Featured SEO trends to jump on in 2020

As of December 2019, there were 1,268,289,402 active websites, which means that if there’s ever a time to consider investing in high-quality SEO, it’s now. In this post, we are going to cover what we, as a business, consider some of the most anticipated trends in search engine optimisation this year.

In Google’s bid to constantly refine their algorithms to sort the results by relevance to the search terms, they introduced the featured snippet section of the SERP. This isn’t a new development from Google, as they were initially introduced in 2013. As the years have gone by and SEO has advanced, the featured snippet is now being referred to as the new number one spot. We anticipate that the featured snippet will continue to provide businesses with floods of traffic, the time that we look through Google for answers is decreasing day by day, so this is a great way to get your site to stand out from the millions of other search results.

Video content is on the rise, we’ve already seen mass adoption of video content on the largest social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Since Google acquired YouTube on November 13, 2006, for $1.65B, YouTube has transitioned from a social media site to a working search engine. The algorithm is exactly the same, which is why we’re anticipating video content to be one of the most effective methods of search engine optimisation this year.

Posts with relevance & length

As mentioned earlier, Google are constantly refining their algorithms on a day to day basis to sort content by relevance and length. We are predicting that the more lengthy content is going to perform significantly better than content that’s short & sweet. We would advise that in the research phase of your content production, that you aim for 10% - 15% increased word count to that of the post that has the organic number one spot.

Mobile friendly website design

We’ve been advocated of the responsive design movement since way back when it all started, and ever since Google started to rank sites based on their accessibility and usability to users on all devices, you also should be. It’s 2020, if you don’t have a website that performs just as well on mobile as it does on a desktop then you are doing your business a disservice especially because 80% of users used a mobile device to search the web last year.

Voice-activated search via Alexa & Siri

Slowly, day by day, advancements in voice-activated technology are becoming more and more accessible to the likes of you and I, through devices such as Alexa and Siri on the iPhone. We can only suspect that this will continue to develop and humans will start to make use of it. It’s now more important than ever to optimise the titles of your posts/ website for voice-activated search. A quick tip would be to shorten your titles to quickly sum up the information that your content covers. This links back to the relevance aspect of the search engine.

In summary, SEO is still one of the most successful methods of digital marketing despite website owners’ beliefs. If you would like to see what options regarding digital marketing you have then check out this blog post we produced.