminator 2 style future.
But, in reality it’s a lot less frightening and a lot simpler.
For instance, there are already highly capable CMS’s (content management systems’) out there which can be toggled to automate a lot of the SEO basics.
By this I mean the likes of image compression (reducing images to smallest possible file size to support page loading times) and site templates configured to automate key structured data (e.g. Article or FAQ schema).
And, if you’re a WordPress user, there’s an ever expanding base of plugins to spot optimisation opportunities for best practice on-page SEO, like Yoast (without you having to be an expert and need to read hundreds of blogs and articles!)
Those are basic solutions to save time and maintain a consistent standard across your entire site.
If you haven’t applied these already, it’s time to look into it and get your site up to speed (pun intended!).
But, that’s not all.
Nowadays, SEO’s need to be smart with how they conduct effective data analysis.
The age of drawing Google Analytics and Search Console data into an Excel file or Google sheet should be gone.
Source: 2019, AIIOTalk Future of Tech
In 2020 SEOs need to start looking at machine learning opportunities to identify the main SEO issues on your website faster. This is particularly essential for those with huge websites.
Python is a fantastic example of this in practice.
Python is essentially designed to use scripts to analyse SEO and broken links on your site to free your time up to higher value pieces of work.
Put simply, it’s a problem-solver. It uses machine learning data extraction to conduct a robust SEO technical analysis of your website.
It’s scripts can be used to crawl and identify the following:
- Word Count
- Page Title
- Meta Description
- Keyword-on-page
- Warnings
- Missings Title Tags
- Missing Description
- Missing Alt Text
This isn’t the only SEO automation solution however.
More commonly, crawling software like Screaming Frog can be used to identify all of the above and more (including structured data) if configured correctly.
The difference is generic crawling software like Screaming Frog still requires you to conduct a lot of manual analysis.
In today’s climate you need to save your time and spot and resolve issues as fast as possible to focus more on the bigger picture objectives to drive value to your website.
8. Voice Search Optimisation
Voice search again is a buzzword which we’ve been hearing since Siri told his/her first joke.
So, is it really going to come to life in 2020?
Well, put simply, yes.
The growth of voice search is growing rapidly. Some studies show a staggering 41% of adults now perform at least 1 voice search everyday.
Another study has shown that voice search results have increased 35x since 2008. Even 20% of searches on mobile are now voice searches.
So, what does that mean for you and how can you take advantage of voice search?
Well, for one your content needs to first rank highly in search results.
The best places to have a realistic chance at succeeding in voice searches is to be in the top 3 positions of a given search result.
This is because these top sources are the ones most likely used in voice-related search answers.
These positions take roughly 75% of voice search answers. So you’ve got to be up there to compete as a basic requirement.
Next, you want to start understanding the main intent behind voice searches and their results.
More often than not voice searches are specific questions the user is asking to get quick, relevant and useful information.
You can use this to your advantage by applying a question and answer format in your articles.
For instance, you could break down your subheadings (H2’s) into specific questions users are likely to ask on the topic, and then use the copy underneath to answer clearly and simply.
This helps the search engine more easily evaluate the relevance of your content on the user voice search.
It’s exactly what Google’s voice search algorithm wants to see!
This is another great reason for why FAQ pages and content is highly valuable to voice search results.
Understanding questions users ask and structuring your content to answer these questions clearly is a great formula to get better voice search answer visibility.
Another nifty trick is applying FAQ structured data to your page where relevant. This will help more obviously signal key Q&A’s your page can answer to the search engine.
A last tip is to focus on getting your content into featured snippets.
Why featured snippets?
Basically, it’s because Google’s algorithm already creates featured snippets where useful and most relevant to user searches. So, why wouldn’t they leverage that for quick voice search answers?
In fact, nearly 4 out of 10 voice search results come directly from featured snippets.
Even the search engine is lazy!
9. Mobile SEO
I can’t emphasise this message enough – always build your site for mobile-first, and then make them compatible for desktop!
