The importance of staying at the top of google search results cannot be stated highly enough for an SEO agency.
As a digital marketer, your effectiveness is defined by your website’s position in google search results mostly. To secure such a high ranking in search results calls for expertise in SEO.
Search engine optimization or SEO refers to building and consistently increasing the flow of quality, organic traffic on your website via technical and content-based optimization of the website.
The word organic is essential here; in this context, any traffic directed towards your content without the utilization of paid ads.
SEO has gained importance in the last few years in digital marketing. While five years ago, keyword-stuffed content was enough to drive your content up the search results, it has been flipped over thanks to drastic updates introduced by Google into its search algorithm.
Google has been moving towards a more and more smart and intelligent approach towards results. It moved away from simple keyword matching based search results quite a while ago.
It has now focused on making search results more context-sensitive by analyzing probable intent the searcher might have had behind the query.
Thus, straightforward keyword-stuffed content is obsolete now. SEO trends have changed, and in 2020, here are a few of them that an SEO agency should work on if it aims to stay in top search results.
1). Mobile and Voice Search
As per Google, in 2015, the Top 10 internet consuming countries had more mobile internet consumers than desktop consumers.
By 2018, in the US alone, more than half the traffic was generated by mobile devices. This has led Google to introduce the Mobile-First Index.
If your website’s mobile version is by any means inferior to its desktop version, it will be downgraded in search results rankings.
With the growing popularity of artificial intelligence-based voice assistants, voice-based search numbers have also surged. It also plays into google’s plan of making search results more and more accessible by making them context-sensitive, as voice search queries are conversational in nature.
Going forward into 2020, mobile and voice searches are going to be a key trend in SEO.
2). Featured Snippets
If you are confused about this term, just type in any random query into Google search bar. You’ll find the topmost website listed in the results will also have a small snippet from their website containing the relevant content shown directly at the search result page.
This feature introduced by Google has fundamentally changed how traffic is driven towards websites. Users now need not click on to the websites but are displayed results directly.
Now Snippets complicate SEOs and are generally disliked in the digital marketing community, but the end-user loves it, so this trend is undoubtedly here to stay.
Some of the best SEO services have started to adapt to it by implementing structured data into their websites.
3). Video Content
You’d be surprised to know that after Google, YouTube (a subsidiary of Google) is the second most popular search engine.
Skimping on video content could thus be very unsavory for the future prospects of your digital marketing business. Users prefer that the content instead be presented in an appealing visual format than textual.
Of course, there is excellent SEO value attached to video content as much as it is with textual content. You can use them to build backlinks and even use them to get into Featured Snippets of SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Remember, Google loves videos, so you better get on this train.
But making excellent and engaging video content is not enough in itself, you have to take into consideration SEO tweaking too.
The web-crawlers still use textual content for rankings, so make sure you have adequately added edited captions into the video with strategically placed keywords.
These are some trends that seem poised to dominate the 2020 SEO scenario. Our industry is unusually slow in adapting to many of these trends, but going forward, this is unfeasible.
SEO has been more dynamic than it ever was before. If you seek to be a company with the best SEO services, ignoring SEO trends is not the wisest way to go.
Learn More:
SEO Tips for Real Estate Business Websites
WordPress SEO: Tips to Improve Ranking of Your Website
Will No-follow Backlink Be Valuable in Future for SEO
Off-Page SEO: 6 Effective Link Building Strategies