For years now, the essence of search engine optimization stays the same. Focus is always on creating quality content, getting high-quality links from reputable sources, and prioritizing the trending and relevant keywords. And this is important for every business that is present online. SEO is Google’s way of determining which website should rank higher when people search for a certain query. Without it, it wouldn’t be difficult to manipulate the search results. So, it’s task is to keep everything fair. However, there are some advanced SEO techniques for 2020 that you can use to boost your rankings.
And don’t get us wrong, all of the things we’re going to mention aren’t unfair advantages. These are just the things you need to pay special attention to if you want to get ahead of your competition. If you suit your customers better, they’ll come back to you more often. So, here’s what you should do.
Prioritize Mobile-First Ranking
The end of an era of desktop users officially ended at the end of 2016. That’s when mobile users exceeded them. And, according to expert reports, 73% of internet users will access the web via mobile devices by 2025.
What this means for you is that your website should be accessible on both desktops and mobile devices. You may be aware of Google’s not-so-recent Mobile-first indexing that was an effort to make the internet a more mobile-friendly place. Since then, the mobile version is a must-have for good SEO. And if you don’t have it, the best way to build traffic to the landing page is to make one.
Mobile-First Indexing
To explain, what mobile-first indexing exactly does is that Google primarily uses the mobile version of the content for both ranking and indexing. It’s an option that is by default enabled on all new websites. For the existing ones, however, they will continue monitoring based on the best practices.
If you ask the ‘man’ itself what to do, they say that attractive looking, user-friendly designs will get fast ranking results. Therefore, optimizing a website for searching through it on a mobile device is a must in 2020. Here are some tips on what to do.
- Make a switch to the responsive website as soon as possible
- Verify your mobile site as a separate entity in Google Search Console
- Both versions of your website need to serve structured data
- Make compromises towards user experience (remember that people use smartphones differently to desktops)
- Content has to be easily readable over a mobile device
Optimize For Speed
As always, speed is what matters in 2020 also. Naturally, every business wants its website to provide a great user experience. And since user behavior is constantly evolving, there are people tracking these changes. So, now we know that pretty much 50% of the visitors will leave a website if it doesn’t load within three seconds.
Therefore, pay attention to optimization as one of the most important advanced SEO techniques in 2020. However, to achieve higher authority for your domain that may not be enough. If it’s needed feel free to move your website to a better hosting option. Additionally, you can eliminate unnecessary JavaScript and CSS files and detect any unintentional 404 errors.
Include More Video Content
If you want to go with the times and stay relevant, you must incorporate video content into your SEO in 2020. The rise of stories in social media, the incredibly fast-growing number of smartphones, and the way people spend their time on the internet made video extremely significant.
More than 80% of the users in the United States watch online videos and engage with them. How things sit right now the number of minutes people spend watching these will only go higher in the future years. Although video content is becoming quite substantial when it comes to marketing, it’s not like you can forget about writing guest blog posts, getting high-quality backlinks, and other things regarding the SEO.
Its purpose is a bit different. Videos should be a tool to reach and capture a wider audience. Concentrate on creating quality content for all fields you operate in and try to genuinely help your customer with these. You can only benefit from that.
Improve Voice Search Rankings
Another aspect of SEO that you can’t afford to ignore in 2020 is voice search. Some reports state that by the end of this year, almost 50% of all searches will be conducted via voice.
If you haven’t used it, you must have heard about it by now. Voice search allows users to speak into their device instead of typing keywords to generate results. Started with Google Home, Siri, and continued with Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa, this way of browsing the web was among us for quite some time.
And since it improves user experience significantly, voice search optimization is highly regarded by Google. To get the most out of it, write content in the way people speak. It should give candid answers to the questions people ask. Focus on local search as it seems that the majority of these queries are location-based.
Conclusion
As we’re sure you’re aware, SEO is vital for any online business to survive in today’s extremely competitive market. Link Department conducted research, and we concluded that not only that it helps you boost your SERPs, but it also boosts the conversion rate. It’s an inexpensive way to make your brand popular in the most natural way possible. When you’re among the first few results, people tend to trust you and you get a large number of visitors.
However, to get and stay there you need to follow the advanced SEO techniques for 2020. It will continue to evolve, as you should do the same along with it.