Executive Chronicles| 5 Essential 2020 SEO Trends You Need to Know to Stay Relevant|Ever since the internet became a thing and search engines humanity’s a preferable access point to all information in existence, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) instantly became one of the most important marketing strategies out there. All this makes a lot of sense – faced with fierce competition and 5.6 billion searches made on Google every day, the businesses that are not doing their best to rank high are sentenced to anonymity.
That brings us to the question – how can you leverage this method to your advantage in the year 2020 when even the smallest of businesses are learning the SEO game? Well, the answer is rather simple – do your best to stay ahead of the curve while checking on website optimization services. Let us take a look at a couple of important trends that will help you do exactly that.
A shift toward zero-click searches
For better or for worse, zero-click searches are becoming the new norm. The easiest way to describe them would be as queries that result in sets where answers can be accessed directly from SERP without the need to make a single click. This may sound like a true conversion nightmare, but keep in mind that people who are doing such searches are not the best candidates for conversion from the get-go, so don’t even bother. Instead, research the keywords that are being looked at here and try to incorporate them into your existing SEO strategy (usually, it’s the keywords starting with how, when, how many and other similar questions).
Faster loading speeds
We are living in a world where internet speed is becoming faster and attention span shorter with each passing day. As a matter of fact, recent research says that as much as 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. Accordingly, the bounce rate increases by 33% with each passing second. So, do your best to give your website an extensive overhaul and make it as fast-loading and accessible as possible. Some of the key metrics you should keep in mind are:
- First contentful paint
- First meaningful paint
- Speed index
- Time to interactive
Greater reliance on feedback and reporting
Speaking of metrics, the entire SEO industry was always heavily rooted in cold numbers, stats, and KPIs. As time goes by, all these requirements are only becoming even more important. Some would say that is the result of the expansion of the SEO industry. Others say Google’s algorithms are becoming more complex. Both are right. Be that as it may, the volume of data your company will need to process and analyze is only going to grow. So, it would be a good time to invest in quality reporting software that will automate these processes and make them more streamlined.
Rise of mobile SEO
It’s not that big of a secret that most of today’s searches are made with mobile phones – that’s been the case for ages now. But, you would be surprised just how this topic remains to be relevant in the year 2020. First of all, there is a countless number of businesses that are still struggling to make their websites mobile-friendly. In the meantime, we can see mobile SEO expanding to some completely new venues with “near me” searches becoming the dominant form of mobile searches. This growing gap is something you should, by all means, exploit. Keep in mind, therefore, that mobile searches are the future of SEO and put more resources into this department.
Technical SEO slowly taking over
The quality content was always at the core of SEO. As long as people use words to search the web, that is something that is not going to change. But, as time goes by, we can see that the influence of the content on the overall SEO experience begins to take slight drops. The trend that is stealing the thunder is the growing relevance of UX that steadily roots the entire SEO industry in more technical soil. However, don’t forget that this soil is very fertile and as long as you balance the quality of the content and quality of user experience, your business can only blossom.
We hope these five trends gave you some general idea of the direction in which the contemporary SEO industry is moving. Keep a close eye on them and do your best to implement as many of the strategies we have suggested as possible. The SEO game is becoming very competitive. Staying relevant is going to be harder with each passing day.
