Though nobody really knows what the world of SEO has in store for 2020, there are some predictions that SEO specialists are starting to pick up on and we haven’t even reached the end of January. Because of the complexity of these predictions, there are many businesses out there looking to outsource their SEO tasks to specialist agencies. But, a lot of these businesses don’t know how to choose the best digital agency. The truth is if you speak to an agency about your SEO and they do mention the predictions that we are about to discuss, then you should continue your search. These predictions are expected to dominate the world of SEO, so it’s important to take note. Let’s get started.
User-Focused Content and Optimisation
Late last year, Google’s BERT update gained a lot of attention from businesses and marketers across the globe. Naturally, every SEO specialist wants to learn and develop a strategy that is optimised for this update. Content now needs to be written to align with user search intent rather than just including information that a user might look for (known as string matching).
E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
This year, Google will continue to look at reputation and expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). In fact, businesses that have struggled with a poor reputation in the past and going to struggle competing in 2020. There is going to be a big focus on the quality of content to fight against fake news and misinformation. So, focusing on the trust value of authors is going to become even more important.
Structured Data
So, as we have discussed, we know that trustworthy content is going to be very important in 2020. But, Google’s algorithms still do fully understand the context of pieces of content. What this means is that structuring data becomes of paramount importance. It helps Google to understand how each element of content relates to other pieces of content on a website.
Zero Click Searches
Google is likely to continue testing new features than makes search queries even more seamless. For example, there are probably more features being developed like their recent mortgage calculator. It’s features like these means that the number of zero-click searches are on the increase. From a user perspective, this is great, but with KPI always being on the forefront of businesses that use agencies to handle their SEO, the challenge of measuring result could get a lot more complicated.
Mobile-First Indexing
Mobile optimisation has been important for a number of years, but we have now reached the stage where it is an absolute necessity. In fact, the days of having a mobile version of a website as an alternative to desktop are long gone. To put this prediction as simple as possible, Google will now be prioritising desktop websites and consider mobile versions as the main content of websites.
JavaScript
In 2020, it is expected that Google will continue to improve the way they crawl JavaScript. Whilst this may help with the challenge of trying to build visually compelling websites that can be indexed properly, this might also push digital marketing professionals towards understanding the backend a little bit more. This is particularly important because once Google perfects the way it crawls JavaScript, SEO specialists are going to need to understand the language a lot more.
SEO Summed Up for This Year
Take our SEO predictions with a pinch of salt but do keep them in mind as you continue to plan your strategy for 2020. If you are relying on informative content this year, then expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness is going to make more sense for your SEO efforts than anything else. However, if your content covered highly complex topics, then you will also need to put a lot of focus on the way your data is structured so that Google can crawl and index the content properly. The most important thing you can do is to keep your eyes peeled for trends and predictions so that you can continue thinking about the bigger picture and not just Google’s latest algorithm update.
