It’s hard to believe that we’re already an entire month into 2020. It seems like just yesterday we were all celebrating Y2K and then shortly thereafter optimizing websites with keywords in white text at the bottom of each page.
Thankfully we’ve graduated from gaming the system and now get to focus on creating the highest quality experiences for our website visitors.
So, what ranking factors are in store for SEO in 2020? Let’s dig in because there’s a lot to unpack.
5 Important SEO Ranking Factors in 2020
#1: Focus on the user
With the introduction of BERT last October (2019), we now have a framework for increasing AI and machine learning capacity within Google (and amongst other Natural Language processing tasks). BERT wasn’t a standard algorithm update, but it has completely upped the stakes when it comes to machines’ contextual understanding of language and conversational search.
What this means for SEOs is that Google is only going to continue getting smarter. It’s going to get better at understanding what users really mean when they’re searching for ambiguous queries like “bank” (financial institution) vs. “bank” (of a river) — or even more nuanced language like how the meaning of the word “get” or “run” can change drastically based on the words it’s surrounded by.
This is how we speak as humans and now with BERT, machines (like Google) will be better able to interpret these nuanced phrases and anticipate the user’s intent.
This means that we as SEOs need to focus on:
- Anticipating the needs and intention of our target audience, and creating web pages and content that speak to their needs
- Expanding our keyword research to not be so narrowly and literally centered on the product or service itself, but tapping into Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to find the terms that indirectly relate and surround that product or service.
For example, if you sell dog food, don’t just target “dog food” — think what your users might be looking for or wanting and incorporate that as well, such as “how to transition my dog to a new dog food,” “is grain-free dog food really necessary,” or “best dog food to help my dog lose weight.” Then create an epic piece of content around those phrases, vs. just having a single product page.
In other words, don’t be a salesperson, be a helper. Your SEO will reflect this positively. - Creating a great on-site user experience. Add real value to your user as they arrive on your site by creating content and an on-site experience that meets and anticipates their needs. Wow and inspire them vs. just selling to them.
Using the dog food example again — why just have a product page when you could have a quiz developed to help them determine which type of dog food formula would be best for their unique situation? Or providing funny “review” videos from dogs themselves demonstrating how dogs love your product?
User experience has been a critical part of SEO for several years now, but in 2020 it will likely matter more than ever.
#2: Yes, you still need to create content. But make it purposeful
Content in 2020 will still be important when it comes to SEO. However, I think we need to reframe why content is important.
For years after we marketers learned that “content was king” and saw how it helped positively influence rankings, everyone jumped on-board and began flooding the web with content. Nowadays there is an enormous amount of blog posts, white papers, guides, infographics, etc. out there on nearly every topic you could imagine, and frankly it’s just hard to stand out unless you’re publishing 30,000-word guides and have a full production team behind you.
That’s why we need to reframe the role content plays in SEO. Walking around saying “content is king” won’t do it anymore — now it’s more like “User is king/queen” and content should just support that.
If you’re sensing a trend you’re right, we’re right back to point #1 of focusing on the user.
At the end of the day, yes — do your keyword research. Yes, create an outline so that your piece of content hits on some SEO-friendly topics. Yes, write your meta data and label your headings before publishing.
Dot your basic SEO i’s, but to be honest, some of the best content that is created is content that is helpful. It’s not written from a sales perspective, it’s not touting your own product or service every paragraph, and it’s not just chocked full of keywords. The best and most-effective content even from an SEO perspective is the content that users want to read. It’s content that truly understands what’s on the user’s mind and either:
- answers a question
- solves a problem
- educates and/or enlightens
- delights and/or inspires
Keyword research can help identify some of these points and give you insight into what your audience is interested in, curious about, or having problems with, but creating purposeful content based on user interviews, customer service website chats and/or calls, or other user feedback is also a wonderful way to connect to your audience.
#3: Make sure your website is technically sound
Technical SEO has long been a part of any SEOs repertoire, but I think we need to become even smarter about this in 2020. Why is this so important? Yep, you guessed it: User experience. 🙂
If we want to provide a good user experience, we need to have a technically sound website. This is often one of the first things we work with clients on because I think it’s that important — it sets the stage and foundation for everything.
