SEO in 2020 | How SEO will change and what are latest trends and challenges?

Search Engine Optimization in the coming years is going to be tough and tougher for marketers. Some of the important factors to boost SEO in 2020 would include video optimization, voice search optimization, featured snippets, authority, network connection, and social media optimization.

Did you notice a drop in your SERPs after the recent core update by Google? What would you do to get back to the top position and regain the lost search traffic?

We studied a few websites and tried to figure out what made them maintain their top positions and organic search traffic.

Read on to find out what made the winners stand different from others.

It’s a well-known fact that the Search Engine Optimization industry is getting more competitive than ever before.  With Google getting more smarter day by day, it has really become harder for the SEOs to maintain the optimization results against rankings and website traffic. The recent core update by Google, many webmasters saw their search rankings and traffic dipped down. Nevertheless, it was a win-win situation for others who wanted to come ahead in the rankings and beat their competitors.

How SEO will change in 2020 – A study

A few months back I wrote a guide on keyword research. The blog post ranked among the top ten results with long-tail keywords, however, it did nothing in terms of increasing the website rank or traffic. What, and how to create superior content to make it to the top, was the new challenge for me?

I was reading about the recent core update by Google and rechecked the ranking and we were ranking on the top with some long-tail low volume keywords.

Now that was an Aha! moment for me to see keywords research beginners guide written by me still ranking in the top results.

The result made me more curious to analyze the high-volume keywords and yes, the top ranks were obviously taken by the industry leaders with me nowhere around. But that didn’t dishearten me as I truly respect the years of experience and the incredible work each of them did in the field.

Now that’s where my rational mind started working and here, I am listing all the findings.

Do read and gain some insights to boost your SEO rankings in 2020.

Since the new look of the Google result page has made it clear for SEOs to certainly put their best foot forward to stand out in the crowd. I  started googling some random keywords.

For instance, when I searched how to make pizza sauce, the result was something like

Notice the top results. First is a list of Recipes comprising of a youtube video result and two from other websites.  Second, there are Videos, and needless to mention most of the videos were from Youtube.

When googled what is global warming, the result was something like

On querying why is Halloween celebrated, the result was like

Notice the variation in the search result page for each type of query. The organic results are pushed down below, featured snippets, videos, people also ask section. Besides these, there are new knowledge cards listings with captivating and tempting information, increasing the probability of users clicking them. And with a true fact that the topmost results are the most clickable and traffic generating results. How would you optimize to meet the new challenges triggered by Google Algorithms?

The answer is the 3 C’s of SEO that are content, consistency, and connection.

C1. Content 

Content is the soul of your website. The more authoritative, and the more user-friendly your content is, the higher are the chances for you to rank in the top SERPs.

When I say content it includes the text, images, video and audio elements of a website. Content is the core stuff that defines your business personality online.

Let’s define the components of quality content to boost SEO rankings in 2020.

1. Accessibility: The website accessibility simply defines, how accessible is the website for its users (disabled/mobile/situational). Accessibility is a specifically important factor for online business websites. As it not only increases the reach of the online businesses. But also improves brand reputation and customer loyalty with their demonstrative social responsibility.

What are the SEO elements that facilitate the accessibility of your website?

The on-page optimization factors

• Title:
  

  Your web page title is an important factor – to tell the search engine bots about the page context, and how it looks in the search results. Optimizing title tags is one of the most favorably valued techniques for on-page optimization. A well-defined and optimized title allows its users to identify the relevancy of the web page information to their needs.

• Heading:

  Using keywords in headings and content, ensure the visitors stay on a page. It also helps to improve ranking on search engines. What’s new in this? You might be wondering. Well! The inclusion of keywords should be as natural as you are speaking to someone face to face. And explaining about your product without keyword stuffing.

• Images:

  Optimize the images with including keywords image alt text and captions.

  The alt text of an image tells its context to search engine crawlers, to enhance its eligibility to be discovered in search results. Alt text communicates the image usage to the screen readers. While the image caption usability is broader as it describes the picture for every website user.

