Well the year is winding to an end, and hopefully it has been a good year for your SEO efforts too. If not, here are some tips to make sure that 2020 is much better for you than the previous year.

The SEO environment has become turbulent. What with Google rolling out updates at a faster rate than it has, and giving conflicting signals, your SEO job has got more difficult as the year has gone by. 2020 will get even more challenging.

Also Read: Choosing the Right SEO Partner

We’re writing this post so that we can help you prepare for the next year and focus on the things that matter in this year.

The 2 most important things for SEO still haven’t changed- content and building high quality relevant links are still the most important things out there to improve your position on SERP’s (search engine result pages). The basics of SEO have still remained the same since we can remember. Adult-SEO has been around in the SEO space for more than 10 years now, and we have managed to stay afloat because of our ability to ferret out the latest SEO trends before the others. While broadly these 2 themes remain the same, you will have to focus on specific sub-niches within these to turbo-charge your SEO efforts.

To make sure that you rank within the first page of a SERP for your target keyword, your content will be very important.

Some new trends have emerged in this sphere which you need to track and prepare for. With its Rank Brain update Google very closely tracks the time spent by users on your site and according to our research on this aspect, we estimate users spend at least 2 minutes 55 seconds on a link in the 1^st page of SERP for a high-volume keyword( between 1000-10,000 keyword searches per month).

Here’s a video of one of the most respected voices in the SEO field, Rand Fishkin on the Rank Brain algorithm, which many of you would find really useful in understanding this update and its impact. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJa0MDf2wh8 )

Once you have emerged in the 1^st page of SERP for a keyword, Google uses various techniques to sort out the wheat from the chaff. One of the most important issues to emerge has been Click-Through Rate. It basically means the no of users clicking on your link among the total users who visit that SERP.

Pages having a higher click through rate are emerging as the winners in the SEO fight. So, you have to work on marketing techniques to increase your CTR but this would not be easy at all, as you would be fighting with the absolute best players in your niche. Neil Patel’s exhaustive post on the subject would be a good place to pick up some useful techniques on this topic.

Supposing you get the desired number of clicks on your website, do you think that is enough? Remember you have to make the visitors stick to your website, otherwise that will increase your bounce rate and Google will throw your website out of the top 10 results. 

You need engaging content to keep your users stick to your website for the nearly 3 minutes time required to retain a place in the top 10 slot on a high-volume keyword.

If you do not have content that your user finds useful, that will increase your bounce rate and this is a negative signal for Google. As per a SEMRUSH study, for the top 3 positions for any SERP, the bounce rate was approximately 50%. This is what you have aim for if you’re looking at dominating search results in 2020.

One very obvious and simple way to ensure that you stay in the fight for the top search rankings is to write longer content. If your visitors stick around to read your content, then automatically RankBrain would give your website more importance and your rankings will skyrocket.

The hard part here is to create content that the users like or find valuable.  Try and make the information thorough so that all the information needs of the user are satisfied at your end only and he or she does not need to go anywhere else.

A small hack to add to your content to make it look even more comprehensive is as follows. After you finish writing your content, you need to garnish it with similar keywords to the target keyword to enhance its SEO value manifold. This would indicate to Google that this is a comprehensive link and thus getting you extra ranking points!

One of the emerging important trends to which your content strategy has to cater to is Google’s ‘Voice Search’, which is rapidly gaining traction all over the world.

Google, Apple, and Microsoft are investing a lot of money in making their Virtual Assistant services such as ‘Siri’, ‘Google Assistant’, etc. better using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. These aim to be be-all and end-all services which will make it completely unnecessary for the information seeker to access SERPs. What he or she will instead get are answers to their query as the virtual assistant will do the job of assessing the information provided by the search result.
This trend is really going to impact businesses and SEO companies as we go into 2020 as it will completely change the game as far as SEO techniques are concerned.

An example I can give you of the importance of voice search is of my own father who does not know the basics of smartphones or the internet that well. The ‘Voice Search’ option has now emerged as his ‘go-to’ for any information required by him on the internet. And it’s not the older generation; the younger millenials are also using it. There are a lot of times when people do not have the time or the patience to type into Google and check SERP’s so they just ask Google a question. In a nutshell, to win the Voice Search battle your content needs to provide answers to user queries as effectively as possible.

Here’s a comprehensive guide from Search Engine Land which will help you devise a strategy to optimize your content for Voice Search

Video has emerged as a key focus area as it helps you to retain users on your website. More and people prefer video to text in order to garner information. On an average, a good informative video would have a length of at least 2.5 minutes to offer effective information on any topic. Make sure that all your posts on your website contain at least one video, which may or may not be made by you. An additional advantage of video content is that if properly coded and embedded it provides a better experience on mobile, which has started dominating search. Users generally find it harder to read content on mobile, which makes it favorable for your site if you have video content.

Many of you would know that YouTube has emerged as the second largest search engine in the world. So SEO of YouTube videos is also an important emerging trend; if you need to increase organic traffic to your website. Google, being YouTube’s owner, is giving more and more space to videos on SERP’s as it is looking to drive up YouTube’s profitability. Thus, carefully crafted videos on YouTube with descriptions filled with keywords and content that inspires your users is necessary.

Well, folks these were a few of the trends in content marketing that we wished to direct your attention to. As always, we’ll be really happy if you leave a comment in the space given below, and share what you think are going to be trends in content for SEO in the year ahead.

Also Read: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted To Know About Best SEO Techniques

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