14 Important SEO Trends You Need To Know In 2020

Search Engine Optimization is the key factor that decides which content ranks on the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Google is the leading search engine and its ranking algorithms are changing so fast.

In 2020, the SEO ranking factors are no longer like how it was in 2018. So much has changed. Google is providing the best solution for its users and focuses on their comfortability.

Here is a list of the “Top 14 SEO trends to gain the most traffic in 2020” to help you reach more audience and drive traffic.

1. Optimized high-quality content

Content is the most important factor in SEO. Content is what people come searching for. Without quality content, a website would not be beneficial for anyone.

In 2020, search engines like google focus only on providing high-quality worthy content to their users. If you want to rank on the top of the results page, it is very important to have a well-optimized website content.

A well-optimized content helps the search engines understand what your page is about and what is your subject expertise. This is why it is important to choose a particular niche and stick to it.

Producing high-quality optimized content makes you look like an authority in the subject and if your content is highly informational, Google and other search engines would rank you on the top to provide value to their users, who are actively looking for a solution.

2. Technical SEO

The term technical SEO confuses a lot of people and leaves them with a question of “What exactly is Technical SEO?” If you have the same doubt, do not worry. We’re going to break it up in simple steps to make you understand it better.

Technical SEO is to optimize your site’s performance and to control how it looks in the search engine results page. Some of the factors involved in technical SEO are:

Verify your site with Google Webmasters – Verifying your site with google search console helps you to know how your site’s performance and to know how search engines view your site in terms of indexing status, crawl errors, search queries, penalties, etc.
Improve Website Performance and Speed – The time your site takes to load plays a great role in SEO. If your site takes a long time to load than the normal time, Google sees this as a disadvantage for its users and your ranking factor is affected because of this.
Install the Yoast SEO plugin – More than 35% of all the websites are powered by WordPress. If you’re using WordPress too, install the Yoast SEO plugin to take care of most of the technical SEO and On-page SEO factors from one place. Yoast SEO helps in customizing how your website should look in the SERP.

3. Mobile Optimization and User Experience

Nearly 60% of all searches come from mobiles these days. If you have a website that performs so well in a PC but does not have great UI and UX in mobile, you’re very likely to fail in ranking and audience retention.

Make your website more-optimized for mobile searches to gain the most traffic. People who search from mobiles are more likely ready to take action. Mobile Optimization is very essential for Local SEO.

A person searching for “pizza places near me” from their mobile phone is more likely to take action immediately than a person who is searching the same from their personal computer at home.

Google prioritizes the sites that give better user experience in mobiles because most of its users are searching using mobile phones. Having a mobile-optimized website is the key to rank better and higher.

Take the Google Mobile-Friendly test to know how well your site is performing across different devices.

4. E-A-T Quality Factors

E-A-T is a Content Quality Rating Factor that Google uses to understand the originality of the content and its trust factor. In 2020, google will pay attention to the online reputation of a company that publishes content and also the reputation of the person who writes

This plays a great role in how a search engine sees your content.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness

Expertise – Google cares more about delivering the correct content more than a relevant one. The new SEO focuses on the expertise of the company and the writer in that particular niche before recommending your content to its users.

Having other related high-quality content on your website makes a huge difference because it shows that you have expertise in the field. Search engines like Google also pay attention to the author’s expertise in a subject matter by comparing all their other works.

Authoritativeness – If you’re into digital marketing and SEO for quite some time now, you won’t be new to the terms Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA). In simple words,

Domain Authority is a score of the website’s overall authority. And, Page Authority is the authority of a particular page within a website.

The higher your domain and page authority is, the more search engines will consider you as an authoritative figure and will rank you higher.

There are many factors that help to increase domain authority and page authority.

Trustworthiness – SEO in 2020 has taken a big turn and it is nothing like before. Google now pays attention to all the trust factors that customers have in you and your business.

Your offline events, customer relationships, product/ service feedback, genuineness, how you handle a problem, what your customers feel about your business, everything is taken into account.

Every detail about your business/ brand that is recorded somewhere on the internet plays an important role in deciding your trustworthiness.

Having a trustworthy, reliable business, providing valuable content and maintaining good customer relationships is essential to rank higher according to the new SEO strategy.

5. Structured Data

People in the world want instant solutions for everything. If your content is not well-structured, there’s a huge chance that you’ll be ranked lower in search engines or you might have a high bounce rate.

Structuring your content with appropriate headings, subheadings, paragraphs, bulletin points, images, videos, etc is vital.

A well-structured data lets the readers skim through the whole content and get a gist of what your content is and how it will help them.

If you have got their attention, they will read the entire article and are very likely to share it with their friends and colleagues.

6. Zero-Click Searches

Zero-Click searches are taking over the google search engine results page now more than ever. When you ask a question on google, it automatically detects the answer that you’re looking for and displays it as a snippet at the top of the page.

Marketers today have termed this as the “Position – 0” as it appears on the top of all the other ten highest-ranking pages.

Even though this looks super cool and is very easy to find the answer that we’re looking for without having to go through an entire blog, there’s a negative for websites posting the content.

Do you know that about 49% of Google Searches results in no-clicks/ zero-clicks?!