  The alt-text is revealed inside a box when an image is missing or not found. While captions can be seen below the images.

  Though these are lesser utilized and insignificant factors as compared to other SEO factors but once they are optimized properly they can do wonders to increase user retention and brand reputation.

  In fact, if you would have ever realized the topmost social networking site Twitter, also had an option to add a description about the image, you upload to tweet. What do you think this is meant for? It is a way Twitter ensures the image is optimized well to be accessible to disabled people.

• Navigation:

  Website navigation is one of the important factors that lead to great user experience and SEO performance. The optimized and good website navigation makes the visitors’ search journey on your website simpler and useful by locating him to his desired result. A good navigation structure leads to more user conversions and improved search visibility.

• Transcripts:

  Transcripts are the documented text of the video and audio files. A transcript depicts what is being said in the video. The search engine bots index text-based content. A well-optimized transcript enables search engines to understand and index your multimedia content.

  You can target your keywords based on the topics discussed in your video and audio content.

  Optimizing the multimedia transcripts have shown good results in terms of SEO. Apart from boosting your SEO results, transcripts can also help you increase your video views and watch time, as per the study by Facebook

  Other benefits of a transcript

  Transcripts also help in enhancing user experience in determining page rank. Transcript video and audio files improve user experience by making it easier for them to understand. It ensures your content is fully accessible to every user visiting your website.

• Mobile-Friendly:

  This is the smartphone era we are living in. The internet world has shifted to mobiles with a whopping more than 70% of mobile users across the world. It has become mandatory for webmasters to create mobile-friendly responsive websites. According to Google, more than 27.8 billion searches are done on mobile. So, to be ranked on mobile search results you need to maximize your efforts to produce user-friendly content with mobile responsiveness.

2.   Technology:

We are living in an era where technology has become an essential part of our daily life. In India only there are more than 400 million online consumers with access to the internet via smartphones. The consumers turn to their smartphones when looking for information, to watch movies and favorite shows online, or to live stream a cricket match.
A study by Google shows that a number of users prefer to search online about a product via voice search, videos, and organic results.

In 2020 it is predicted that there would be 500 M online video users.

The rise of omnichannel presence has made it mandatory for the SEO’s to actively create, optimize and promote their content to get the best results of their SEO efforts.

To get good SEO rankings in 2020 you must leverage using these 5 technologies.

YouTube Videos:

It is a known fact that Google displays YouTube videos among the top ten Google search results. YouTube is also the world’s second most popular search engine, according to Forbes. It is estimated that more than 3 billion searches per month are generated on YouTube.

Uploading videos on youtube not only increase your audience but also lets you score a good rank in the organic SERP. However, your videos should be engaging and creative enough to hold the interest of audiences.

Here are some usage stats of youtube that could give a fair idea of why you should not stop yourself from leveraging this video platform.

Voice Search:

The record growth of Voice Assistant users throughout the world is already being discussed across the internet marketing industry.

A million people globally are using digital products like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple Siri, to search online. The growing voice search technology enables the user to multitask while finding information online. Today voice search helps you to find products and services, stores and banks, hospitals and parks, and theatres near you, etc.

Here are some interesting voice search facts to answer why you should be optimizing for voice SEO.

Three tips to optimize for voice search:

• Optimize content with long-tail keywords for voice search.
• Adhere to SEO best practices while optimizing content.
• Optimize for the local area and Google My Business account.

 Facebook:

Facebook is the most popular social media web site in 2019. More than 2 billion active users communicate with family and friends worldwide over Facebook.

Here are some stats about Facebook usage that should make clear why you must not be holding yourself back to leverage this social media platform.

The above Facebook stats should motivate you to make your business presence on the social media website.

Twitter:

Twitter is another social media platform whose significance cannot be neglected in terms of managing and maintaining business networks and relationships. In fact, Twitter is one of the most influential social networking websites, for brands, to make an impression on prospective customers.

Here I am sharing Twitter 2019 stats to highlight the growing popularity of this platform globally.