Yes, I know this probably isn’t the first time you’ve read about the importance of websites being mobile-first since it came in officially in July 2019.
But, so many sites being built or updated still miss off this incredibly basic rule.
Since the start of 2017 mobile search has consistently accounted for over 50% of all search results.
So what do you need to do other than simply optimise your site for mobile?
Basically, all of the above and other things that go hand-in-hand with mobile SEO.
First, is the importance of site speed.
Site speed has never been more important, and it’s only going to continue to become more relevant to SEOs.
Why is this?
Basically, we live in a world of instantaneous information with even 47% of consumers expecting a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less.
Not only this but studies have shown that even a 1 second delay can lead to a 7% drop in the number of conversions on your site.
So, when you’re building your site or working on updating it, focus on ensuring it’s quick. You can do this by analysing the following steps:
- Implement your own content delivery network (CDN) – e.g. use a network of localised servers to deliver your site quickly to everyone
- Use Adaptive Images
- Use Cache effectively
- Check Plugin Impact
- Enable HTTP keep-alive response headers
- Compress your content
- Configure expires headers – extend your website files expiration date past 24 hours
- Minify Javascript and CSS
- Check your hosting regularly
Secondly, there’s ensuring you regularly monitor mobile SERPs.
Mobile SERPs are incredibly important for effective SEO analysis these days.
As Google has changed this to become the main battleground, you need to make sure you’re monitoring the following:
- How you’re displayed in mobile search results
- What traffic volumes you’re generating
- Site Conversions through Mobile Search
- Featured Snippet opportunities
Regular analysis and optimisation for mobile search should always be correlated to movements in your bottom-line.
This is particularly essential if you are running an ecommerce site.
10. Structured Data
Again, Structured Data is nothing new I hear you say!
Well, that’s true, but new techniques and the value of getting it right for your website has never been more essential to remain competitive.
What’s the reason for this?
Well, basically as much as Google’s algorithm is impressive at identifying and surfacing quality content, often context can be misunderstood.
I know what you’ll say – what about the BERT update?
That’s a great question, but BERT is only the start of Google’s attempt to better understanding the context of content, it’s not the perfect end product solution.
Structured Data allows you to help the search engines out.
Applying the correct structured data (or ‘Schema’) more clearly signals the context of your content.
When all is said and done you ultimately want to be found by your customers.
That’s where structured data helps you stick your hand up and better answer those context questions the search engine is otherwise attempting to interpret.
For example, if you’ve produced a blog you can add ‘Blog Posting’ structured data to your page to bring out the headline, author, main image for snippets and the substance of the page.
Without structured data your pages are at risk of being misinterpreted by the search engine.
And who does that help?
No one! It just leads to a lack of optimisation and easy opportunities missed.
Equally, if Google doesn’t understand how each element on the page relates to other elements or how pages relate to other pages on your site, you’re not taking advantage of how your pages will be represented in search results.
But don’t just stop there.
Make sure you’re also keeping up to date with the latest changes and additions to structured data.
For instance, crucially to the future of voice search optimisation, speakable structured data is now in it’s beta phase.
It’s examples like this that if you don’t stay up to date and apply the latest updates (when relevant) you’ll miss a series of incredibly helpful and simple optimisations to gain more traction for your website in organic search.
11. Knowledge Graph Optimisation
It’s time to cut the Bullsh*t and start focusing your content on the subjects and niche you are an expert in.
As the E-A-T algorithm explains, the winners in SEO in the future will be those companies, entities and individuals that are proven experts in their field.
This fuels the relevance and importance of knowledge graphs in the future.
For those of you who are unaware, knowledge graphs are essentially a virtual layer knowledge base used by Google.
It’s used to enhance search results by pulling together knowledge from a variety of sources to help resolve user queries.
Why is this important?
Well, if you’re going to compete well in search rankings in the future you need to be a proven expert in your specific niche.
You can’t simply churn out content and information about a great number of subject areas.
Instead you need to focus on what you are good at.