When people read your content via snippet produced by Google, it does not count as a view or a click for your website even when they are reading the content that is extracted from your website.

Focus on producing valuable content that would increase your snippet chance. People are more likely to click on that link than the others in case they want to learn more about that answer snippet.

7. Secure Website

It is no big surprise that Google pays attention to highly secure websites. Whenever we enter a website and notice that it is not a secure one, we are scared to accept cookies, click any button or enter our email address. Because any information entered in a nonsecure website is not secured and can be stolen.

Google wants its users to only access what is safe, secure and trustworthy. If you want to rank higher, get a Secure Sockets Layers (SSL) certificate ASAP.

This prevents your site from being misjudged as a fraudulent website, keeps your data safe and creates a trust factor.

8. Video Content

Video Marketing is playing a big role in businesses recently. People are more likely to watch a 5-minute video than to read the same content for 15 minutes.

Video is a great way to share visuals like images, infographics, graphs, charts, animations, etc with audio. Watching a video involves your hearing sense & vision, giving you a really clear idea about how the product or service is going to work.

It is said that “YouTube is the new TV.” 6 out of 10 people prefer watching online videos than television.

If a blog post with more images can gain more views, then surely a video will give a more added advantage to the viewer.

This is why video content is important for search engine optimization too.

If a video is more useful to viewers, google will suggest them to watch it when they search. And if you produce quality video content, the chance of your video reaching the top of search results is achievable.

9. Length of Content & Consistency

SEO strategies for 2020 focus more on the content that is being provided to its users. This includes content optimization, structuring, etc.

SEO now don’t just focus on how optimized your content is, it also focuses on the length of your content and consistency of posting.

In recent days, the number of people who take up self-learning has increased. The times when people went to the libraries to rent books to learn and read are long gone. It is the digital era that we’re living in.

Blog posts with over 2000 words tend to have more views these days and google ranks posts with lengthier content on top because they offer more information.

A perfectly optimized two-thousand words blog will have more information than a 500-words blog post.

“The more information, the better” is how it works.

How often you upload and update your content also plays an important role in SEO.

10. Keyword Research

When you’re talking about SEO, keyword research is one factor that you cannot ignore. No matter how many new trends and strategies add to SEO, Keywords will always be one of the most important factors.

To choose the right keywords for your post and to infuse them in a way that the user does not feel like the keywords are stuffed is the key.

There are a lot of free tools to research keywords and analyze which will give you the best results. Stick with one main keyword and a few secondary keywords.

Some of the tools that can be used for keyword research and analysis are:

Majestic SEO
SEMrush
Ahrefs
OpensiteExplorer
MOZ SEO toolbar
Ubersuggest

11. The popularity of your brand

Earlier in the E-A-T quality factors, we mentioned about trust, authority, expertise. Similarly, a brand’s popularity and engagement with the audience also plays a role in SEO in 2020.

A brand/ business that is popular with more people is more likely to have a positive impact and will have great trustworthiness.

Search engines like Google focus on the popularity of your brand because if more people trust your product/ service, you can be a reliable source in that field.

12. Engagement in your Content

Content engagement is one of the most important ranking factors.

If people are sharing your content or having some kind of interaction with it, it adds great value not only to your SERP ranking but also to drive in new traffic.

Few of the important content engagement factors are:

Social Shares
Comments on Posts
Time on page
Returning visitors
Bounce rate

13. Link Building

Link building is a factor that is equally important as Keyword Research in search engine optimization.

There are two types of links that should be added to gain more traffic. They are:

Internal links
Inbound links or Backlinks

Internal links:

Internal links are links that are embedded in a post to lead to another page on the same website.

We add internal links to connect our other posts. Whenever you write a post, make sure you add a link to all the similar posts. This helps you increase your site’s dwell time, engagement rate, and decrease the bounce rate.

Backlinks:

Backlinks are links that other people add on their website linking to your content.

Writing link-worthy content is important to build backlinks.

Building links increase your domain and page authority. Having a higher authority helps you rank higher in Google and other top search engines.

In simple terms, internal links lead to a different page within the same domain and backlinks lead to a page in another domain. They increase the domain authority of a website and the page authority.

14. Voice Search Optimization

Voice recognition and Voice assistants are taking over the new age search engines. The first voice assistant “Siri” was launched in February 2010.

Since then, things have changed completely and AI is taking over the world.

It is expected that by the end of 2023, over 8 billion digital voice assistants in use.

If voice assistants and voice recognition is going to be such a big boom in science, think about how much more of a bigger part it’ll play in digital marketing!

Like we always say, “Your business is not about you. It is about your customers.” And, if your customers are relying on voice search, think about how important it is for your brand to come up with voice search optimization.

Conclusion

When you read this whole article, you might feel that it is too much work to do and that you might fail. Trust us. All of the steps given here are so simple yet very effective. Focus on one thing at a time and achieve your success.

Search Engine Optimization is something that you have to take care of every day. See? You’ve got plenty of time. Plus, it takes a while to reach the top of the Search Engine Results Page. Being patient is the key to achieve.

If this post helped you share it with your friends & colleagues.