1. Having a mobile friendly website
First thing is that a little bit different about 2020 than previous years is having a mobile-friendly website. You need to be 100% mobile ready with responsive design, super fast website that is an indicator for mobile and just, in general, make sure your website is 100% ready to go there. so anything that’s on your desktop site needs to be live on your mobile site, you need to have fast page speed, you need to be thinking about how users want to interact with your website on mobile because that is going to be one of the most important things for 2020.
2. Great user experience
My second thing is a great user experience. So now with RankBrain and just a general Google algorithm, Google is looking much more at user experience and how people come to your site? Do they stay there? Do you have a good click-through rate? Do they like the intent? So make sure you have HeatMap installed on your website. Make sure you got ContAnalytics. Make sure you are constantly refining your templates and making it better. And you are increasing your page views, your time on site and your conversion rate. Google is looking at this data now and it’s really important that you make a really great quality experience for desktop and mobile users on your site.
3. Pump out a ton of content
My third thing is pumping out a ton of content. That is a ton of high quality, long-form content that users want to interact with. If you can do this you’re going to be in really good shape. Just even our own site, WebZoneLanka. Over the last couple of months, we have increased our visitors over 30000 a month by doing the long form high-quality content with facts and figures publishing on a consistent basis. Don’t just use all the junk out there, make sure it’s really good stuff that people want to read and make sure that you’re targeting keywords specifically in every single post. If you want to learn more about how to do this right check out the other article we wrote on our site Webzonelanka. I think you’re really going to get a good idea of what it’s going to take. This is not 100% easy and you might need to invest in content marketing resources to make this happen but it’s definitely going to be worth your return.
4. Think about voice search
Next thing you want to do in item number 4 is, you want to be thinking about voice search. People are doing more and more voice searches every single day. So you want to structure your content in a way that Google is going to recognize that it is going to serve it as a response to a voice search. There is a really cool tool out there called Answer the Public. One of the things I like to do is I like to put in a keyword find all related terms also do that inside the SEMrush and in addition to that do that inside the Google and look at Google related searches and just do some general keyword research and find all different questions that somebody looking to answer around that time and then create one massive resource around that where it’s basically like a question-answer format and you by doing that what happens is Google realizes that they see all those related answers to questions, they start serving that as a response to voice searches. voice search is really important, therefore make sure you focus on it this year.
5. Acquire natural links through great content marketing and PR
Okay, item number 5 is to acquire natural links through great content marketing and PR. Don’t go out there and try to force external linking. You know, use a weird vendor to get you links from a private blog network or anything like that. If you’re really doing great content marketing, you’re building the brand, you’re doing creative campaigns through social media and then links are going to come in naturally and that’s really the way you want to go about it. You know, linking is kind of slowly, getting less and less important. But it’s still important, but it’s getting less and less important. I believe that trend is definitely going to continue, meaning that how important it is for ranking in Google. For right now it still is, but just get those links by doing great PR, helping out journalist, get those links by pumping out of great content, infographics, data and video that people want to link to. If you could do that, it’s really going to be much better for you. You have no risk, you’re going to have more longevity for the site, and you are going to build the most sustainable online business model through search.
6. Make sure your website is on HTTPS
So my next item is that to make sure your website is on HTTPs. so you need to make sure your site’s security. This is a quick point that I think a lot of people know. But make sure your site’s secure, it actually really matters.
7. Keep working on your click through rates on a weekly basis
My next item is kept working on your click-through rates on a weekly basis. If you can, make sure you’re checking that inside the new Google search console, you can see your click-through rates, the exact URLs, how many impressions you’re getting and how many clicks. You need to keep working on that. The other day I saw one of our most popular pages only had like a 0.4% click-through rate that was killing us by going in updating that getting that more to a 4% to 10% click-through rate. I made a lot more traffic and a lot more leads, and you can do the same thing.
8. Mark Up Your Content Items
Okay, so the next item is use Schema.org as much as possible for your space. Definitely, use the review Schema.org so that people can see how great ratings you have on your own site or the ones you pull over from another site.
But all the different types of Schema that you can add because it’s going to allow Google to better understand your website. Here is a video that describes the importance of good usability signals and brand signals.
