In the digital marketing world, Search Engine Optimization or SEO is used to get better ranking for web content and pages through various techniques and factors such as keywords, page loading speed, quality and relevance of content, and so on. Google keeps updating its algorithm to SEO factors also evolve, and maximum benefits go to the user. Millions of pages getting added on the web each day make it imperative that the search is The Internet is expanding at an astonishing pace and a search done at a global level may not hold any value at a local level. Like all other businesses and industries, the web is also going local to cater to local users. It’s best to keep yourself up to date on SEO trends and implement it to gain maximum out of it.
- Quality Content is more important than ever in 2020.
Recent trends and updates clearly indicate that providing relevant data to users is one of the topmost priorities for the search giant Google. Gone are the days when one could place keywords without any context and fool the algorithm by making it believe that their content is worthy enough to rank at the top. Although keywords will always remain a factor in SEO, even, as the technology evolves and bots are made to think more like humans. No point in guessing that high quality and relevant content will rank better than anything which answers the partial question. As a digital content provider, your mantra should be “Give users what they want and in return get what you want” that is more traffic and better ranking. There other factors worth considering to improve your SEO
- Research and know your audience before creating content. There is no substitute for genuinely rich content.
- Instead of stuffing keywords in your content forcefully make sure to add them like meta titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and so on.
- Use related and similar words to your keywords which will help in improving your ranking indirectly.
- Bert Update by Google
Late 2019, Google came with its BERT update. It is short of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), which is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP). I’m sure now you understand the importance of quality content. While BERT is at an initial level, it will play a key role in the coming years. There is no workaround for this unless you focus on giving relevant content you will lack in this department.
We have already discussed the points to overcome BERT in terms of SEO building. I.e. know your audience, find out what they are looking for, what are the specific queries they have, and build content around those. There are absolutely free resources such as “Question Hub” by google available for that. You can scan through relevant topics to see what the user is searching for and give them that on your webpage. Read here to understand more about it.
- Page Loading Speed
The time it takes to load the page may not look a big factor, but trust me it is one of the key SEO trends in 2020 and will remain so in the future as well. This needs to be carefully reviewed and maintained, as new pages are added to your website. What is good page speed? As per industry standard, anything under 2 seconds is considered acceptable whereas Google’s aim is to bring it below 0.5 seconds. There are many resources available to check the page loading speed, and if it’s on a higher side, you better start optimizing it. Below mentioned things should be considered to improve page speed.
- Optimize old and use lighter images. There is no point stuffing your website with heavy images.
- Use Compression for CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, try to keep them below 150 bytes. It’s similar to optimizing images.
- Reduce redirects – Redirects can be a major cause of slowness. Keep this in check.
- Use tools to improve page speeds. Read here for some recommendations.
If you need good web traffic then you must take help of a pioneer SEO company.
- Mobile-Friendly User Interface
Not focusing on how the site and pages will look and perform on mobile applications is one of the most common mistakes, even the experts end up making. If you look at insights more than 80% hits your website gets is usually via mobile phones, and while creating pages, we should test it like a user would it should be super simple and uncluttered. A page that looks awesome may not be perfect for the mobile interface as few key navigation menus or links may not be visible.
- Keep it simple- Provide simple and clear site navigation; menus should be on each page; search options should always be visible to the user.
- Build Curiosity – Keep headings and subheadings interrelated. Without forcing, encourage your user to navigate the site seamlessly without any hiccups.
- Voice Search Functionality
This is going to be a key SEO trend in 2020 and beyond. As the number of mobile users are increasing, the usage of voice search is also growing at a fast pace. So one should be well prepared for the upcoming trend in SEO.
- Think local, start including the correct location, exact addresses in web listings, so the user finds their result.
- Start adding natural language and location-specific flavor in content. This will help better voice search results. Remember the BERT update, and it links to that as well.