There is no shortage of businesses trying to make it to the top of search results, and that’s why the struggle for SEO dominance in 2020 is only going to become more intense.
And with Google poised to make further changes to its algorithm in 2020, we can expect SEOs the world over to do everything they can to stay on top of more algorithm changes, including trying out new approaches to optimization that will eventually become SEO trends.
Whether or not the trends they create or ride on the wave of will last remains to be seen. What’s certain is that these latest SEO trends are going to make a splash in 2020:
The rise of voice search will challenge SEOs.
Forty percent of adults used voice search at least once a day in 2019. That figure is expected to hit 50% in 2020, which will pose quite a challenge for SEOs.
Considering the world of difference between typed searches and voice searches, SEOs will be hard-pressed to produce matching voice search strings. Then again, this shouldn’t be a problem for SEOs who think and speak the language of their audience.
Video will continue to dominate.
Video has been around for some time now, but in recent years, we have seen it grow to become the most popular type of content. And the video is expected to become even more popular in the next few years, as it’s expected to comprise 82% of all web traffic by 2022.
In 2020, more businesses will feature more videos about their products and services on their websites. However, video’s dominance doesn’t mean webmasters should forgo other types of quality content such as:
- How-to articles
- Authoritative blog posts
- List posts
- Infographics
Feature more videos, but continue posting any of the ones listed above.
Longer content
Video may be the current and future king of content, but the written word will always be there, especially when it’s of excellent quality and, says several studies, longer.
Well-written, useful, and relevant articles with 2,000 words or more will be more common in 2020, as articles of such quality and length tend to have better visibility than much shorter posts. Longer articles also increase the dwell time of visitors, which is always good for a website’s SEO.
Mobile search will keep on growing.
Before Google got the ball rolling on mobile-first indexing, mobile users have already outnumbered desktop users in 2016, and figures from 2019 show how much mobile has grown since then. About 80% of users used a smartphone or a tablet to surf the Internet, and 40% used them for their transactions last year.
What all this is telling us is that it would be foolhardy for SEOs to put optimizing for mobile in the backseat when just about the whole world will be doing the opposite in 2020 and for many more years to come.
Leveraging influencers for SEO will become more common.
We live in a day and age when people are more likely to trust reviews an influencer makes than information coming from an ad. Then again, it isn’t surprising that this is the case these days. After all, the Internet is already saturated with ads, most of which carry messages that people don’t consider authentic.
Many businesses already spend a significant portion of their marketing budget on influencers. In 2020, more entrepreneurs will work with an influencer, particularly one who already engages with their target audience. With the traffic and backlinks they can generate, influencers can actually help you become more authoritative in the eyes of search engines, which should give your SEO efforts a boost.
More people will use other search engines.
Google is the king of search engines. No one is going to dispute that fact. Other search engines have come and gone, but Google remains number one and will stay that way for the foreseeable future.
For other search engines, it will always be a fight for the number two slot, and they will be very much encouraged by the SEO trend where the number of people who use them will grow. The year 2020 will see the likes of Bing, YouTube, and Amazon enjoys an increase in the number of users. The dark horse, however, will be DuckDuckGo, whose emphasis on privacy makes it a very palatable choice for many search engine users.
There was a time when SEOs focused solely on optimizing for Google. Today, it would be smart to start optimizing websites for search engines not named Google. They may just be number two in the hierarchy of search engines, but the rankings, traffic, leads, and conversions they can potentially bring will still be substantial for any business worth it’s salt.
The year 2020 is still in its early stages, but we already see some of the SEO trends above make waves. Feel free to jump on the bandwagon these trends create. Who knows, they might just bring you lots of SEO success for 2020 and beyond.