Staying up to date on SEO trends allows businesses to consistently rank websites at the top of search engines. With Google making hundreds of changes to its search algorithm every year, it is never certain which websites will perform the best.
Now that the year is halfway through, it easier to see which factors are having the biggest SEO impact in 2020.
Here are the top 5 SEO trends of 2020:
Rise Of Voice Search
Voice searches continue to grow in popularity as more people are looking for an easier way to search on mobile devices. Google reports that over 27% of all people online use voice search on mobile devices.
The increase in smart home technology is also contributing to the rising popularity of voice search. As of early 2020, over 66 million Americans own a smart speaker. This number is expected to reach 76 million by the end of the year. As the sale of smart speakers continues to rise so will the use of voice search.
Video
Video marketing will continue to be a major SEO trend in 2020 and beyond.
According to Zenith Media, the average person is expected to consume 100 minutes of online video per day by 2021.
The rise of visual image search is also contributing to the importance of video content. Since 2018, videos have appeared in image searches on Google. As image searches continue to rise, videos will become a more effective way of gaining search engine exposure.
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are a brief summary of the answer to a search query. Google displays a featured snippet at the top of the search results, above paid ads and organic pages.
Below is an example of a featured snippet for the search term “how to start a blog”:
Featured snippets have dramatically changed Google’s results pages. Many users are able to find the answers to questions without needing to click on any of the results.
When searchers do decide to visit some of the results, featured snippets receive more traffic than the first organic search result. Structuring web content to gain a featured snippet can provide a tremendous boost to SEO traffic.
Mobile Search Dominance
Google switched to mobile-first indexing in July of 2019. With mobile-first indexing, Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a web page for indexing and ranking.
The switch to mobile-first indexing is the result of the continued dominance of mobile searches. In 2019, over 60% of all searches on Google came from mobile devices.
Optimizing content for mobile is no longer a choice but a necessity for high ranking pages.
Long-Form Content
The need for long-form deeply informative content is here to stay. In the early years of search engines, writing a 500-word blog post was enough to land on the first page of Google’s SERP results.
However, this is not the case today. Studies show that the average length of the top 10 results today are at least 2,000 words.
Web pages with long-form comprehensive content improve user experience and rank well as a result.
Conclusion
Understanding the latest SEO trends can help businesses improve search ranking positions. Knowing what types of content are performing well makes it easier to craft a winning long-term strategy.
It is clear that many users are shifting away from the typical text search on a desktop device. Creating in-depth content optimized for mobile and voice search will set businesses apart in 2020.
