SEO trends to watch out for in 2020 from the experts at SERPninja 

There is hardly any business organisation that does not seek refuge in the most effective marketing tool of the 21st century, and that is SEO. That being said, SEO is quite tricky. Even the best of SEO analysts cannot furnish a set of formulae hoping to conform to them for every project that they handle. Google is smart and keeps SEO experts like Daniel Foley on their toes.

Speaking of SEO, you must understand that Google keeps upgrading its metrics without a warning, all because its best interests lie in enhancing the user experience. There is no specific time span until which a particular metric shall hold well when it comes to ranking. Therefore, the onus of keeping up with Google’s ever-changing metrics falls upon the SEO analysts and experts. Experts must make it a point to analyse the trends early on so that it is not difficult to conform to them. We shall look into the trends that are to follow in the year 2020 so that it becomes easy to understand the shifts in Google’s rubrics of SEO and engineer the methods in ways that they suit the changing requirements of ranking on the SERPs.

Analysts are of the opinion that the ‘Featured Snippets’ or which can also be known as the ‘Position 0’ shall rule the market of SEO in 2020. For the uninitiated, featured snippets are the results you find at the very beginning of a search engine results page. They come before the first organic result and furnishes quite a bit of information about the search you were going about. This enhances the user experience as users can already get the hang of what they can expect out of visiting a particular website. This saves their time and effort and helps them get to the specific detail they have been looking for without expending much energy. The bottom-line of this point is that ‘Featured Snippets’ shall be a dominating factor in the domain of SEO in the year 2020. "Some clients are concerned that featured snippets increases the possibility of no-click searches” says Brighton based SEO specialist, James Hubbard, “however, with the correct Schema markup application in place, I have seen many clients improve their organic click-through dramatically”.

Google shall rank websites that has a richly designed website optimised for mobile phones as well. There is hardly a soul out there who does not own a smartphone. Therefore, for Google (or any search engine, for that matter) to rank a website on a conveniently visible spot on the SERPs, it is essential that your website is optimised for mobile phones. Mobile-first indexing shall trend, and it is not advisable to relegate this trend as secondary.

Google favours websites that take the least time to load. Users are bound to leave a page if it is slow to load. Therefore, if you want your page to rank high on the SERPs, make sure it is quick to load and display its contents. A slow webpage will have a high bounce rate, and this is not something that can contribute towards your website’s higher rank. Thus, optimising the loading speed of your website is a trend to watch out for in the year to follow.

Multimedia enhances user experience because a specific content can be understood and explained much better when it has the support of the right multimedia. This, by default, enhances the search experience of users and enables them to use their time and effort more effectively. The trend of multimedia is not entirely a new one and has been around the corner since the dawn of SEO. However, this is something that shall never cease to go out of trend. People are big on multimedia, and they like it when they have pictorial representations and videos to turn their attention to while going through a specific content.

 Voice search is the new thing on the block, and its popularity has gone over the roof. Turn on the television, and you shall find several advertisements for Amazon Echo and Google Echo. The feature of voice search has made the lives of people easier and much more convenient than ever before. Therefore, it is no surprise if voice search takes over the realm of Search Engine Optimisation in the year that shall follow. Users shall benefit quite a lot from this feature as it shall use the natural language of the users to furnish them with the required results. Therefore, you might start working on enabling the voice search optimisation feature for your website.

Several trends might make into the domain of SEO and also become obsolete with time. But one element that stays unparalleled is the quality of content. People have less time to go through a website with errors and grammatical mistakes. They will leave the site at once if such is the case. Therefore, the content remains the king, and there is no dethroning this king until SEO continues to have market dominance. However, in a bid to frame your content around the best keywords possible, do not fall into the vicious cycle of stuffing the text with redundant words and anchors. Anchors must always be optimized to go along with the topic we are dealing with. Do not inject the anchor forcibly into the fabric of the content, lest it shall seem inorganic and out of place.

 Vadym Zyabkin, a Search Engine Optimization expert at SERPninja says, 'In 2019, we've noticed the Google updates to tighten the scrutiny of anchor text. Over-optimized and over-used anchor keywords tend to do more harm than good, and brand/naked URL anchors + generic anchors relevant to the root niche tend to boost the terms one is trying to rank for indirectly in a much more effective manner.'

Therefore, keep your content crisp and clean and avoid over-optimising your anchor texts if you are to obtain a suitable rank on Google's results.

It is going to be 2020 in less than a month, and people do not want to settle for shoddy and half-baked content anymore. Your website’s content must always be designed in a way that can help users find specific answers to their search.

SEO keeps evolving, and it shall be inane to presume that a technique that could do the trick in 2018 shall be as effective in 2020 as well. One cannot confine SEO for small businesses into any one watertight compartment, and the right way to devise effective strategies for ranking would be to understand the pulse of the search engines and then come up with ways that can provide your website with the much-required edge.