9. Keep building the size of your brand
My next item is to keep building the size of your brand. The more people that are searching for you, the better off you’re going to rank. So if you’re running YouTube videos and a whole bunch of people are seeing it and then googling in your branding and then coming to your site, that’s going to help your rankings. If people are searching for something and then they see your listing inside a Google and they click on it because you have a stronger brand, they have that brand recognition and that’s going to be helpful too. Keep running TV and keep running radio or bring those things online and do a branding boost, through display ads. No matter what keep building the brand. Use social media from these viral campaigns because the more people who are searching for your brand, the higher you’re going to rank. Google really picks up on that.
10. Keep a great Site structure
Okay, so the next item keeps a great Site structure. This is so important. If you’ve got that top level keyword, all these supporting keywords, and all these other supporting keywords, make sure you’re setting up a clear hierarchy of how they’re linking to each other and they’re pushing all the authority to each one of them and they’re also cross-linking to each other. So that Google can crawl these things properly. Also be technically correct. If you’re using things like mobile subdomains and AMP and Angular all together, that can really mess stuff up. So make sure you have a technically correct website. One of the biggest mistakes that I see is, if we have a website that’s 100% technically correct and we’re just adding content and building the brand, those people are successful 99.9% of the time. If you have stuff breaking up, you have URLs changing, you’re using things like Angular and too much Javascript and Google can’t pick it up. You’ve got AMP. AMP isn’t rel=canonical properly and things like that. That’s where you see big issues. Be technically correct, have a good site structure. Make sure you have a clear foundation.
11. International SEO
My next item is that when it comes to international SEO, whether it’s English in a different country or it’s a different language in a different country or it’s a different language in your same country. Make sure the content is 100% unique. Don’t try to outsmart Google. Don’t try to put in a bunch of random fields and spin the text and just wrap it together with raffling tags and hope it’s going to be okay. That’s not going to work. Invest in the translation; invest in somebody who understands the language to really help your conversion rate. If you do that you’re going to have a much bigger bang for your buck for the international SEO side. It’s really the right way to do it.
12. Google stories
The next item is Google stories. So Google creates Google stories if you have AMP on your website. And now you can do these AMP stories inside Google stories on mobile that are even animated, right? So there’s Instagram stories or FaceBook stories, there are Google stories. You can create a story inside of Google. It’s mostly on the news side. And it’s mostly for highly trafficked news websites. It’s definitely something you should be looking at. So keep an eye on those stories because when Google releases features like that you can also result in a lot of traffic coming in and publishers getting big traffic spikes. Not just publishers but also people doing content marketing.
13. Keep working on your Meta descriptions
My next item is, just a quick point on this, keep working on your Meta descriptions. I can’t tell you how many times people, they don’t even fill them in. The main things that people look at in the search base are your title and your Meta description. Keep working on that. I know it sounds simple and trivial, but don’t forget about them.
14. Video contents
Okay, so the next item is video. Video’s going to be big in 2020, and there’s a lot of different ways to do it. You can create a tutorial video, you can get it transcribed and you can put it on your website, you can optimize an image around it, you can optimize the video. And that can be a great way to do content marketing. Another way to do it would be, have a really long form article, you can create videos on each of the sections, put them on YouTube, optimize them for YouTube and get them right there and then embed them on the post to make it so it’s a longer post. There’s longer dwell time, people find what they want more and it really starts humanizing the brand. No matter what, a video is where it’s at right now. I think you’re seeing a lot of people merging in that direction because attention span is getting a bit shorter. Text still matters, it is still very important for ranking in Google, but I strongly believe supplementary video in addition to text. The text gives you a lot more synergy, right? So make sure that you’re creating a video strategy for yourself and really working on that this year.
I can go on about things to do for search engine optimization 2020, but at its core, you really just need to have a great foundation. Create significant content optimized around specific terms. You know, do some PR, and do great branding. Have a general advertising strategy going on as well, that’s going to allow you to attract links naturally. Throw some video in there to make sure that you’re supplementing your content marketing, you can better engagement, and you’re humanizing the brand. All these things together are going to result in you getting where you want to go. If you do this correctly, there is zero reason why your traffic shouldn’t be up 20 to 150% this year, depending on how hard you’re pushing it. What I’ve often seen is there are holes in the bucket. Out of all the things I just mentioned, maybe there’s 3 or 4 that are really important that people aren’t doing correctly, either way, I wish you a ton of success this year with SEO in 2020.
