As new businesses spring up each day, the competition for the reader’s attention heightens. Staying on top of the latest SEO trends will enable you to meet specific requirements that search engines use to rank websites.
Google makes hundreds of changes to its search algorithms every year. While most changes are minor, they could affect your search ranking. These are some of the SEO trends I expect to see in 2020.
1. Voice search: People search how they speak
“Google, can you find the nearest taco place near me?”
There were 33 million voice search queries in 2017 alone. Data from March 2019 shows that 20% of mobile queries are voice searches[1].
As voice search becomes increasingly popular, more people will type search queries the same way they speak.
Notice that most of these search queries are long-tail and very specific? Users want an accurate answer to the exact question they asked.
Users who search long-tail keywords are in the consideration stage and are more likely to convert than someone in the awareness stage.
Bullet lists Increase your chances of ranking for voice queries, and most voice queries are local. Hence, optimize your website for local SEO[2].
2. Featured snippets will continue to dominate search results
A featured snippet[3] is a summary of an answer to a search query. Google displays it at the top of the SERP result, above paid and organic ads.
They’ve been around for a few years and have led to significant changes in Google’s search engine result page. Almost half of all searches result in no clicks because users get the answers they need directly from SERPs. In fact, an Ahref study of 2 million featured snippets[4] revealed that featured snippet gets more traffic than