Jan 1, 20204 min read

Spark Your SEO in 2020 with Top 5 Trends

Updated: Mar 4, 2023

Without a doubt, 2020 is turning the SEO world upside down! In order to navigate the world without confusion, it is our job to continually educate ourselves in the best SEO practices that are constantly changing with technological developments. This allows for the opportunity to get ahead of the competition on search engines.

By implementing a few SEO tactics, 2020 could be the year that your business hits the top of Google Search! Let our team at Sparketing Agency help you reach the top and make your business more successful!

Don't ignore these upcoming SEO trends!

2020 TREND #1 | AI & SERPs Are Evolving

Unfortunately, Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are not what they once were just a few years ago.

While most believe Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are distinctly different disciplines, the fact is that they must work in collaboration with one another. SEO specialists would prefer long-form content and lo-res images but CRO would rather have micro text and hi-res beautiful images. This is because SEO is focused on how to attract visitors to your site and CRO is focused on getting those visitors to buy, buy, buy!

Google recently published an article featuring some rather intriguing information about the ways that Google Search is changing and becoming more intelligent:

"Using data to refine results is one reason Search results are getting better even as the volume of data around the world continues to explode."

~ Andrew, McAfee, Co-Director at The MTI Initiative on the Digital Economy

The facts about machine learning and smart search was extremely interesting, but for us it was exciting to see that the search engine acknowledges user behavior is now being included when ranking pages.

Google's algorithm has evidently been missing out on user behavior in the past. Always stressing that it's goal to provide the best possible results for users. Yet, it doesn't seem that search had been using its own data to review how users behave.

Ultimately, websites will now rank higher based on customer experiences more so than standard SEO.

2020 TREND #2 | Strengthen Keyword Research

Evolving from a search engine to an answer engine, Google will require you to strengthen your keyword game. When keywords were used to improve the relevance of each web page, keyword research now will be the foundation of your SEO strategy.

To upgrade your keyword research strategy, use a combination of these tools:

Forget thinking about keywords, but instead, think about "topics" in order to map out secondary keywords from your primary keyword seed.

2020 TREND #3 | SEO Learning

SEO Lensing (also known as PageRank sculpting) takes diffuse traffic and focuses it into a beam like a magnifying glass.

Just as a magnifying lens focuses on the diffuse rays of the sun into a tight beam of light and burns a blade of grass, so can SEO Lensing. Replace the light with organic traffic and instead focus direction on high-converting landing pages.

The idea is to take poorly ranking pages and use them to:

Create a single outstanding page.
Better match content with user intent.
Offer visitors a better experience.
Flow PageRank from multiple URLS into a single page.
Remove low-quality pages to increase trust and authority in the domain.
Provide additional opportunities to generate buzz and backlinks.

Comment below and let us know what you think of this new strategy?

2020 TREND #4 | Voice Search

With Voice Search being around since 2012, everyone assumed it was a lost project in the ever-growing Google beta graveyard, but it's here!

With Google, Siri, and Alexa-type devices growing in popularity, it is likely the future of voice search is here to stay. While the adoption rate is slower than predicted, it's vastly becoming needed in our lives in a number of ways:

Schema Markup - released nearly every month with one of the latest developments being for movies. Smart speakers (now numbering 120 million in the U.S.) are now requesting websites to take advantage of the 35.6 million voice search commands taking place every month. And, those featured snippets providing easy-to-read, authoritative answers can be mighty lucrative.
Speakable - used by Google Assistant to answer people's questions about specific topics. Able to return up to three relevant articles as well as provide audio playback using text-to-speech markup, the assistant is highly lucrative as it attributes the sources and sends the full article URL to the user's mobile device.
Google Actions - a development platform for Google Assistant allows the third-party development of "actions", or applets, that provide extended functionality. Actions can be used to get things done by integrating your content and services with Google Assistant such as: build actions to ensure Google Assistant uses your apps, allow users to search for and engage your app, and provide your app as a recommendation for user queries.

2020 TREND #5 | Video Is Crucial

Clearly, Video is the key digital marketing trend for 2020!

In today's fast-moving world, many people prefer to get their information and entertainment from videos. By optimizing your video content you can bump your YouTube presence for your business.

96% of people agreed that watching videos helped them learn more about a product or service.

By following the suggestion below, it could be a make-or-break SEO effort for your business.