SEO trends keep changing every year. Recently, these changes have been coming more than once a year as well. Google is trying to become the end destination for their user’s journey. For 2020 SEO trends, this is the most influential part. To stay efficient within Google’s framework, you will need to adapt your websites accordingly.

However, hiding in plain sight are Google’s long advertised core changes. On the outset, there might be nothing major new but just the polishing of already announced and introduced strategies. Yet, for SEOs of 2018 who for any reason missed 2019, the next year, 2020 might look awfully new in terms of how things work.

Below are some of the most influential SEO trends of 2020 that will have an impact on how you and your website work:

More Focus on Zero-Click Searches

Google has been rolling out new features during the past couple of years. Features Snippets are one such feature in SERP along with many others that will put the spotlight on zero-click searches. Google’s Local Packs, Knowledge Graphs and sore others have become a part of this zero-click search feature. What this means is that user’s search queries would be answered without them having to click on any links or search results at all.

How to Deal with It?

The first thing to keep in mind is that these types of clicks have very low conversion rate. What people are looking for with these quick snippets is answers to their informative questions. People may be looking for certain addresses of businesses or their phone numbers, which they can get straightaway. Research has shown that conversion rates from these snippets or quick info glances are still very low.

Narrow down your optimization for keywords. Identify which keywords can actually bring the best traffic from the list that you are trying to optimize for. Wasting time on keywords that you think important but are without much traffic pull is no use.

Optimize for Featured and Rich Snippets

As zero-click searches become more important and mainstream, information that shows up on SERP itself is more important than ever. You will need to get rich or Featured Snippets in order to stand out. This trend will be on the rise in 2020 and will change the way webmasters and site owners have been doing their work.

Featured snippets are of course those entire blocks of information that get shown at the top of a search result page in Google searches. These have the ability to boost your CTR and yet getting your website featured in one of these is easier said than done.

Rich Snippets go far and beyond simple blocks of information. These have images, rating stars for reviews, prices for products and services and more added in along with the title and description. However, these bring lower CTR improvements when compared with featured snippets. Results shown in Rich Snippets are more noticeable however even if the SERP position remains the same.

What to Do About It?

Both featured and rich snippets are important and the best way to get them is to have well-structured data on your website. Do a proper audit of your website from a quality tool and find out what needs to be done in order to structure your website better.

You should also know that just about everything including ranking at the first search position guarantees a Rich or Featured Snippet. Yet, if you do optimize your website for them and actually get any one of them, the effort will be more than justified.

Brand Building Is the Way to Go

Paid ads still to this day work fine for social marketing, however, the number of brands and companies doing it has risen astronomically. ROI for paid social ads is decreasing by the day. Organic social is pretty much dead and there are no two ways about it. This is what marketers of today are having to deal with on a permanent basis.

What can be predicted almost for certain is that these paid ads will rise in their costs. This will affect everyone using these paid social ads. One thing that will stand out in 2020 is brand building and brand awareness. Digital marketers will have to let go of their good old ways and meet the market with new brand building activities. And then you also have those link-less mentions that are gaining significance especially with Google and Bing confirming these to be used as ranking signals.

What to Do for Brand Building?

First thing a brand should be doing is to build relevant mentions. Building quality link profiles will be ever more important in 2020 and will need as much attention as handling or managing link-less brand mentions. Social media listening is something that allows for you to monitor every mention for your brand. It also goes far and beyond allowing you to monitor every product/service mention as well.

Using this, you can engage with your clients directly. You can also use this to build better brand awareness through publicly providing effective customer care. This also allows you to inform interested people in your products or services about any promotions or campaigns that might be going on. Smart work can also allow you to find out where competitors get mentioned. Working on how to get your brand mentioned there can be a great plus.

Brand building is now more important that ever and this trend will continue in 2020. Utilizing these social listening tools, marketers can build much better brand awareness by interacting directly with their customer base.

Those Machines Aren’t Going Anywhere

Machine learning has been one of Google’s priorities for a long time. The search giant has spent years learning algorithms to improve user experience with search. This includes avoiding keyword stuffed or negatively prepared and looked after pages. 2020 will see this getting to new heights and become even more of a t hing.

There are several mechanisms Google uses including Neural Matching, which helps understand the actual meaning of a search query. Then there is RankBrain, which helps adjust SERP’s relying on data collected about behavior of the users. And now just recently, we are introduced to BERT, which helps Google analyze the actual structure of a search in a contextual way to make better sense.

What to Do About (or for) These Machines?

The Neural Matching and BERT don’t really leave you much room to do anything pretty much. The Neural Matching algorithm is Google’s inner core and BERT requires webmasters to actually write high-quality content. However, by writing good quality content, both of these can be on your side (until any new update rolls out at least).

RankBrain however, should be treated very carefully. You simply don’t aim to rank for any give specific keyword. Intent matching to master searches is now and even more so in 2020 (and the future) is becoming the thing. You will lose on a huge chunk of SERPs if you only rank and do not go for intent matching at any level.

To master intent matching, a deeper understanding of what is actually ranking right now is required. Monitor the results of ranking pages and observe what type of content is considered by Google to be relevant and matching with user intent. Create content after understanding the search intent of users and even tailor it accordingly in order to master search intent.

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