Here’s a few common things to watch out for when it comes to technical SEO:
- Site speed on both mobile and desktop. I recommend using GTMetrix or Google’s page speed tool to test this and identify areas of opportunity for improving
- Broken links. SEMRush or Screaming Frog are great tools for finding broken links on your site, but you can also use a free tool like BrokenLinkCheck.com if you’re on a budget
- URLs. Audit your URLs to check for structure (no special characters, underscores or stop words), and also see if there’s areas where you can improve your folder structure if it makes sense. For instance, instead of having service pages that are essentially on their own, consider whether it’s worth it to put them in a subfolder like /services/service-name. This won’t always be the best answer because changing URLs can have big SEO implications, but I’ve seen great results from reorganizing URLs if it’s done correctly (ie don’t forget your 301 redirects).
- XML sitemap and robots.txt file. You’d be surprised at just how many sites I run across that are not utilizing these technical documents properly. Always double-check these to ensure that you are telling Google the right pages you want indexed, and which should be ignored. It’s a simple check and usually a simple fix, but not something to be overlooked.
- Structured data. It’s 2020 folks, which means you need to be using structured data (like Schema) on your website. Use this to mark up key information such as business info, contact info, location info and blog posts. This can do wonders for your SEO and help you stand out from a crowd of sites who may not yet be using this to their advantage. Also as a bonus: structured data can help make your site/page/post more eligible to show up for Google’s Featured Snippets, which we’ll talk about next.
#4: Go after Featured Snippets
Google’s Featured Snippets have been all over the SEO news world this past week due to a “deduplicate” update released January 22, 2020. This update made it so that a website cannot occupy the Featured Snippet (sometimes referred to as “position zero” because it appears at the top of the SERP) and a traditional blue link down below.
However, this shouldn’t discourage you from pursuing SERP Features / Featured Snippets — which include things like People Also Ask (PAAs) and Instant Answer Boxes — because they’re currently the best way to get exposure for your brand and website.
This is especially true now that more than 50% of searches are zero-click searches (meaning they don’t result in a click through to a website), because people are getting the information they need straight from the SERP instead of going deeper into a website or article.
So if you’re not showing up front-and-center for relevant queries, there’s a chance your website won’t actually get traffic even if you are technically ranking on page 1.
I could go on for days about featured snippets (and often do with our clients), but we’ve still got one more factor to go so for now I’ll leave you with a great resource on how to optimize for featured snippets: https://moz.com/blog/optimize-featured-snippets
#5: Button-up your brand SEO
The last factor that I want to cover as part of this “SEO in 2020” post, is focusing on your Brand SEO.
I’ve been doing SEO for 10+ years so this factor was a little hard for me to wrap my SEO brain around because for most of my career we harped so much on the NON-branded SEO and showing up for NON-branded terms instead of just ranking for your brand.
However, due to significant changes within Google, the huge uptick in zero-click searches, and just all-around competitiveness within the SERPs for nearly all categories, it’s so important to own your brand within Google.
What exactly does this look like? Let’s break it down real quick:
- Your brand’s Knowledge Graph. Whenever someone searches for your brand, you are eligible to show up in Google’s KG on the right-hand side of Google. However, you need to optimize your Google My Business profile and — depending on the size of your business and brand — sources like Wikipedia as well. Ensuring that these are fully up-to-date and accurate will help influence the KG and present your business well to searchers
- Claim your local listings if you’re a brick-and-mortar business. By now we’re all familiar with Google’s local 3-pack (or “map pack”) for localized searches. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, you must find a way to own this space and the other local listings sites like Yelp. I suggest that if you are an enterprise company looking to up your SEO game, that you look into Yext local listings platform. If you’re a small-to-medium size business, Moz Local is a more affordable option that still helps you aggregate and update your local listings all from a centralized platform.
- Finally, this sounds obvious but… make sure you are ranking for your brand name. I’m constantly shocked when I find a brand not actually ranking #1 for their brand name! If this is the case, please follow steps 1-4, ensure your brand name is in your title tags and spelled out in your urls (don’t abbreviate your brand name for your domain name), and then craft a strategy to really dominate the SERPs for your brand name. Because if you can’t then someone else will, and that’s not what you want to have happen when there’s already so much competition out there.
