Make the Most of your SEO in 2020
The world is a changing place, and this is never felt more than when it comes to technology. As 2020 starts, we will all be looking at the advancements that will affect and benefit our businesses. And one of the areas where we have to change and adapt to help businesses with the ever-flowing tide of technological advancement is search engine optimization (SEO).
If you are not moving with the times in terms of SEO, you can bet that your competitors are. SEO has a very real effect on businesses these days and without a strong digital marketing strategy, you will find that your company will get lost in among the sea of other businesses. And if you are not coming up toward the top of the search engine results page, then you will be will struggle to attract new business.
2020 promises more changes to SEO. Here are the areas that your business should be focusing their attention to hit the top of the search results.
1. Featured Snippets
We’ve all seen featured snippets. These lists, paragraphs, or tables of information that will appear above the search results when you Google a question have become very handy for users. They give a very quick response which means that they don’t have to trawl through lots of sites trying to find the specific answer to their question.
The great thing about these snippets is that they sit above the search results, in position zero. If you want to beat your competition, leapfrog them by optimizing your content for featured snippets. How do you get your content to become a featured snippet?
• Frame your content as a question and answer
• Try and answer multiple related questions with one set of answers
• Use numbered headings
• Use informative tables
2. Greater Mobile Optimisation
It’s been five years now since mobile browsing overtook desktops in terms of making online searches. This should be a well-developed and mature area of SEO, yet some businesses are still yet to adapt and fully embrace this change, leaving their site unable to load correctly on a smartphone.
But with most of your users now accessing your business’ website via a smartphone or tablet, then you need to adapt. Google has been using smartphone crawlers now for quite some time, so if your site is not mobile-friendly, it will relegate you in the search results. Make sure that your website design is suitable for the screen size. Avoid Flash on your pages, do everything to optimize your load times, and carry out a full mobile audit on your site.
3. Voice Search
With the number of smart speakers such as Alexa Echo and Google Home. on the rise, and increased use of smartphone-based AI’s such as Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri, we are talking to our technology more than ever.
With the increase in voice search and artificial intelligence, we are having our search results refined by these digital assistants. So, when it comes to creating content, we need to make sure that it is optimized in a way that these AIs favour. You can do this by:
• Use tools to find natural questions to include in your content
• Structure questions in your content in a natural flow that allows AI interaction
• Work with Alexa Skills and Google Actions
• Optimize your content for featured snippets
• Optimize your content for mobile
4. Local SEO
Local SEO is still a big deal in 2020. In fact, even more so. We constantly check out details of local businesses and the information that gets returned through Google Local Packs is invaluable. You need to be aiming to be in that section, and you can do this by ensuring that you have all of your contact details, trading hours, address, business type, and more listed on as many local listing sites as possible, and with Google My Business.
While Google Local Packs may provide a ‘zero-click’ result that will not generate a visit to your website, this won’t be too much of a problem as the information that a user can take away from this search is not something that would really provide any kind of conversion in the click-through.
5. Maintain Your General SEO Strategy
In 2020, it remains business as usual for many of the general areas of your SEO strategy for your online business. Make sure you are optimizing your keywords by keeping them relevant, look at improving your page speeds, and as always, create meaningful and naturally written content that is designed to inform readers.
