2020 SEO trends to begin right now

Why wait until after you’ve rung in the New Year to get started on your SEO tasks for the months ahead? As you will well know, search engine optimisation success is no quick trick so we say, hop aboard these 2020 trends now to give your business website the best possible start to a brand new year!

Trend 1: pleasing BERT Google called it the single biggest update to search in years (find our detailed post on this here ), so it should come as no surprise to hear that pleasing BERT is going to be a big 2020 SEO trend. BERT applies NLP principles to search – meaning it allows Google to understand search queries and intent better.Folding this into your SEO strategy will mean creating content with the user at the forefront. BERT should help Google to better understand context of searches, so ensuring your content marketing and landing pages have clarity is essential. Trend 2: Content quality will matter even more We’re always preaching the value of good quality content but we expect that it will become even more vital in 2020. This ties in to BERT of course, because as Google gets better and better at understanding search intent, it wants to return the very best results. Let’s be honest, there is a lot of rubbish floating about online so search users want to find the most relevant, helpful and informative content with their Google searches.The pillar and cluster approach to content is a good way to ensure you’re really leveraging this trend and means your content will naturally be more detailed and focused. Trend 3: Brand building Link building is hard. And it’s getting harder. Which is perhaps why we expect to see more SEO campaigns focusing on brand building, with links as more of a by-product. In local SEO, how prominent your brand is remains a core pillar of visibility and next year could see this seeping into traditional SEO too. Here, we expect to see a focus on generating high quality editorial content, securing guest blogs and features for thought leaders and prioritising media coverage. These activities naturally come with links but, they go above and beyond mere link building to bring added value. They also work to raise the overall profile of the business which can also lead to other SEO benefits such as more click throughs, lower bounce rates and greater social proof.