Businesses will need to tune their SEO strategies for success in 2020 by aligning with fluctuating user needs and their evolving behaviors. Google, the world’s leading search engine keeps updating its algorithm to dominate the search industry. Last year, it reported more than 3200 updates, including 10 major ones. So, you also need to adapt to these algorithmic changes and changing search behavior of the users to stay ahead and rank high in 2020.

Here, we have come up with 8 top trends that a SEO services company need to follow in 2020 to keep you ahead of the curve.

1. Conversational voice searches – Search the way you speak

With the growing use of mobile devices, voice searches are becoming popular among the users. Voice searches can be done not only on smart phones but also on home-voice assistants such as Amazon Echo, Samsung Smart TV and Voice Pod. So, the organizations will need to implement conversational voice searches in their SEO strategy to reach out to a wider audience and rank high in internet searches.

2. Click through rate (CTR), dwell time and user satisfaction level

As people are becoming accustomed to getting information on their fingertips, click through rate (CTR) and dwell time, or the length of time a user lingers on a webpage before bouncing back, will become vital for your SEO strategy in 2020. The two metrics differ in that while the CTR tracks the number of people clicking a link, dwell time tells about what people do after clicking a page, not the number of people who clicked it. Both of these metrics are important to know about the satisfaction level of the users, and whether they are able to find the information on your webpage that they are looking for.

3. Optimize for local SEO

Businesses will need to focus on location-based searches for promotion among the local customers.  Local searches account for nearly half of the all online searches, so your business need to appear in searches when the buyer is close to the location you offer your products and services from.

To rank in local searches, do the following:

• Optimize your Google My Business and Apple Maps Listings
• Optimize your website content for local search keywords
• Make a responsive and mobile-friendly website as most of the local searches are done on mobile
• Create local landing pages for your website to rank for different locations
• Keep updated Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) information on your website

4. Rich content with videos and snippets

You need to enrich your content with video containing storylines of the situations that can be linked to your audience, as video content has enjoyed increasing popularity for years among the uses, along with blogs, podcasts and AI content. You need to create content for the users who mainly consume videos. This will help your audience stay tuned with your website’s content. You also need to follow the structured markup and standards with Google and other search engines for snippets that they look into your website.

5. Visual search

When we buy offline, we use our eyes or visual search to choose a product. Internet visual search translates this to the online world. It is done by using images instead of text for searches. The image will be scanned by the AI to understand its elements, and based on that; user will be presented with the results of the product they searched and also other similar ones. Google and Amazon are among the top visual search platforms that can understand human faces, places, animals, plants, and much more. Businesses will need to optimize their products for displaying on Pinterest and Amazon for better visual search results.

To optimize your visual search:

• Submit images in the sitemap for the search engine crawlers to access them
• Apply schema markup for easy comprehension of your image
• Use high quality images only for easy readability by crawlers
• Optimize alt text for better understanding of your content

6. Content diversification and SERP marketing

You need to optimize your website for all other search elements in addition to the traditional organic text searches, such as knowledge graph, related videos, People Also Ask, and visual results, as Google is building up to be an ultimate resource to provide comprehensive answers to any search query by the internet searchers. This is known as search engine result pages marketing or SERP marketing. To dominate SERP marketing, you need to analyze your current opportunities and set up your content collaboration strategy, incorporating content diversification, to come up with quality content assets in various formats. With content collaboration, you can empower your marketing with more benefits, including enhanced trust and shares by users.

7. Optimize for mobile and voice search

Consumers spend a large amount of time on their mobile, three and a half hour on an average each day. In view of this changing user behavior, Google has introduced Mobile First Indexing, wherein it predominantly uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking. If your website doesn’t look good on a mobile or there is less content in its mobile version, it may lose rankings both in mobile and desktop searches by the users.

• To optimize your website for mobile and voice searches, do the following:
• Structure your content with H2-H3 subheadings to address questions behind user queries
• Provide quick answers below each subhead for the search engine to grab and feature
• Optimize your featured snippets as only one result is read out to the users

8. Semantic search and intent optimization

Google no longer provides results based on the exact-matching keywords. It doesn’t use actual strings for words being typed by the users in the search box. Instead, it looks at the “query intent” and does analysis of the possible search intent of the user to come up with the intended results they are looking for. So, your old-school content development methods that focus on a single keyword string won’t benefit you any longer to be discovered by your target audience. You need to provide content to the searchers that they want and solves their problem. You can consider using semantic search tools, such as Text Optimizer to cluster a user’s search query into related concepts and entities. The tool can help the content creators build sentences based on common co-occurrence analysis of the terms that you select to target.

These were some of the SEO services company tips that digital marketers and webmasters can implement in their search engine optimization strategy for 2020. At Flexsin Technologies, we keep our marketers and content creators always updated of the latest SEO developments, tricks, tools and strategies, and can implement innovative internet marketing strategies to help our clients outsmart the competitors. Get in touch with Flexsin Technologies to bring success your online business in 2020, leveraging the experience and skills of our SEO experts.