SEO Strategies to Focus on in 2020

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an ever-changing pursuit. With the new changes or additions to the internet or digital media channels, the parameters that determine how a website ranks in SERPs also keep changing. Meaning your website must be redesigned every time as per the latest SEO trends to ensure you get continuous success in the online business.

Here are the top five SEO strategies that you must follow in 2020 to keep your website updated with the latest SEO trends:

1. Focus on Voice Search for Your Website

Many people use voice searches to find different things on the internet. Probably, you also use Google Assistant, Siri, or Amazon Echo to find out weather conditions or look for specific content on the internet. With voice searches becoming more popular, you also need to consider the importance of voice searches and their impact on SEO effort.

The critical difference in general SEO strategy and the one done for optimizing voice searches is using “natural phrases.” For instance, text searches are stilted, such as the “Best SEO company in Delhi.” But when it comes to voice search, you’d probably use more natural phrases like “Which is the Best SEO Company in Delhi this year?”

You can see how natural, long, and specific the second phrase is, meaning that you have to consider long-tail keywords for better search results.

Moreover, there won’t be too much stress of adding cumbersome key phrases into the blog posts or content. All you need to work on is relevant and natural phrases that people are more likely to use in their day-to-day life.

2. Focus More on Search Intent and Less on Keywords

One of the major changes in the SEO world will be that keywords will become less important. However, many people will wonder about keyword relevancy and how intent-based search optimization would impact search engine results.

But before that, let’s find out what Search Intent is!

In this internet savvy world, now it’s not enough to add a few keywords into your content or blog post and assume that it would automatically show up on top 10 SERPs. This is because Google won’t be showing results only based on keywords. Now, Google will come up with the results considering the intent of a particular search.

In the exact words, Google now wants to display exactly what a specific user is looking for. In 2020, the intent behind a particular keyword usage will weigh more than the keywords.

But that doesn’t mean that keywords will vanish completely. However, SEO experts have to find keywords that could satisfy searcher’s intent. It will be a difficult task, but with proper online SEO tools, you can easily refine your entire keyword strategy for better search intent. This will ultimately boost your website rankings and engagement in a significant way.

3. Optimize Appearances of Featured Snippet

When you ask a question on Google Search, there is a special featured snippet block in the search result at the top of SERPs. This particular featured snippet contains the complete summary of an answer, taken from a webpage, page title, URL, and also links to a page.

You need to work on the appearances of these featured snippets because more than 99% of featured snippets are given to the URLs that rank on page 1 in Google for a keyword in a question. Pages that get the top ranking for a keyword get a featured snippet and, thus, the highest clicks on the interment. Therefore, it’s crucial to work on the featured snippets in 2020.

4. Ways to optimize featured snippet

Here are some essential factors to consider for increasing the chances of attaining featured snippets:

• Use target keywords, along with questions. For instance, questions that begin with words like “why” or “how” have 90% more chances of getting a paragraph snippet than regular keywords. So, you must use proper schema or FAQ schema to generate a query-like keyword for improving your content’s chances of being displayed as a featured snippet.
• Content up to 40- 50 words also have a good chance of being displayed as paragraph snippets. For instance, the snippet on “backlinks” is the content of around 51 words mentioned at the start of your blog post.
• Google prefers truncate lists with over eight items in their snippets. Therefore, work on creating longer lists to encourage users to click on your website content.

5. Expand SEO Strategy to Different Social Media Channels

You must have a strong online presence for digital marketing. This also indicates to have a good SEO strategy. Although social media shares are not responsible for direct ranking, it’s somehow correlated between rankings and social signals.

How this works is quite complicated to explain. However, we would say that the more your content would be circulated on social media, the more traffic your website can get through different search engines. Even this helps in building backlinks, as well as brand awareness, as most people are on social media these days.

That’s the reason why considering an SEO strategy for social media channels is crucial in 2020. Focusing more on essential platforms is a consistent strategy to share content while engaging with followers. It will undoubtedly help you in different ways in online marketing.

5. Make your Website Mobile Friendly

Improving mobile pages is vital because Google’s mobile-first index ranks pages depending on their mobile interface compatibility.

So, even if your website is working great on the desktop, it’s important to improve it for mobile devices to enhance the ranking.

It has become mandatory for websites to be responsive on mobile devices. Otherwise, the users would leave your website and look for another link that’s more user-friendly on a Smartphone or mobile device. So, you must consider spending more time on making your website more mobile-friendly and usable.

You must also consider how your website works on different screens. For instance, if your website is working fine on desktop, you also need to see how it’s appearing on mobile devices. If the website contains additional pop-ups or other elements, you need to make sure that they won’t interfere with the experience of mobile users.

Fortunately, this is not a tough thing to do. Today, you can easily look for different WordPress themes, as well as plugins that are designed to be mobile responsive. But to be sure, do test your website on different devices to see what improvements need to be done.

Conclusion

SEO has always been and will continue to be an integral part of any website creator’s work. However, you must be aware of what new SEO trends and strategies to follow to make your website rank higher on search engine result pages.

Since technology has evolved to a great extent, there are some key changes in new SEO strategies as well. So, you must be well aware of what SEO trends are working in 2020 and which ones are outdated to ensure your website is up-to-date.

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