2020 SEO: The Ultimate Guide to Your 2020 SEO Strategy
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Hitting a successful SEO ranking seems to get harder and harder each year. 2020 has not strayed too far from the SEO strategies of 2019, but there have been significant changes that you need to be aware of in order to hold onto your website’s high ranking or begin climbing to the first page. For instance, have you thought about how important Tik-Tok and voice searching have become for ranking? Whether you write and publish a website for yourself or hire a blog manager to create and curate content for your business, this guide will show you how to stay on top of the SEO game in 2020.
Key aspects of SEO for 2020 can be broken down to the broad categories of:
- Quality Content
- Dwell Time
- Optimizing for How People Search
- Featured Snippets
- Appealing to Your Audience
- Social Media Marketing
Quality Content
The bar for well researched and informative content is high, and E-A-T remains as important as ever. Users want accurate, reliable, and well researched information from well cited and transparent sources that is informative rather than salesy. You want to make sure that experts write your content for the best authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Length also plays an important role for SEO because varying the length of your articles will make them feel more natural and less automated. Users also want to remain on a single authoritative source for their information needs.
Backlinks rank high in Google’s evaluation of sites for page ranking, so much so that without it you likely will not get on the first page. Creating reliable and high-quality content will benefit your E-AT and make your site appealing for others to link to. It is also a great idea to promote your site in high traffic areas like blogs and podcasts that are relevant to your business. For a lot of blogs, you can ask to guest post once you’ve built your relationship with them and gain links to your site and publicity that way
Dwell Time
The key strategy for increasing dwell time on your site is making the user experience as seamless as possible. You will want to make sure your site loads quickly on desktop and mobile devices as every second of load time increases the percent of users that click away from your site. Without this, your other strategies will never get a chance to shine!
How can you increase dwell time?
- Clearing out or repurposing old content will make your site more trustworthy to search engines and users.
- Setting links to open in new tabs will help avoid high bounce rates and keep users on your site.
- Placing key information towards the bottom of the page while keeping it easily accessible will retain users as they search for what they need.
Optimize for How People Search
In 2020 trends continue to move further away from forms of searching like typing keywords into Google and clicking through the first few hits. This makes creating content that popular forms of searching can easily find an essential SEO optimization strategy.
Video has become an invaluable avenue for SEO optimization. To take advantage of this, you can invest in creating video content on platforms like YouTube, Tik-Tok, and Instagram. You can then link to this content on your site and have new platforms to help boost SEO and connect with new customers/clients.
To do this, you want to make sure you use keywords in your descriptions, titles, and video tags. You also want to break your video into clear and understandable sections that Google can understand. Also keep in mind that while transcripts generated by YouTube can be accurate, often they contain errors, and making sure your video transcripts are accurate and available can better your SEO optimization and user experience.
Searching by voice is also very popular with the ubiquity of products like Alexa and Google Home. What this means for SEO optimization is that it is beneficial to include natural language such as the questions likely to be asked along with the answer on your site. Phones, Alexa, and Google Home, for instance, will grab onto a title matching the question they have been asked if the answer is also readily available in that content. If the answer can be put into a numbered or bullet point list, you can also stand a chance at snagging the coveted featured snippets place.
Featured Snippets
For SEO in 2020, Featured Snippets have become invaluable because they prioritize lists and bullet points so much that they will put them on top of higher-ranked sites and ads despite the rest of the page’s ability to rank. You want to aim to rank high and optimize for Featured Snippets to claim what is being called position 0.
To optimize for Featured Snippets, you want to use concise paragraphs, bullet points, infographics, and numbered lists that answer user questions succinctly. Google sees elements such as these as easy answers to questions, so using them will increase the chances of your site being the Featured Snippet even if you are not the #1 ranked link.
While paragraphs are the most common, you will potentially want to optimize for other forms of Featured Snippets such as lists and tables as well. You should diversify the media you use for your content and use elements that make sense. Infographics are very helpful, but if a list does the job best, use a list. Remember to always stay succinct with elements of your site— reliability, concision, and creativity are key.
Appealing to Your Audience
Lastly and obviously, all of your SEO strategies should have your audience as their focus. Understanding which strategies will appeal to those you want coming to your site will make or break the effectiveness of your SEO.
For instance, as it was in 2019, search intent remains an essential aspect of SEO. Making sure people get results that match the information they seek heavily influences ranking on Google. You need to make sure you understand the intent behind someone searching a term; is someone who Googles “RAM” looking to buy a computer part or learn more about it? Getting this answer correct will put you in a better position to be on the first page of search results and help you build a loyal following of readers; if they know your blog covers topics they’re interested well, they’ll subscribe and read each post. They will also be more likely to interact with the content and share it to their respective social media pages.
Knowing your audience also allows you to cultivate a community on your site through tools such as comments sections, and this user activity will positively impact rankings for blogs and other sites. Along with this, the constructive feedback given by the people who consume your content will allow you to better optimize your SEO strategies for future growth and traffic.
Making Your Social Media Work for You
By 2020, you’d think most people would have caught on to the many marketing opportunities social media has to offer, but there are still a few business owners that don’t know what they’re missing. Social media is a great way to promote your business, connect with your customers/clientele, and spread brand awareness. There are myriad marketing opportunities, both paid and not, of which businesses, large and small, can take advantage.
Free Social Media Marketing Opportunities
There are a number of ways that you can still make your social media work for you without spending a dime. First off, you can get free publicity through social media. If you’re not on every social media platform (yes, even Pinterest and Tik-Tok), you’re leaving free marketing opportunities on the table. Sure, you reach a much wider audience by paying for Facebook to promote your content, but you can still do some promotion for free on your own.
Here are a few tips for free publicity through social media, for more in-depth suggestions, see the our article on social media marketing:
- Post on a regular schedule
- Interact with your followers
- Stay on message
- Optimize what you post
Paid Social Media Marketing Opportunities
As we mentioned above, you can reach a wider audience through paid promotions with Facebook and Instagram. These are typically done in slight charges on a per-post basis. The better a post does organically, the cheaper it will be to promote it using Facebook Ads. If you’re looking to grow your social media, paid promotions can help your posts get seen by an audience that otherwise would’ve been out of your reach.
We recommend only boosting posts that are optimized and engaging. Make sure each post that you boost contains media (videos or images) and is tagged. Boosting posts that are already doing well will cost your business less while also increasing the content’s chances of success.
Promoting Your Website Through Social Media Marketing
You can also use your social media to boost your website’s SEO rankings and attract a wider audience to your content. You can use this platform to distribute your blog posts, new products, new services, etc. which can be done in the following ways:
- Posting on your own profile
- Posting in groups
- Posting in comments on other’s posts when relevant
It’s key that you only post blog posts in relevant groups and in comments when it is organic to discussion. Otherwise, no one will want to go to your content and you might get yourself banned from groups or pages. If your posts are organically engaging, your audience will share your content, widening your audience each time the post gets further distributed.
Whether you are growing your own blog or hiring experts to produce content for you, understanding the current SEO strategies will help you gain traffic to your sites. Following this guide will make sure your site climbs the ranks and stays on Google’s first page.
Just always remember to:
- Create accurate, reliable content that provides information and answers questions.
- Utilize strategies that keep users on your site for as long as possible.
- Optimize for the new and popular forms of searching.
- Understand and engage your audience to build community.
- Be active on social media and use it to distribute your content to a wider audience.