Five Underrated SEO Trends To Learn In 2020

Take a moment and Google's "SEO Trends." You'll see article after article, blog after blog, a "definitive" list of SEO trends. It's a lot to work through, but what you'll quickly know is that all the experts are going to come down to the same basic idea: the only thing we can say about the SEO world for sure is that it will continue to evolve.

Despite this pace of transition, it's certainly not possible to pin down a be-all and end-all list (there's so much going into SEO). So, I've chosen to take a different approach: here are five SEO trends for 2020 that have stood out to me over the past year, working closely with companies to help them expand through digital marketing.

1. Google is far more intent-oriented

Google is getting very good at reading intent based on how people search. It can serve up different content if it thinks someone wants to purchase a product, find a nearby store or answer a question. This new layer of intent recognition enriches the search experience and broadens the way that businesses can go about SEO.

Always remember this when you are creating content for your website. What is an occasion that makes your audience down the road to finding your content? Are they attempting to fix an issue with your products or services? Possibly they have to find the location of a company like the one you have. With target audience intent as your starting point, you will be able to personalize the words and structure of your web pages, blog posts, as well as other content appropriately.

2. Webpage speed is always overlooked

Google cares about page speed enough to publicly state that it affects the way its algorithm ranks websites. Unfortunately, web page speed usually gets ignored among the myriad on-page and technical SEO techniques that people tend to concentrate on. It is a crucial mistake, both in terms of SEO and the end-user experience all around. This is because people are not going to wait too long these days.

Here's where some of your professional SEO skills are going to come in handy. This can include optimizing your images, taking advantage of caching or reducing the number of redirects on your site.

3. Paid strategies like ads and Adwords are still important, but organic search traffic is much more important

Ads are sometimes a faster and more immediate way to drive traffic and sales. Still, nowadays greater than 55 Percent of web site traffic originates from organic search. And business owners often find that tapping into organic search traffic is much more difficult than simply optimizing for a couple of keywords — it takes a more comprehensive strategy. The most common misconception around organic traffic is that you need to submit a lot of content in order to rank well and boost organic traffic. However, the correct way is to post a lot of nicely-organized and authoritative content that brings value to your target audience. Neither Google nor human readers are going to pay much attention to the content generated by the auto-content machine or spun content.

4.  It comes to the time of no-click search results 

This might appear counterintuitive, but the vast majority of search engine results do not result in a simple click. Does that imply people search and then do not find what they need? Maybe. Much more likely, it’s that the search engine result gives them all that they want, making a simple click-through to a website unnecessary. This is actually the power of rich-featured results in Google, for instance. Things like snippets, information graphs, and local company listings stitch together plenty of info at once, within a quickly digestible way, giving people everything they want without a click.

5. Content is still the King

Search algorithms are picky today. They have a solid desire for articles that is well organized, properly optimized, authoritative and, most importantly, beneficial towards the end-user. Things such as word count, keyword density and backlinks may help, but they are less important if comparing to content. Because of this, article mills and black-hat SEO methods are quickly turning into relics of the past.

The truth is, it’s not simply the standard and relevance of the information that’s essential, but just how it’s structured and optimized on the page, and exactly how that web page is organized and optimized in a website’s broader details structure. Many of these elements of content approach are signals towards the Google algorithm criteria since it decides what info to pull and show in search results.

A great place to start is with a site audit. Take a complete inventory of the latest sitemap. What are the pages that make up your web structure? Why are they organized and interconnected, and what is their purpose? What do users find and move through this content? Use these as starting points for a potential restructuring of your site.

Yeah, 2020 is up to us. From where I'm sitting, these five SEO trends will be difficult to ignore, not just in 2020, but potentially far into the near future — until Google wants to alter the algorithm, that is, or some new technology totally disrupts how SEO is done.

That takes me to my final point on SEO trends: can we optimize all at once? Well, we can give it our best shot. But the best way to plan your website (and your business) for 2020 and beyond is to ensure that your core SEO system and strategies are in place, well-constructed and regularly maintained.

From there, you will take advantage of new SEO trends in a way that makes the most sense to your company and, most importantly, to your users.



Winnie Chan
Co-Founder
Nugget Global
https://www.nuggetglobal.com/