As we know it, SEO is not static. With the search engine giants always updating and changing things in their algorithm, SEO is an ever-changing process. Therefore, it is vital to be up-to-date on the latest tips and strategies to enhance your website in 2020.

1. Google BERT and User-Focused Optimization

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is an open-source neural network-based technique for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Since Google rolled out BERT in 2019, it has caused a buzz among SEO professionals.

BERT isn’t an update to Google’s algorithms, but it is a technique for improving NLP. It allows Google to process words in search queries with all the other terms contained in the query – unlike the word per word process that Google has been using before.

So, how do you optimize for BERT? Well, Google said optimizing for BERT is impossible since there is nothing to optimize. However, it is possible to apply some simple strategies that can help you with the recent BERT update.

• Write more straightforward and concise content — focus on the context of the words used in the sentences (or group of sentences) that you used in the body of your content.
• Topic clusters — use topic clusters to create signals for search engines that are authoritative/influential for a specific topic that encompasses a wide range of long-tail keywords – which will eventually outweigh the traffic you’re receiving for just a handful of high-traffic, high-difficulty keywords.
• Be specific with the keywords or queries you target.

2. High Quality, Optimized Content

Yes, it’s high-quality SEO content! The fact remains that without high-quality content, you can’t enjoy the full rewards of SEO. Relevant and valuable content on your website will get visitors to stay longer, which can positively impact your search rankings.
Other benefits of high-quality content with SEO include:

• High CTR — Google considers your CTR as an important factor in ranking your website.
• Helps you generate backlinks — An effective strategy to gain high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites.
• Allows you to incorporate keywords — It is the only way to make sure that you can strategically use your keywords.
• Provides excellent user experience — Provides a good site structure that users can navigate easily, optimizing your robots.txt files, and writing good meta tags.

3. E A T

EAT stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust — three factors that Google uses to measure how much trust it should place in a brand or website. 

Google wants to give its customers (search engine users) the best experience possible, so it only wants to promote sites that it fully trusts.

• Include Author Names & Biographies for All Editorial Content — Information about the author needs to be available to evaluate whether they are a suitable expert for the topic at hand.
• Invest in Personal Branding — Having a positive personal brand is vital if you want the EAT quality score for your page to trump others in your niche.
• Cut or Edit Low E-A-T Content — Even though low EAT content on one page doesn’t directly impact the EAT of other pages, but it can negatively impact your site’s overall reputation. Therefore, pages with low E-A-T and very little traffic should be removed in the vast majority of cases.
• Invest in Technical Security
• Moderate User-Generated Content

4. UX and Technical SEO

The main reason for having a website is to attract visitors and convert them into customers. To achieve that goal, you need more than a well-coded site. You also need a fantastic UX design.

A good UX is all about creating a whole experience that will drive people where you want by piquing their interests, translate their needs and concerns, and ultimately convert them. 

UX is about how your visitors will perceive your website. If it is good enough, they will come back for more.

5. Mobile Optimization

Having a mobile-friendly website doesn’t only help customers reach you easily when they’re on the go, but it also impacts search engine optimization.

Therefore, it is necessary to implement a responsive design that will change the layout based on what type of device a user is browsing with.

To determine if a site qualifies as a mobile-friendly website, Google indicates the following criteria:

• Don’t use common desktop Apps on mobile devices, like Flash
• Only use text that can be read without zooming
• Ensure that you use the right size of content to fit the screen, so users don’t have to resize it

6. Programming

With a lot of tasks to carry out concerning SEO, you should leverage programming languages like Python and R to save you time on time-consuming activities.

Automating your SEO processes with specific programming languages will help harness the power of marketing fundamentals in the areas of:

• Branding
• Creating great customer experiences
• Storytelling
• Speaking your customer’s language
• Listening to your target market & providing thoughtful/timely responses
• Providing easy to consume content (in the way in which your users want it)
• Being human

7. Link Building and Brand Building

If you want to acquire quality links in 2020, then move link building from the dark ages into a consumer-first approach. What this means is that you must focus on three types of journalistic writing:

• Planned editorial: Cover topics written by journalists every single year at a given point. Example, Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, etc.
• Planned reactive editorial: Focus on those kinds of contents written by journalists on a topic that ties to a seasonal event or theme that we know is being covered due to time frame, but we don’t know the exact story until editors or journalists write it on the morning of their editorial meeting.
• Reactive editorial: Publish those kinds of content written in the present, those that are unplanned, and can’t be predicted and are dictated due to a news story breaking.

The idea is that customers are getting smarter, and they expect more when it comes to marketing. The more customers trust you, the more they will share your content, talk about you (value), and buy your products. 

If you wish to know more, fell free to get in touch with us.