Top 6 Revolutionary SEO Trends for 2020
Technology is ever-evolving rapidly, ever so often new trends set off, old ones die, while some keep up with the future. Google algorithm’s changes have been more persistent than ever before and infinitely smarter, impacting website traffic and rankings, sometimes positively, other times not.
So, as a content marketer and search engine optimizer, it’s highly critical to keep up with these ceaseless changes, in order to update and optimize your website, its content and ensuring its relevance to users.
Constantly developing and modifying SEO Strategies to keep up with the latest trends is becoming a pivotal part of the life of an SEO expert.
Here we have laid out some ongoing and upcoming trends in 2020 to aid Search Engine Optimizers in their quest.
Artificial Intelligence: The All-Time Revolution
While other trends may come and go, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay.
AI is not only used in search engines, but is quickly gaining traction in Google’s other products, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s site and devices, Cogito’s customer support, Netflix’s recommendations, and myriad of other products and tools.
Google’s powerful self-learning algorithm, RankBrain that gauges user’s intent rather than words, has made search results more refined and analyzes results flawlessly.
AI keeps facilitating SEO analysts in developing the personalized user experience and automating a number of tasks, thus, saving time and effort.
SEO experts are expected to adapt to the capabilities of AI, which is quickly enhancing its understanding of the web and expects quality from the websites.
Voice Search Trend Keeps Changing Further
Experts predict that 50% of online searches will be done by voice in 2020.
Since Google improved its speech-recognition accuracy up to 95% and is poised to go up to 99%, voice search will gain explosive popularity in the coming years.
Bondcap Trends reported that in 2017 20% of mobile searches were performed through voice search. These are just mobile searches, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence and high-speed internet, voice searches are performed via virtual assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home.
Users will now want the convenience of voice search to every website or app they go to. Voice search is changing SEO since instead of 2 or 3 keywords entered into search, users will utter queries in a conversational tone; therefore, increasing keyword length to around 10.
So it’s vital to optimize websites for voice search now, through the use of conversational language, long-tail keywords, and schema markup.
Visual Search is Transforming SEO
Gartner predicts that by 2021, those eCommerce websites will have a 30% jump in revenue growth, which optimized their websites for visual search.
The problem with text-based search is that the user has to remember a snippet or a name in order to search it, with visual thought, the user is only required to put up an image and the search results arrive.
It may not replace text-based search, but visuals and voice will occupy a lot of space in SEO.
Websites generate 94% more traffic if supported by images and videos; therefore it’s imperative to support more visuals in web designs.
Blockchain Merged With SEO And SEM
Blockchain is identified as a transaction platform for cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, any relevancy between SEO and blockchain seems improbable.
But blockchain is soon going to have an extensive impact on the digital marketing world.
Blockchain ensures a secure transaction between the buyer and seller, without any involvement of third parties, while maintaining a steady and accurate record.
When employed in the transactions of digital marketing, blockchain authenticates that the user is genuine and not a bot, shrinking the online ads fraud greatly.
Hence, it’s going to impact Google’s and the marketer’s ad revenues.
With the help of embedded schema markup, information and activity on the websites will be recorded much more accurately and precisely, calculating the value contribution of each user. Making web rankings more efficacious than ever.
Mobile-first Index Prioritizing Mobile SEO
In March 2018, Google released its mobile-first indexing feature.
Statista recorded 52.2% of global website traffic generated through mobile devices.
Mobile-First Indexing measure the health and performance of the website on mobile devices.
It has become imperative to develop responsive websites that are optimized for mobile devices.
A slow-loading website on mobile is anathema to Google, who believes that fast-loading websites are cardinal for user experience.
If websites want to improve their web rankings, they should prioritize user experience, ensuring smoothly navigable and fast-moving websites.
Featured Snippets & More SERPs Features
Featured snippets entail a few bits and pieces of content from the website displayed on top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
To optimize for featured snippets provide information on web pages that is listable and easily understood by the search engine.
Snippets are extremely valuable to mobile users, to whom relevant information is easily displayed on the go; hence, improving Clickthrough Rate.
As for review snippets, Google got rid of them in September 2019, since website owners tended to maneuver the rating to their advantage.
So SEOs will have to emphasize other SERP features to improve their rankings and CTR.
Ending Note
AI and Machine Learning have had a huge hand in changing the search engine for the better.
With AI becoming sophisticated day by day, we’re hanging on to see what new trends are emerging and which ones are dying.
SEO is evolving, with them the strategies too, but the aim will always be to please the user.