SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a vital role in a brand’s online success. And it needs to be an on-going part of your marketing strategy, as companies are always trying to find ways to outrank you for your industry keywords.
As we work on our clients’ SEO strategies for this year, we wanted to share some of the key 2020 SEO trends that we’re seeing emerge. If you need help figuring out how to best employ these strategies for your company, please reach out to us for a free consultation and analysis of your brand’s website.
3 Top 2020 SEO Trends
Mobile and Voice Search
Let’s start with voice search. What exactly is voice search? It’s searching for anything using just your voice. Think of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google’s voice assistant. How do you generally use these devices? You ask them questions.
One of the best ways that you can benefit from voice search optimization without partaking in a paid ad campaign is by ensuring that your content is easy to read and thorough. The average Google voice search result is written at a 9th-grade level and is usually 2,312 words in length. Google only reads about 29 words, so having short, concise answers to the questions your content answers is essential. Having an ample amount of content, yet having short sentences all feeds into your readability score. And this leads us to our next trend.
In addition to optimizing for voice search, being optimized for mobile is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a must. It was shown that in 2019, 80% of users used their mobile devices to search. The ad spends on mobile searches was estimated to be approximately $28.12 billion in 2019 alone.
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s hurting your Google rankings. Not sure if your website is mobile-friendly? Reach out to us, and we’ll provide you with a free custom report taking a look at your site’s mobile health.
Content-Length
We should start this section by saying that having quality content is vital. It’s quality over quantity, always. Every sentence should serve a purpose. However, you do also want an ample amount of content. Research shows that the top 10 results on Google typically have an average of about 2,000 words. If a web-page, blog, etc. has the quality and lengthy content, it is likely to get more visibility.
The trick here is, a longer post will require a user to spend more time on your site (thus lowering your page’s bounce rate). This shows Google that readers find your website helpful, which can have an impact on your rankings. However, you don’t want your content to be too long, as this can overwhelm users and drive them away. It’s a dance between having enough to satisfy Google and not too much so that you create visual fatigue on the reader.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers have become a massive trend in recent years, and the trend is continuing to grow in 2020 with a more significant focus on micro and nano influencers. These are influencers that have a smaller audience (though still sizeable – think around 10 to 20k). These influencers tend to have a higher engagement rate than larger influencers do that have a 100k+ following.
How does influencer marketing tie into SEO?
Influencers create content and post it for their followers to see. Ideally, this is multiple pieces of content – a blog post, Instagram post, tweet, and Facebook post. The goal is for this content to lead consumers to click a link and then visit a brand’s profile or website (and create a quality backlink to the brand’s website).
Brands often reshare this content on their own social media as well, helping create high-quality content for their social presence while taking advantage of being able to reach a broader audience through their partnership with an influencer.
SEO is continuously evolving and changing with every new Google Search algorithm update. And to put that in perspective, in 2018, Google reported 3,234 improvements made. That averages out to about nine updates a day. That’s more than eight times the number of updates they did in a year a decade ago. Knowing what updates are being made (and how to utilize them for your website best) is key to your site having good rankings with Google.
We know it’s a lot to keep up with. So if you need a little extra help, please reach out to Excite for a free consultation. We’d love to help you take advantage of these 2020 SEO trends, as well as the ones that Google will be releasing in the future.