Ranking on Google is just like a grand board game, where Google is the game master knowing the rules. But you can observe how the pieces (websites) move across the board, and place your own pieces making random moves, then observe how your pieces respond. The more moves you make, the better you understand the game.
2019 has seen a lot of updates in the SEO game and we all wait for 2020. What is going to change in 2020? What SEO trends a webmaster needs to follow to stay ahead of their competitors? What strategies will work in 2020?
Let’s look around the top SEO trends that are likely to become popular in 2020 to rank a website. Levo, an SEO and Digital marketing agency in Tulsa along with 20+ digital marketing agencies have formulated the following trends looking into the Google algorithm changes over the years.
1. Voice Search: Conversational Keywords will Come into Picture
Voice search is here to stay forever. With the rise in production of voice-first devices and Google giving preferences to long-tail conversational keywords, one can clearly assume the rise of voice search in 2020.
What does this mean? This means that you need to optimize your website content for voice search keywords or phrases. The way people do text search is different from voice. While searching their query through voice, they become more conversational and use long phrases to search.
This means you need to optimize your content with long-tail keywords that are likely to be searched by people. This doesn’t mean that you will have 100 articles revolving around 100 different long-tail conversational keywords. Voice search will be a long-tail keyword game in 2020.
2. Featured Snippet: The Race to be on Position 0
Google deems to offer the most valuable and in-depth response to the user’s query.
Google will have more focus on the featured snippet in 2020, which means the race to land on the much-covetedPosition 0is on. You need to research the keywords that have chances of ranking as a featured snippet.
Again, the long-tail keywords have a better chance to land onPosition 0as compared to the shorter ones. So, produce an in-depth, valuable piece of content around those keywords that answers the user query while summarizing the answer within the first paragraph.
3. CTR and Dwell Time Will Become Bigger Ranking Factors
As people are getting used to lightning-fast internet connection and having information on their fingertips all the times, website click-through rate (CTR) and dwell time (amount of time people spends on a webpage before bouncing back) will become bigger ranking factors and will be critical for SEO success.
Both these metrics will be important as they are linked to user experience whether the users were able to find relevant information easily or not. By seeing how long they stayed on a page and what other links they clicked on will tell the marketer how interested they are in content.
The more time spent on a webpage indicates how satisfied a person is in finding what they were looking for. We are likely to see CTR and dwell time as trending SEO factors in 2020.
4. Mobile UX will Determine Website Rankings
A website not having a mobile version may lose most of its users as mobile web pages are a growing trend which will get even more popular by 2020. As the number of smartphone users is increasing day by day, more people are getting equipped with internet on their smartphones. Having a website is not just enough.
You need to get it ready for mobile users as well. The interface of your mobile website needs to be easy to read, grab people’s attention and then should have the ability to answer the questions of the users.
Studies show that 4 out of every 5 consumers conduct local searches on search engines use mobile devices. The people searching from their smartphones are more as compared to computers, you need to get ready with a mobile-friendly website. Optimize your current website for mobile devices.
5. Creating Quality Content Will Always be a Trend
Google is going strict with content quality day by day. The new algorithms will hit your website instantly if you are using duplicate content or adding just a few words to your pages just to increase the page count.
Creating quality content has become more important. What do you mean by quality? Quality content means it should be readable and free from grammar errors. It should be unique in its own sense.
For this, you need to understand the type of reader you are targeting. You should write accordingly. Creating engaging content and interacting with users in between the post can help the user to stay engaged throughout the post.
Of course, quantity matters, but not over quality. Apart from this, updating content time to time will help your blog post rank higher than your competitors who are not following these strategies. After creating quality content, marketing content is another major topic to fill in.
6. Backlinks will Always Remain in the Game
We all understand the backlinks game very well. Ranking on Google is the combination of signals, and backlinks have always been the powerful one. If you are getting backlinks naturally then you are in the game.
But how to get them naturally? Creating awesome content will help. But to speed up the ranking process, you can always go for guest post submissions on niche relevant site. Though Google doesn’t promote exchanging links for money, but when a link is embedded naturally, the ranking of your webpage gets improved depending upon the competition and other factors.
7. Fast Loading Webpages
A delay of second in page load speed can drop 15% of visitors who clicked on your page URL but dropped due to slow loading speed.
You would have heard that “the first impression is the last impression”. Optimize your page loading speed. Google provides Page Speed insights. You can check the possible reasons for the slow loading page on this tool and optimize the page speed accordingly.
Your page should ideally load in less than 2 seconds. So, if your page is taking more time to load, you need to worry. You will be out of the SEO game very soon.
The Bottom Line
Thus, to make your website a noticeable name on the web, you need to rank higher. Prepare yourself for 2020 if you don’t wish to lose visitors and stay behind from your competitors. With Google getting strict day by day, it is getting harder to rank a website for a certain set of keywords. Start following the top SEO trends for 2020 to rank your website higher on search engines like Google.
