4 SEO Trends

As businesses become more and more dependent on their online presence to stay competitive, understanding new and emerging SEO trends remains vital to success. 

This year brought with it a global pandemic, economic shutdowns, record unemployment and national protests — making recent changes in Google’s search algorithm pale in comparison. 

However, as businesses around the world continue to rely more and more on online services to connect with customers, these SEO trends will greatly impact business growth this year and beyond.

Read below to learn more about 2020’s 4 biggest SEO trends:

• Evolving Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence rose to prominence over the last decade and, in October of 2019, Google introduced Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (BERT) into their search algorithm. BERT technology focuses on natural language processing, and helps Google understand the context of individual words in searches. Most importantly, it is not possible to optimize SEO for BERT. Due to the introduction of this new technology, businesses must create the most useful, high-quality content possible, written with the user — not SEO — in mind. 
• Growing Prominence of Entities: Entities aren’t discussed often, but Google is putting more stock in them than ever before. According to Google, entities are “a concept that is well-defined, unique and distinguishable.” Both websites and products can become entities, which means those sites that offer many different products — which can all be entities — will have to carefully consider how to frame these products to meet user expectations and Google’s learning capabilities.
• The Power of the Knowledge Panel: The knowledge panel gives users a snapshot of a website or personality, and can be an excellent tool for directing user traffic. Recently, Google began to allow entities to personalize the information on their knowledge panel — allowing them to control what information is presented to users. This is a fantastic tool to build brand trust and rapport with followers, and claiming your website’s knowledge panel is the first step. However, this is not as simple as it seems; typically, unless you are a famous person or your brand is widely recognized, claiming a knowledge panel is difficult. That being said, it is important for businesses to focus on building brand trust with users gradually, with claiming their knowledge panel as an eventual goal.
• Load Speed And Mobile-Friendly Websites: Mobile-friendly websites are more important than ever. Google prioritizes websites that offer the best user experience, which includes websites that are optimized for mobile devices. Business owners must make sure that their websites on mobile devices load quickly and are formatting for easy viewing in order to be ranked higher in search results. 

With several months of 2020 remaining, it is important to keep an eye on the changing SEO landscape in order to quickly spot new trends and changes.

For more information about SEO trends from the experts at Spider Marketing Group, please contact us here or call us directly at 616.406.9695.