The above stats make it clear why brands should not only be present but also actively respond to followers and provide approachable customer service on Twitter.

Artificial Intelligence:

AI and ML are the crucial components of modern SEO. The significance of understanding AI while optimizing your content for SEO can definitely let you lead among your competitors.

With the growing intelligence and smartness of search bots, especially Google, in identifying and fetching relevant quality results that are free from keyword stuffing and spammy irrelevant backlinks, AI has become the mandatory tool for marketers to meet the new smart search engine requirements to rank their content.

Using AI for SEO success not only helps in boosting page rankings but also in developing superior content and cohesive strategies.

You can collect insights and data with the help of AI and create better strategies to target your audiences by developing special landing pages, dynamic content and creating unique user experiences. These are three important factors that could assure SEO campaign success of yours.

3.   User Experience

User Experience (UX) is simply the experience of your website users while browsing through your webpages.

The three important factors that make a great UX are easy to understand site, simple and user-friendly navigation, and captivating and engaging content. Does your website fulfill all these requirements? Or, is your website discouraging visitors to stay on, is confusing and frustrating, and not able to meet visitor’s requirements?

How SEO and UX are related?

SEO aims to rank your website on search while UX aims your site visitors to interact with your webpages. With recent algorithm updates, a number of websites with bad user experience observed a drop in search engine rankings.

Some best practices to improve user experience to boost SEO in 2020 are

• Write high-quality content with relevant keywords
• Add image alt tags
• Optimize meta description with keywords and making it captivating to let users visit your site
• Organize content by utilizing large fonts, whitespace, bullet lists, and good color contrast
• Improve site speed
• Use a responsive design and ensure your website is mobile-friendly
• Use Proper Headings
• Improve Site Navigation

The above factors and stats are just going to be the roadmap for your future search engine optimization campaigns. To stand out in the crowd you definitely will need to level up the creatives, content and marketing approach and techniques.

C2. Consistency

Consistency refers to the quality of being consistent. How consistency affects SEO? Well, your consistent efforts to improve your search engine rankings can definitely boost your website SEO performance.

What is being consistent in terms of SEO?

Your website and SEO should go hand in hand to grow business. As the businesses update content as per the business needs, the same should also be optimized well to ensure good SERP’s.

Search engine bots would understand your website’s purpose better if you show a consistent pattern in the content generation and distribution. It is when smart bots identify the reason for your web page existence and match it with user queries, your web page is ranked higher in SERP.

• Be consistent with your keyword usage
• Be consistent with your content
• Be consistent with your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Numbers)
• Be consistent in your content distribution

Sharing and updating your blogs, identifying opportunities to improve, creating quality content, sharing your experience with others in terms of what worked and what went wrong.

Consistency is the key factor to boost SEO results. While creating high-quality content is one significant factor to boost SEO rankings. Remodeling your website consistently to adapt to the latest Google algorithm updates and to bid bye to bad links, duplicate content are also major factors to be considered.

Keep NAP consistent throughout every web listing to avoid confusing both crawlers and potential customers.

C3. Connections

Search Engines favor a web page popular with its audiences. To be digitally famous and well-liked you certainly need to develop connection with your audience, with your community and your network.

When you create and share good quality content with usability feature you build a connection with your audience. As a result, you earn some natural mentions, from the web world.

In fact, having an open communication channel to communicate with your audience gives you a chance not only to understand their needs and requirements but also allows you to improve your services.

When you are well accepted, favored and admired by your community you earn popularism with search engine bots also.

Conclusions:

If you want to stay ahead in SEO in 2020 you ought to work on these 3 Cs. If you focus on creating quality content, making connections, and stay consistent with your efforts you can definitely win over the search engine bots.

• Content is the fundamental most important factor to score good search engine rankings.
• Content includes videos, infographics, images, and text.
• High-quality content helps you build network connections.
• Your connections and popularity can help you gain popularity with search bots too.
• Leveraging social media will help you improve search engine rankings and connections.