SEO Tips for 2020
It’s important to stay up to date with the latest in SEO and how google is currently ranking webpages so you can ensure your website is performing its best in search engine results and you are getting the maximum amount of traffic.
What is Google looking for in 2020 to rank a web page well?
Google expects your main content to be of good quality and amount. Main content is defined as any part of your page that helps it achieve its purpose. It can be text, image, video or audio. It does not include footers or sidebars etc. but it does include product pages if that is the main intention of your site. Overall you need to be prioritizing audience-focused content.
Audience-focused content is subject matter that is relevant to your users. Most importantly, as far as google is concerned, it is content that is unique, informative and adds value. Search engines will filter out duplicate or copied content and this includes product descriptions from other sites.
Searchers will often do an image search first to research a product they are interested in and then proceed to a website. Have high resolution photos with standard dimensions. Google does not like unusual sizes and anything too large could affect site speed (see below). Again the image must be relevant and match the topic it illustrates.
Your website should be mobile friendly with responsive design. An increasing amount of searches are done on a smart phone rather than a desktop computer. NovaLoca’s own analytics research performed in November 2019 revealed almost 60% of our users were coming to our site by mobile. Google now runs on mobile first indexing which means it will primarily use the mobile version of your site to rank its pages and it will move all sites to this indexing eventually.
Keywords are the words a searcher will enter into a search engine. Your main keywords are those that describe what your site is about. Google will know if your content is just full of keywords for ranking purposes. It comes back to having relevant content with words to match it. Have a look at our earlier blog post where we look at long tail keywords.
Google does take site speed in to consideration. If a page takes too long to load and a user gives up on it and proceeds to a different site the search engine will take notice of this and rank you accordingly.
Google released an algorithm update in October 2019 known as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers if you like to get technical). It is intended to help google better understand human language used by a searcher as well as in written content. It will help solve ambiguous sentences and phrases, by taking in to account the context of a piece. This will make featured snippets more relevant. As far as SEO is concerned with this update all of the above points continue to apply to maintain rankings: relevant, quality content. Read more from google here.
Great tips – plenty to consider here!
Thanks for sharing.