The new year is already in full swing. Has your site achieved (or sustained) its page rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)? If not, allocating some of your budget to a bespoke SEO package will give your site the boost it needs to rank higher on results pages.
Here are five important SEO trends that you need to know about in 2020.
1. Have you met BERT?
BERT is Google’s most significant search system change since the introduction of RankBrain (released approximately five years ago.) It’s said that the new algorithm will impact one in 10 search queries in terms of altering the results that rank for those specific queries.
So, what is BERT exactly? According to Search Engine Land, it’s ‘Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training’. Essentially, BERT has the ability to understand nuances and context in users’ search queries.
SEOs will now have to focus on user intent more than ever, optimising for a string of words won’t cut it anymore. The bottom line is that content and SEO have to work together to deliver what the user really wants to receive.
2. High-Quality, Optimised Content
Content will always be the essence of SEO. Experts have said that if you wish to succeed in 2020, content needs to be relevant and provide value.
According to Jesse McDonald, Global SEO Strategist, IBM, and Jessica Levenson, SEO & Content Strategy Consultant, ‘2020 is the time to move away from the obsession with keywords. Stop targeting individual keywords, chasing pageviews, and “spraying and praying” with content.’
A holistic approach is needed, which means that content should be topic focused; tackling a full conversation that is comprehensive and intuitive, rather than a single target keyword serving as the primary purpose for the content.
3. E-A-T
Your brand’s reputation will remain a driving factor in how Google views your company. Ensure that all content publishers in your company are well-versed in the acronym E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) when writing content.
Technical SEO Analyst, Grace Kindred comments, ‘It will be more important than ever to focus on the trust value of authors (verifying authors and showing their authority for particular subjects) and sites as a whole.’
4. UX & Technical SEO
User experience (UX) is a massive trend on which SEOs which brings technical SEO to the conversation. The technical foundations of a company’s website need to be in top shape (e.g., canonical corrections, Hreflang corrections, etc.) Google has already cemented its focus on the importance of site speed with new Chrome ‘slow warning badges’ as well as speed reports in Google Search Console.
SEO expert, Dan Taylor comments, ‘This for many will reignite conversations with developers and in some cases lead to systems requiring almost complete website redesigns of page templates and reengineering of how assets are loaded.’
5. Mobile SEO
Many agencies can attest to the fact that one of the main issues prospective clients are facing is that their mobile sites are a complete shamble. The reality is that more potential/existing customers are accessing websites via mobile devices. So, it’s in developers’ and SEOs’ best interests to build and optimise for mobile-first, then construct a compatible version for desktop.
Looking for a bespoke SEO package to enhance your digital footprint? Please contact us today.
