SEO Trends for the New Year?

Behavioural Changes

SEO is important to anyone who is remotely related to the online world. Whether you are providing a service or are a seeker, SEO impacts everyone in one way or the other. Yet, it is more crucial to those whose entire livelihood depends on it.

From user behavioural changes to Google’s tweaks, every year brings something new with it as far as search patterns are concerned. Hence, it becomes vital to cope with those changes for entities at the business end of the spectrum.

It has been made clear by Google through its constantly evaluated and changing guidelines, as well as by the users through their preferences, that content is the king in the battle of rankings. Yet keeping pace with the trends should go hand-in-hand with the quality so that you do not find yourself missing out on any opportunity.

Let’s discuss some important trends that SEOs and marketers need to watch for:

User Preferred Content

Since the benefactor or rather the influencer, who is the user here is the one who is affecting the entire decision-making, it is important to pay attention to user intent and preferences. The analysis behind the content selection should be customer-centric. Content that users like will garner more eyes. In a world of sharing, better content will always be rewarded by shares, enhancing visibility. Discovering the expectations of someone initiating the search and providing them with the best answer in the simplest form should be of prime importance.

Increasing Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness

Summed up as Google’s E-A-T guidelines, these serve as guardians of the users’ interests. One should ensure that their efforts fall under those guidelines, while being sincerely customer-serving. Efforts should be directed at gaining authority on a subject matter before delivering authoritative content.

SEO Practices Beyond Google

Search platforms are increasing, evolving and diversifying. Hence, it is important that focus is not concentrated on one platform. Especially for niche markets such as app development, it is relevant to promote the app through websites; however, it is also important that the app ranks within an app store. Similarly, overlooking voice-enabled home assistance devices would not be the best strategy as these devices are slowly but gradually gaining popularity among modern households.

SEO extinctions

2018 and 2019 were tumultuous years for SEO. The main difference going into 2020 is that we now have some idea of what to expect.

There are two ideas that are likely to go extinct this year. One is the idea that content spinning and link networks (black hat SEO) can provide sustainable rankings. Google is getting ridiculously good at identifying this behavior, so the net is closing on these techniques. The other is the mythological E-A-T concept. Companies are quickly discovering that they can produce great quality with great credentials and still fail to rank – and in many cases, technical SEO is the real culprit.

Google is now starting to explain its updates to the general public, and coin its own nomenclature. The likely effect is that the SEO industry will become less clandestine and rumor-driven.

Last but not least, it seems unlikely that Google’s campaign to clean up the health web is over. The previous two core algorithm updates actually rewarded a few anti-science sites and punished some very strong evidence-based sites. Once again, this is due to the importance of technical factors in determining “authority.” Google will be looking to refine this system to ensure that “Your Money or Your Life” queries receive professional results.

Content marketers can write naturally

With the release of BERT, which enables Google to better understand the context of search queries, I believe this will hugely shape how content is created, updated and maintained in the New Year.

In terms of how this will affect content, I believe it should make things easier by putting the onus on being completely natural. For example, previously, long-tail keywords could be difficult to optimize for because many of them are constructed with Google in mind and do not sound natural. Also, in Google’s own examples of search before BERT, these unnatural long-tail keywords brought results that didn’t meet the user’s needs. This made it tricky for content marketers, and it often resulted in unnatural sentences and texts being constructed to try and capitalize.

However, BERT should now make it much easier to rank for these long-tail keywords just by answering the question and writing informational pieces naturally. In essence, I feel that it is an extension of how content has been reshaped towards answering featured snippets. The end result of BERT should be beneficial to everyone – content marketers can write naturally and have a better chance of ranking for unnatural long-tail keywords. Google can answer the user’s query much better, while users also have a more pleasant time actually reading more natural text.