Online competition continues to increase amid the rampant growth of new websites and pages. According to Tourquemag.io, WordPress alone gets more than 2 million posts published every day. Or 24 posts every second!

This means that it is more difficult than ever for you to get your blog to the top of the search engine result page (SERP).

Your website must meet certain criterion set by search engines to be successful. And SEO is easily the most important part of it.

Showing up on the first page of a search engine such as Google can be the difference between a thriving business and one that has gone bankrupt. It is a Google search that leads users to visit your blog post or product page and ultimately make a purchase.

SEO ensures that your site appears in the search results when a user enters a query relevant to what you offer. In other words, it aims to increase a website’s visibility on the web and brings more organic traffic to your blog.

Since the search algorithms are being continuously updated, it can become quite challenging to keep track of the changes. While most of these changes are minor, it is crucial to keep them in mind because they could still affect your search ranking.

This post will help you refresh your SEO strategy and overview the changes it has undergone in recent years. It will also help you reevaluate your SEO strategy and the way it can be done in 2020 and beyond.

Here are the new changes in SEO and the expected updates to keep an eye on in 2020.

The rise in voice search:

Voice search is the next big thing in online marketing as more and more people now speak their search queries the way they type.

Data shows that voice searches have risen 35 times since 2008. Additionally, around 20 percent of searches on mobile are voice searches. The surge in voice search is because of virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home.

To optimize your website for voice searches, SEO experts advise implementing long term keywords that natural phrases and language. Since more than half of searches will be done verbally in the coming years, voice search is something that you cannot ignore in 2020.

Featured Snippet:

Featured snippets are blocks of information shown on top of the search results page for any query. They present a summary of an answer that is extracted from a webpage containing its URL and title. Featured snippets appear at the first spot on a page, also called position #0.

As per SEMrush, more than 11 percent of all searches currently have a featured snippet. To further complement this number, around 55 percent of clicks from Google originate from featured snippets. This means that snippets can be used to drive more clicks and significantly improve the traffic to your website.

Intent-based optimization:

One of the greatest changes in the way search engines display results is that the user’s search intent is getting more and more relevant. It is no more just keywords and phrases that will get you on top of the SERP. It is because Google now considers a searcher’s intent when showing up results.

Creating content that matches searchers’ intent will be a must as search engines try to give the right results to users’ queries.

Video is a must:

According to Cisco, video will constitute 80 percent of all online traffic by 2021. And this may still not satisfy the users’ demand for video content. As a result, experts predict a rise in advertisements using video as a marketing tool.

This is because internet users, particularly the younger generation, prefer to watch video for entertainment or academic purposes. So, it may be wise for businesses to keep video content on the radar.

Video SEO will, therefore, become more crucial than ever to reach massive audiences. To be able to do so, you will need to use appropriate keywords in the title and description of the video. This will ensure that you reach the largest number of users interested in the subject.

Quality content is still the king:

Creating top-notch content is still a primary requirement of an effective SEO strategy. As online ads become more expensive in the coming years, you will need more than just ads to attract new customers.

Even after spending millions on advertising, there is still no guarantee that it will pay off. This is because only 9 percent of digital ad spend is viewed for over a second. The overwhelming 91 percent of online ads spend just go wasted.

To make up for it, you will need content that is well researched and properly structured. Readers want articles that are easy to read and navigate. Most of the users will ignore blogs that are too complex and salesy. As you ponder over how to develop a content strategy, make sure you come up with a plan that doesn’t make your content seem like a sales pitch.

Improve your CTR:

Click-through-rate is a factor that helps a search engine decide whether your content is relevant to a search or not.

If a user ignores your site when it appears on SERP for a particular search query, Google thinks that your content is not relevant for that query.

In order to make your website relevant for keywords, you will need to improve your website’s click-through-rate.

Try to optimize your titles and descriptions so that they become attractive and more likely to be clicked. Additionally, you can also take help from Adwords Ads. Look for the words frequently used and try to apply the same pattern of usage when drafting your title and description.

Final Thoughts:

2020 will be a tough year for marketers to get their share of organic traffic from search engines. As consumers’ behavior change, we will see more updates to search algorithms that aim to make search engines more secure and transparent. But you can lead the competition by staying up to date with the trends shared in this article.