Sounds obvious right? Well it is.
The more reputable you are in your area of expertise, the more Google will naturally consider you more authoritative and trustworthy over time. And this is where the real sustainable competitive advantage in search comes.
From another perspective it will also enable you to be featured in more Google infoboxes next to search results.
This will naturally help develop your brand awareness as a robust source of information and bolster site traffic over the longer-term.
A good tip is if you’re compiling industry reports for your niche as an informative expert, it’s worth going the extra mile.
Try then compiling this information into expert advice. If done repetitively this will help you more quickly become an authoritative expert in your field, leading to more visibility in knowledge graphs.
It’s a no brainer really – start focusing on your niche and building your online reputation sooner rather than later!
12. Link Building & Brand Building
It’s time to get smarter with your link building.
This is often the most neglected piece of the SEO puzzle – building authority.
But, it’s essential to gather ‘votes of confidence’ for the content on your site from other sources.
This helps build your page authority, and more importantly, your domain authority.
In simple terms, the higher your domain authority, the easier it will be for you to rank your content in search results higher and faster.
It’s usually a smart strategy to focus on long-tail keyword targeting (low volume, high intent searches) when you’re first making a name for yourself, so you’re not wasting your time creating content for overly competitive keywords you simply won’t rank for.
Once you’ve built up enough traffic and link acquisition from an initial long-tail targeting strategy, you can start to compete more and more with the big boys.
Hence, the higher your domain authority the stronger your competitive advantage in the world of search rankings becomes.
You need to start networking!
Focus on sites relevant to your niche.
Offer guest blogs, suggest how your content adds value to some of theirs, partner together to produce some high quality content, and look at editorials – both planned and reactive.
Even if some of the links you start to generate contain the ‘nofollow’ attribute, at least you will start to drive really relevant (and potentially revenue driving) referral traffic to your website.
In fact, since the introduction of UGC (user generated content) and sponsorship link attributes from Google, there is suspicion Google may even use some links with nofollow attributes as a ranking factor in the future.
As much as Google wants to fight black-hat link buying, they’re pragmatic.
If you’re honest and attribute the more specific and correct link attributes Google will, in theory, reward you with positive results such as domain authority boosting.
The nofollow link relevance is of course speculation, as ever with Google.
But, it’s worth keeping on top of your game with link building and start developing a strong and robust digital network.
13. Visual Search – Visibility not just Blue Links
The evil rise of zero-click searches really took form in 2019.
In fact, a staggering 50.3% of searches in 2019 were zero-click.
So, what does this mean and what should you do?
It means CTRs are likely to continue to fall on average and you need to take the battle to featured snippets where possible.
Zero-click searches just means Google is giving the user the information they’re after in the search results.
For instance, if you type in ‘what is the time in Reykjavik?’ you’ll get a result like the below. So, why would you need to click on any link?
Using appropriate structured data across your pages to drive featured snippet opportunities is now a must.
You should no longer dwell too much time on the impressions your Google Search Console account will be showing you, but on clicks.
As you update your pages, optimise your on-page SEO, build links and apply relevant structured data monitor the impact on your SERP clicks over time.
Make sure to also keep an analytical brain on the number of featured snippets you’re appearing in and the clicks it’s generating.
As I mentioned earlier, position 0 really is the new position 1.
The impact of ranking first in search results is no longer going to generate the same level of traffic and revenue as previously.
You have to be smart and focus on the main areas where you realistically can compete.
For instance, if you’re ranking in first position under a featured snippet, applying and modifying relevant structured data and boosting traffic to your page would be more effective than trying the same technique when you’re left under a massive ‘People also ask’ result.
Screen real estate is the aim of the game.
Neglecting the growing relevance of being more visual in search results is really going to hit your bottom line if you don’t adapt in 2020.
If you haven’t already, consider applying strategies that help you take advantage of these key trends in SEO in 2020. Acting quickly could be the difference between success and failure in the SEO game.
If you have any questions or thoughts please let me know below.
