SEO has been one of the key strategies employed by several businesses for their brand awareness campaigns, regardless of whether they have set up a brick and mortar store, or purely an online business.
This is because search engine optimization techniques are proven to be effective in establishing brand name and reputation. You may have an incredible website, but if your potential customers are not able to find your site when they search for products and services in your market niche, then your efforts in putting up the best site may be in vain.
This is why an SEO technique proves to be of importance because it makes your site discoverable to your target market. SEO agencies are no longer limited to the Western part of the globe.
Over the recent years, SEO agencies have consistently emerged in Asia and over the East. You may even come across Thailand SEO and Web Design Agency, which ensures that their techniques are aligned with the standards of the major search engines. This is because the team behind an SEO agency are usually highly experienced and seasoned developers. They are the ones who are knowledgeable with the latest SEO trends, as well as those to watch out for in the coming years.
For 2020, here are some SEO trends to watch out for.
Content List
Featured Snippets
Google, one of the major search engines, recently employed featured snippets in order to deliver a more user-friendly experience. Featured snippets appear on top of the number one search result, which is why there is a great chance that featured snippets get more clicks and visitors.
Sites that provide clear answers to frequently asked questions in their pages are those that usually land on the featured snippets. Thus, even if your site is not in the top position of the search results, you can still get an immense number of visitors if your link is on the featured snippet.
Website security
Over the recent couple of months, Google, the leading search engine, released a policy to penalize sites that are proven to be risky by ranking them lower on the search results or even posting a ‘not secure’ warning on the link of the unsecured site.
With a lower ranking, or worse, with a warning that your site may not be secure, visitors may be wary of clicking your link. Thus, it is important to enable the HTTPS, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, for your site. This protocol ensures the data integrity and security of the users because their information is encrypted and authenticated over a highly secure connection. Websites that implement HTTPS may experience a slight boost in their SEO rankings because of their guarantee in terms of the data security of their users.
Dwell time
In the past, SEO rankings relied heavily on the click-through-rate factor, or CTR. This is indicative of how many users actually visited your link, compared to the number of users who were presented with your link.
You will have an idea on how many people have seen your link through the number of emails sent that bears the link to your site. On the other hand, the number of users who actually visited your site is often available through Google analytics. With this data, you will have a rough idea of your CTR.
However, CTR will not only be the sole factor that will affect the SEO ranking of a website. In the coming years, dwell time will also be taken into consideration and will prove to be another significant factor in terms of search result rankings. Simply put, dwell time is the amount of time that a visitor to your site spends on your page before leaving. This factor is important because it is indicative of the user engagement and satisfaction with your site.
More often than not, people who don’t find relevant value on a site will only spend a couple of seconds before bouncing out, without actually navigating through the whole site entirely. On the other hand, users who find a site’s content interesting will spend more time invested in the site either because they found the answers they are looking for or they are simply entertained by the site’s content. It goes without saying then that the dwell time is an important metric to consider in your SEO strategy.
In order to ensure that your users will be engaged in your site, it is imperative that you deliver high quality content that includes the relevant keywords aligned with your SEO technique. Apart from this, ensure that your content is timely and that your site is updated because search engines reward sites which are frequently updated with higher rankings in the list. A good rule of thumb in creating your content is that it should follow a logical structure, making it easy to navigate.
Voice search
One of the biggest trends to have a significant impact on your SEO strategy is the voice search. This is because with a voice search, the terms and keywords are more conversational and targeted, which makes short keywords or less relevance. Apart from this, the search engines project that by the year 2020, most searches would be initiated through voice. Thereby, in order to be able to keep up with this trend, your content should be relevant, with keywords that match the conversational and more focused searches done through voice. If you are able to keep up and optimize your website to be able to adapt to a voice search, then there is a great chance for you to generate more organic traffic to your site.
Video content
Apart from voice searches, video content is set to continually dominate the online world in the coming years. Video content proves to be more appealing to various users, especially those in the younger generations. Thereby, to be able to reach more and more users, even your video content needs to be optimized and aligned with your SEO strategy. In order to do this, it is imperative to use the appropriate keywords in the headline of your video, as well as in its description. In a similar way with a text content, users will be able to find your video content with the appropriate keywords in place.
Mobile user interface and user experience
With more and more people using their handheld devices and smartphones to search for anything and everything online, it is imperative that your website should be able to adapt accordingly. Statistics show that 4 out of 5 users utilize their smartphones in searching for products and services. Thus, it is important to invest in a mobile version of your website if you want your page to be able to reach more people in your target market. If your website is not yet designed to be user-friendly when viewed on a mobile device, now is a great time to invest in the optimization of your website in terms of the mobile user interface and user experience. This is because search engines such as Google are ranking websites with mobile compatibility higher in the search results list.
Optimum digital experience
An optimum digital experience continues to be a trend in SEO. This entails the need for you to ensure that you are providing an ultimate user experience to your visitors. One of the ways that you can do so is by seeing to it that your page loading time is at its finest, being able to load in under a couple of seconds, regardless of whether the users are viewing it in their mobile devices or on their computers. No matter how great your site may look, or how relevant and updated your content may be, once your users find the page loading lag time too long, they will have no second thoughts in bouncing. This may heavily impact your dwell time and negatively affect your SEO rankings.
Apart from the platform that your website is built on, there are several other factors that may affect your page loading time and another one of these is the complexity of your site. Your web page will load longer if there are more elements that need to be displayed. Thus, ensure that the layout of your site is logical and easy to understand. Minimize unnecessary elements in your layout to ensure that your users will not be confused in navigating through your site. Additionally, keep in mind to steer clear of jargon in your content that your users may have a hard time understanding. It is important to look at your site as how your users see it to be able to understand what will work best.
It can be deemed that SEO techniques and strategies are unceasingly being revolutionized to ensure its effectivity in terms of the ever changing business needs. SEO techniques also need to be improved continuously in order to be at par with the fast pace of technological innovations. Thereby, it is important to keep in mind that the best SEO strategy is one that leverages on the advancements of the digital world.