Seo In 2020: What Are The Current Trends You Need To Know About?

By Author: Kiara K
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With up to four broad core algorithm updates per year, search engine Google continuously changes the way its algorithms arrange the search engine result pages (SERPs). Aside from the major updates, smaller updates are frequently rolled out and other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo are equally working on the improvement of their algorithms. This means that the SEO landscape is constantly changing. 2020 revealed several trends worth looking at if you want to keep your website relevant for appearing in the top results of the major search engines.

1. Keeping Up with Updates

In line with Google’s broad core algorithm updates from the past few years, Google continued to hone its algorithms this year with the January 2020 Core Update and the May 2020 Core Update. The January 2020 Core Update, which rolled out in mid-January, mainly shook up a part of the “Your Money Your Life” niche and websites that were affected by the September 2019 Core Update. The May 2020 Core Update, which rolled out early May, caused a great shift in the organic positions of online communities, arts and entertainment sites, business ...
... platforms and sites in the health industry. Both updates were primarily concerned with the tweaking and tooling of previously introduced algorithms. This meant that Google’s advice on how to handle a drop in traffic due to the update was by simply adhering to the same rules the company had provided before. Still, this doesn’t mean you can’t optimizing for these updates. The first thing to do is to take a good look at your content.

2. Write High Quality Content

Content has became one of the most important ranking factors for Google. Since the introduction of the company’s A.I. for reading and understanding text – and the related August 2018 broad core update – it has become more important than ever to produce high quality content. In order to rank well within the SERPs, web texts should be strong, relevant and unique. The times when you could write a simple text and stuff it with keywords is long gone; content now has to be natural and clearly written for users rather than search engines. Google’s recent core updates have mainly focused on adjusting the way the algorithms go about their quality assessment for content.

Webpages that offer users qualitative content rank will better then “thin content” pages. In order to write quality content, first make sure that your texts closely match users’ search queries. If you are targeting a certain keyword, make sure you understand the search intent behind the query matching that keyword. When writing your text, always remember that the keywords you use should serve your content; not the other way around.

Finally, look beyond your body text and check if your page title, meta description header tags, images and their alt tags, and other visual elements are all aligned to serve the page’s purpose.

3. Give Credit Where Credit is Due

Every article has an author, but not every author is granted authorship. 2020 is the time to change this. One of the key factors in how quality is judged is by checking the prove of expertise. This is especially true within the financial industry and the health industry, but goes for other branches as well. You can claim our authority by adding author information to your blogs and articles. A recognizable name and a well-written biography give off clear signals to both your readers as well as search engine crawlers that the article was written by a real person, with real experience. To up your expert status, add social media buttons referring to business profiles such as LinkedIn; this provides users and search engines an easy tool for fact-checking the identity of a pages’ author.

In addition to providing author information, it’s always a good idea to credit third party sources in your blogs and articles. By referring to a qualitative article or research report from a reliable third party, you emphasize the expertise of your own page. Make sure to include a follow-link to your sources – especially when you quote them; if you’ve used their work, don’t make the mistake of indicating you refuse to show a sign of trust.

4. Prepare Your Site for the Page Experience Update

In recent years, Google started pre-announcing its broad core algorithm updates a few days in advance. Still, the announcement of the Page Experience Update was quite unique: announced on May 28th, the update don’t roll out until early 2021. The early announcement of the update gives you plenty of time to prepare for the rollout.

The Page Experience Update will be focused on the assessment of the experience users have on websites. The criteria are mainly concerns with the basic web elements that facilitate the idea of user-friendliness: the use of the a secure HTTPS protocol and the presence of a reliable security certificate, the mobile-friendliness of pages, page speed and the “Core Web Vitals” that are connected to the page speed metrics. In Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, the following elements are labeled as Core Web Vitals:

• First Input Delay (FID): the algorithm checks whether the interactive elements which users can either click on or engage with are loaded and working within 100 milliseconds. Prevent users from thinking your page has crashed when they are unable to quickly click on the interactive elements.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): when the layout of your page visually shifts while the user is already trying to engage with interactive elements, this often causes problems. Prevent this from happening by making sure your page is visually stable within 0.1 seconds.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): rather than focusing on the First Contentful Paint (FCP), the algorithm looks at whether the largest element “above-the-fold” is loaded within 2.5 seconds. If not, it may appear to users as if the page is not loading properly.

5. Get Ready for Mobile Indexing With a Responsive Design

Google has stated their deadline to switching all websites over to “Mobile First” indexing lies around September 2020. Though this deadline has since then shifted to early 2021 due to the COVID-19 epidemic, Google’s message is clear: if you haven’t prepared your site yet for this shift, now is the time to do so. Make sure your mobile site is in order; this means that the user experience of visitors using mobile phones should be at least as good as the experience of visitors using desktop computers. One of the best ways to deal with this shift is by using a responsive website. A responsive website will render its pages based on screen size of the device it is opened through. The layout will also automatically change when a user adjusts their window size.

In addition to a responsive design, also take a good look at possible technical optimizations which will help you enhance the user experience of mobile users, such as page speed, button sizes and other elements. Make sure all content shown on your desktop site is also shown on mobile; hiding content for certain users or devices will be judged as imperfections.

6. Implement structured data to increase your CTR

Increase the Click-through rate (CTR) of your site by implementing structured data. Search engines have the option of displaying rich snippets within the organic search results. These snippets are tiny bits of extra information, which offer additional value to searches. To become eligible for these data snippets to show up for your webpages, you have to implement structured data. Keep in mind that since April 2020 data-vocabulary is no longer supported by Google; the search engine now prefers Schema, formatted through JSON-LD.

The number of snippets that are being displayed in the organic search results has gone up rapidly over the past year. To somewhat curb large number of Schema implementations, Google’s selection of which snippets are shown has become stricter. Make sure your structured data is flawless and complete. Implement the right snippet on the right pages, don’t abuse the aggregateReview-snippets and make sure your structured data doesn’t contain any information that is not visual on the page to which they are linked.

Don’t Forget the Basics

In the first half of 2020, Google has shown to place a strong focus on quality content and user-friendliness. Still, it is important not to lose sight of the basics of Search Engine optimization: if a website has any technical defects or points of improvement, neither its content nor the value of its backlinks will truly flourish. You can’t built a house without first constructing a sound foundation.

In short, 2020 is the year of the user: Google (and Bing) in particular have developed their algorithms in such a way that they can now look at websites from the perspective of a human user. From 2018’s August broad core update and 2019’s BERT Update up until the more recent May 2020 Core Update, each change Google implemented honed the semantic reading skills of their algorithms. If you provide visitors with valuable unique content and an easy-going user experience you’ll be able to create a natural and satisfactory web experience. The quality of this experience will then in turn also be picked up by search engine crawlers, as they stop by for their quality assessment.

Source: https://www.lequal.nl/diensten/zoekmachine-optimalisatie/