While the basic principles of SEO have more or less remained the same over the years, recent updates released by Google mean that SEO is becoming more focused on precisely what the user wants.
Here are the SEO Trends of 2020, according to Top Results Consulting, which you should consider directing your marketing efforts towards to outrank your competition.
Build a Strong Technical SEO Foundation
Most SEO for blog posts revolve around non-technical aspects. However, SEO isn’t limited to the usual on-page and off-page techniques. You need to ensure that the technical infrastructure of your website is good in order to lay the groundwork for your SEO. Your website will simply not rank highly in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) if it doesn’t have a strong technical foundation.
Your website needs to satisfy specific criteria to have a strong technical foundation. This foundation includes optimizing your URLs, ensuring that your website’s navigation is flawless with proper link building, fixing your website code, using suitable title tags or alt tags on images. For local SEO, this also means optimizing your website for local search, including Google My Business, local imagery, and other content, adding location pages, and ensuring that contact information is consistent across your platforms.
Although SERP’s algorithms change regularly, by ensuring that your website has a strong technical foundation and providing a good user experience, your SERP rankings will steadily improve.
Focus on User Intent
SEO has historically focused on identifying those “golden” keywords that receive high search volumes but aren’t heavily utilized by other businesses in their SEO marketing efforts. Finding these “golden” keywords is still important. However, improvements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) now means that user intent more closely links to your SEO keywords.
NLP works by making inferences about the user’s intent through the search terms used and provides a more refined and “natural” response, such as a person might be able to provide. For SEO, this means it is more important than ever for your website content to be written “for the user” and using natural language. By incorporating keywords into your content that reflect the natural language that your user would use themselves, your content is likely to achieve higher SERP rankings.
Focus Less on the Algorithms
The final SEO trend of 2020, according to Top Results Consulting, is to focus less on the algorithms and shift your SEO efforts and resources into satisfying the user’s goal. As already touched on, SERP algorithms are continually changing. The long-term outcome of your SEO efforts is likely to be fruitless if you continue to focus on changes to the algorithm. As updates go, the trend is to continually improve the algorithm so that SERP rankings better align with the user’s intent. So when planning your SEO strategy, think of algorithm updates as simple distractions, and ensure your attention is firmly placed on the user intent.
By implementing these SEO trends of 2020, you’ll be one step ahead of the rest in both your SERP rankings and marketing results.
