3 SEO Trends to Stay on Top Of Search Results in 2020
Posted on: Jul 03, 2020 7 min read
According to experts of a well known digital marketing agency who have specialised in search engine optimisation or SEO services, getting top position of your website in organic ranking and achieving your targeted traffic are of utmost importance. However, SEO can never be one-time investment and this is a continuous process of improving content based on the latest updates of Google algorithms.
The biggest of all searche engines, Google tries to improve its search function by organising the information of the world and making it globally accessible to everyone. In the last five years, SEO has already gone through several changes and some game-changing updates of Google are RankBrain, Hummingbird and the Exact Match Domain update. These algorithms make search engines much smarter than before. Though these updates can make life much easy for the end-users, SEO specialists are now forced to remain on their toes to for putting into practice these new techniques quickly in their digital marketing strategy.
BERT: Queries are understood in a better way than before
In the last year, Google had announced its most compelling algorithm update in the five years: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers or BERT. So, BERT is improving how the search engine knows the language and breaks down into queries. The objective is to take up the query on the whole which include context and nuances than criticizing every word. BERT enables Google to match your search queries with more accurate and relevant results.
Since voice sear?h is becoming popular, it is possibly a safe way to believe that BERT will stay. As they have been verbalized, users can phrase their voice queries in the most natural way. The algorithm is particularly useful for breaking down conversational language queries due to its ability for understanding the nuances of the queries.
How you can optimise for BERT
The answer is you don’t as many experts of the industry have warned search community about the inevitable spread of BERT optimization articles. As BERT has absolutely nothing to do with backlinking, insertion of the keywords or technical SEO, it is one of the essential steps for Google to reward accurate and most relevant content. You will have to focus on crafting much better content and cover different topics that your target market will find useful by improving your site authority as an expert.
Experts working in a SEO agency in London have said, BERT’s advanced language processing capability can help to improve featured snippets which ensure position zero can be occupied with the result that can directly answer the query. These snippets when they grow more accurate can lead to another trend this 2020 with zero-click searches.
Zero-Click Searches: Get quick answers for annoyed consumers
In June 2019, nearly 55% of all Google searches had yielded zero clicks. This meant users have found the answers they needed on the search engine result pages and so did not had to visit different websites. Google takes snippets from the ranked pages that offer the most satisfying answers to the queries.
In case of users, the prevalence of zero-click searches means that Google is actually performing a great task of making the information extremely useful for users. Since consumers have grown eager in the last few years, the convenience of not scrolling through several webpages has actually improved browsing experience to a great extent. For businesses, this means that SEO strategy need to be strengthened. Even if your website ranks higher on the search results, then there isn’t any guarantee that they will visit your web pages again. Though the trend opposes your objective of bringing more traffic to your site, your brand will still be able to get benefited through zero-click search optimization.
How you can win over zero-click searches
According to experts of a SEO agency, the most suitable way to optimize for zero-click searches is to win featured snippets. You can try out this by executing structured data on the site which is considered to be a standardized format used for organizing and labelling the information in the webpages. Structured data do not help in improving your search rankings directly, but it has a lot of benefits for SEO. It will make your website much more readable for search engines that can help crawlers to break it down quickly.
Occupying position zero can improve your online presence even though all users do not click through your website. You will have to add your business name in the meta tags, in on-page blogs for improving your brand recall. Featured snippets can help in getting the maximum number of clicks by attracting almost 50% of the traffic. Schema markup is a major tool for structured SEO that consist of three formats such as – Microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD. Google suggests using JSON-LD for structured data as its scripts are easier to add, update as well as remove in comparison to the others. Other than zero-click searches, another trend has shown that the increasing demand for users is quick but with engaging content. More and more brands are now trying to produce videos, as an important part of their content strategy.
Video for SEO: Try to create engaging and informative content
Google is in love with videos and so, are the users. YouTube is the second biggest search engine that uses videos for your content strategy and might lead to greater sales opportunities.
Other than improving your content marketing strategy, videos also have some kind of SEO value in them. Any kind of rich media is shareable as when people share your videos, it can help to get more backlinks thus, boosting your ranking. Videos can get featured in SERP snippets too and you will be able to use them for winning position zero and driving more traffic for your site.
How you can optimize your videos for search results
A reputed agency has been able to do it through keyword research, social listening and monitoring as well as checking out the “People Also Ask” section in SERPs to know what people are talking about them online.
Apart from getting engaging videos, make sure you do not forget about SEO aspect for your media-based content. YouTube can automatically add up closed captions for all your videos, but they are not accurate all the time. You need to check the transcript of your video for any grammatical errors, and then insert some keywords that you want to target. As, web crawlers are text-based, you should be able to leverage caption feature as much as possible.
According to DubSEO consultants in London, these three latest trends such as – video SEO, BERT and zero-click searches will try to improve your content quality as today’s consumers are in high demand for easy-to-find and unique content.
