SEO in 2020 - What to expect

Are you already planning your SEO strategy for 2020?

Here's mine:
Do what's bringing your brand in front of your target audience.

In SEO, this means inbound marketing at its heart.

Now, many SEOs and online marketers argue that with voice search coming up, natural language processing (NLP) getting stronger with BERT, artificial intelligence slowly but consistently getting more ground, one should really be focussing on those new areas of interest.

And I don't disagree completely - those themes are part of the mix, and we definitely need to take them into account.

At the end of the day, Google can best serve their users when they fully "understand" where their search intent comes from, and completely comprehends how a certain piece of content tries to respond to that.

Voice search is everywhere - more and more households have at least 1 or multiple Alexa devices or similar assistants from Google or Apple - so voice search is definitely always important - schema markup goes hand in hand with that.

But I digress ...

The reason why I'll continue to focus on inbound marketing can be summarized with one of my clients' inbound marketing-based blog visibility:

inbound marketing 2020
Inbound marketing based strategy

Essentially, what we have been doing here for the last years (I had the pleasure of starting SEO for this project right from the beginning) was to focus on numerous pieces of content, optimized for SEO, interlinked where it made sense, and supported by external links.

A strategy that has been standing the test of time for 6 years straight.

A combination that, for this particular client, brings in numerous sales day after day, week after week, month after month.

Now you could argue that this only works with high quality, long-form articles with tons of research, bla bla bla ...

No! Dead wrong!

This works with pieces of content responding to hundreds of individual search intents and user questions.

Inbound marketing works where search intent-based content meets external non-spammy links.

Here's where it's going to be different in 2020 in my point of view (call this my "seo predictions" if you want):

  • 2020 is going to bring more competing content of similar quality
  • 2020 is going to show us more Google Core updates
  • 2020 is going to put more emphasis on site speed
  • 2020 is going to require SEOs to use top-notch on-page tools to prepare their content
  • 2020 is going to take more space on page 1 away from websites in favor of Google properties' results similar to the knowledge panel or the local pack
  • 2020 might be the year where we see the first commercially, AI-based content creators (plug in your topic + a few keywords, the engine is going to write up a text)

Do you think I'm completely wrong about this? Comment below!

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