We will be looking at the year of SEO 2020 so that you can gain an edge on your competitors.
For a lot of companies, the elements of SEO are more of an afterthought when they’re planning their content strategy.
You know that though. Matter of fact, that’s why you’re here- you know that SEO isn’t a topping that you can just pour on your website and expect tons of success. You know that SEO the base ingredient you need for the recipe of content marketing success.
Search engine algorithms are always updating and changing, which is why it can be difficult to stay on top of SEO trends. Are you looking for ways to keep the edge on your competition by improving your SEO performance in 2020? Keep reading for our complete guide!
Mobile SEO 2020
Did you know that 58% of searches on Google are now completed on a mobile device? This means that there’s been a 27.8 billion increase on mobile searches than desktop.
Is mobile the future of searches? You could say so.
When it comes to optimizing your website for mobile searches, you need to set your website up with a responsive design.
Responsive Design
You likely already have a desktop version of your website, the main version if you will. You can set your website up for responsive, which means that your website figures out what type of device is visiting your website, and directs your visitor to a URL that’s been optimized specifically for that device.
Unlike other options, responsive designs creates this optimized page without you have to create a different HTML or URL for each device that visits your website.
Responsive design isn’t just SEO friendly; it’s a requirement, as it:
- Is super user-friendly (which Google loves)
- Doesn’t create the need for re-directs
- All of your website content is on a single URL, which is great for sharing on social media and getting more traffic
- You don’t have to worry about duplicating any content (Google frowns upon duplicate content)
Still not convinced? Well, what if we told you that Google recommends responsive layouts?
Monitor Competitor Website Updates
If you want to ensure that your website stays on top, it’s important that you keep an eye on what your competition is doing. That’s why it’s important that you keep an eye on any updates that your competitor websites make.
Keeping yourself updated with the changes that your competitor makes to their website will provide you with the opportunity to stay ahead of the game, giving you the chance to process important important that’s necessary for making strategic decisions.
Not only will this give you a closer insight on any new products, prices, and promotions, but you’ll also get a better insight into any new SEO updates they make to their site. What difference does that make for your site? Being on page one of the results versus page two.
Check out Visual Ping, a tool I use to keep track of cometitor website updates.
Create Relevant Content
Nowadays, businesses are competing more now than they ever were before. Anyone can create a piece of content, hit publish, and flood search engines to get the attention of Google.
The only way that you can make sure your website stays on top of search engine results is that you’re producing high-quality content that focuses on improving viewer experience (or knowledge) rather than producing content for search engines that’s stuffed full with a bunch of keywords.
Quality content will drive traffic to your website, which will help your content to rank higher on search engines. Focus on creating content that generates clicks and compels your readers. Higher rankings on search engines will follow!
Skyscraper Content
What exactly is the skyscraper technique and how can it help your online website grow? The skyscraper technique is a strategy that helps to build links by improving thriving content that you already have and replicating the backlinks.
Let’s break it down a little more.
We all want to spend our time reading the best content online, right?
Start by finding a piece of content online that has a ton of backlinks. Create a piece of content that’s way better than the content you found. Get those backlinks that are on the original piece to link to your higher-quality piece of content instead.
Create High-Quality Video Content
Yes, creating high-quality video content will help you to increase your website’s SEO rankings. Videos are the easiest way to consume content online; all a viewer has to do is click play on a video and listen. No reading, no scrolling.
Tons of information can be absorbed in a short manner, when presented in a concise manner. As you’re producing video content for your website, think about what questions your videos answer.
Google tries to display videos on search engine result pages whenever they can for searches related to questions. If someone is Googling a question, Google will suggest a clip or video for a user to watch for an instant answer.
Don’t believe us? Try searching a question right now and you’ll find that Google recommends at least one video result. Create high-quality video content that provides valuable answers to specific questions and there’s an increased chance that your video content will catch first-page ranking.
Develop Eye-Catching Infographics
Infographics create the perfect message. They have the power to turn a boring subject into a fasciniting experience for your viewers. It’s one of the most effective strategies that you can use in digital marketing to offer up information.
The power of infographics allows viewers to easily read through tons of information that’d usually be hard to digest. This helps to get your message across to your audience. More importantly, this helps viewers to engage with your content outside of your website and on social media.
Voice Search Optimization
When building your website to rank for voice search optimization, it’s important that you keep semantic differences in the back of your mind. Let’s say that the viewer is looking to buy a new pair of running sneakers. On their desktop or smartphone, they’ll likely search ‘best running shoes’ but when using voice search, they could ask ‘what are the best shoes for running?’
To ensure that your content ranks for voice search optimization, take time to brainstorm the possible questions that people could ask that relate to your targeted keywords.
You can also make your content easily accessible for people who use home assistance by building custom skills in Alexa or creating Actions on your Google App. Both of these softwares have the ability to interact with your content while a visitor is visiting your website.
Creating these actions makes it possible for a user to have a conversation with your content, which ultimately makes it a lot more valuable to anyone that’s visited your website through voice search.
Use Entity Salience
Entity salience, broken down, is basically the way that search engines understand the content. When referring to SEO, it’s the way Google uses it’s machine learning capabilities to predict what a human visitor will see as the most important things that are mentioned throughout an article.
The entity is something that’s identifiable, like locations, people, numbers, concepts. An example of an entity would be Apple.
Salience is the concept that holds more a linguistic feature that’s inside of a larger text. It’s the phrase or word that’ll stand out more to you use a human reader than the entity. Examples of salience would be iPods, iPad, MacBooks, etc.
When search engines are reading through content, they try to identify the entity of the content, and what the salience of the page is. The salient is the most important content of the page, as website content will typically have several entities.
If you’re looking to have your website content rank for a specific keyword, you have to make sure that Google and other search engines see the keyword as the salient entity. In addition, you have to make sure that this keyword is more salient than the websites you’re competing against.
Elements of SEO to Build Your Brand
To keep your business on top of search engine results (and your competition on the edge), it’s important that you keep up with current SEO trends.
This doesn’t mean that you should only focus on stuffing your blog posts with a bunch of keywords, it means that you should build your content with your users in mind. Build rich, useful content with the skyscraper technique and optimize it for voice searches, video content, mobile searches. Don’t forget to spice it up with an eye-catching graphic to grab the attention of your audience!
Are you looking to learn more about how the elements of SEO can help change your business? Click here to schedule an SEO consultation!
