SEO 2020: Your optimal guide to visibility

If you're not visible, you don't exist, as the saying goes. But we dare say that if you're not on Google, you don't exist. According to the report Swedes and the Internet, 95% of Swedes now use Google search, and every day over 55 million Google searches are made in Sweden. At the same time, we know that keeping up with SEO is a full-time job. To make it easier for those who don't have it in their role description, we have gathered important trends and optimization advice in one post. Enjoy!

Expertise and credibility are prioritized by Google

Domain authority used to be mostly about links to a website from other relevant sites. But in recent years, Google has added more criteria to the evaluation. One important qualifying factor is something abbreviated as E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). This means that in addition to ranking on popularity, Google also bases its answers on how trustworthy the pages and their senders are.

How to SEO-optimize for E-A-T:

Let experts be part of the content creation process. All companies have experts in different fields. You, reading this, are probably an expert in the marketing side of things, while your colleague has their expertise in the product or service you deliver. Sit down at the same table for a short interview and fill in the company blog with your shared expertise. The guidelines on E-A-T are particularly important for pages related to healthcare.

Google also wants to see deep expertise. In practice, this means that to appear as an expert, the entire site should be about one main topic. So try not to be too scattered in what you communicate. Find your niche and produce more content around it.

Last but not least - be transparent. Who is the sender? Put some extra love into the About Us pages that explain who you are and what you do. Of course, it should also be easy for the visitor to navigate to the contact page. Beyond that, common internet etiquette applies such as linking to references, complying with GDPR and including the privacy policy on all forms.

Visual search really takes off in 2020

Visual search (or image search) has rapidly grown in popularity in recent years. Supported by new technologies, Google has moved from matching images with keywords, or uploaded images, to interpreting what you see through the lens of your mobile camera.

You may have heard of the Google Lens app. You haven't? Then you have something fun to try tonight. Using the app, you can use your mobile camera to scan things in your surroundings and get answers instantly. What is this plant? Where is that jacket? And so on. Google lens can already recognize and interpret over 1 billion objects.

Image search is only going to grow and is expected to make its big impact in 2020. And whether it's at the beginning or end of the year, it's good to have a plan to optimize your site's images.

How to SEO-optimize for visual search:

Optimizing images is about matching them with relevant keywords. How do you do it? Well, by paying attention to what you name images, i.e. file names, and adding an ALT text, the text that appears when the browser cannot load the image. Including the keyword here helps Google's spiders interpret the content.

Other factors include when the images on the site were last updated and their position on a page. Google prioritizes new images that have a central place on the web page. We users have been trained to use our scroll thumb on different platforms, so does the order of content still matter? Yes, higher up still has a higher priority for the visitor.

Last but not least, image quality is important. The images on your website give visitors a first impression of you as a company and the product or service you sell. A good image also gets better organic spread, and can, for example, drive traffic to the site from platforms such as Pinterest.

Video continues to grow - and YouTube is the norm

In just a few years, video has gone from being a nice-to-have activity to something that has an obvious place in every company's marketing plan. Over 55% of Google search results show at least one video and YouTube is now the world's second largest search engine. But it doesn't stop there, quite the opposite. According to Cisco, the world leader in IT and networking, video will account for up to 80% of all online traffic by 2021.

More evidence that video is in demand by users can be seen in Google's addition of featured video to its feauterd snippets. This is the area at the top of the search results page that shows an excerpt from one of the high ranking web pages, to answer a search query directly. A tip if you have a page that ranks highly is to consider whether the content can also be conveyed in video format.

How to SEO-optimize your video:

Google's spiders interpret the content of the video through the title, description and tags. So make sure that the keyword/search phrase you want to be seen on is included here. To make the video more searchable, you should also upload it to YouTube. Don't forget to add a thumbnail to attract clicks. This will appear as the start image for your video on YouTube, Google and other channels where it is shown. An extra gold star in the SEO book is awarded to those who also upload a transcript for the video. This ensures that search engines interpret every word said in the video correctly.

Otherwise, the same optimization rules apply as for images. Recent, high quality videos with a visible position on the website are rewarded.

Voice search predicted to be next big breakthrough

Voice search also has an upward trend curve. Voice search has been particularly popular for mobile searches, with one in five searches being done by voice. And with the increasing availability of digital assistants in our homes, the use of voice search will only continue to grow. For example, a study by ComScore predicts that by 2020, half of all searches will be done by voice.

For those of you who are curious to know more, we have written a whole blog post about voice serch.

How to SEO-optimize for voice search:

Spend time on the SEO optimization of your website. Pages that rank 1-3 in the Google results page have the best chance of being read. Ranking in a so-called "featured snippet", i.e. an excerpt from your page, also helps. Here, too, pages that already rank high are shown organically. Beyond that, the formatting of the content plays a certain role. Think tables, FAQs, step-by-step guides and the like that are cut-and-paste friendly for Google.

Search intent - interpreting keywords more than literally

Search intent was one of the big talking points in SEO in 2019. And with good reason. For a few years now, Google has been using RankBrain, which is based on machine learning with artificial intelligence. And one thing that the algorithm has sharpened is the ability to interpret the intention behind the search, not just what is written or said. The effect of this is that content that doesn't match the intent of the search phrase won't rank either. For us content creators, this means that we need to think a bit more when optimizing landing pages, blog posts and articles. Before we start writing, we need to have an idea of what the searcher wants to know or do.

How to SEO-optimize for search intent:

The first step is to figure out the intent behind the keyword or search phrase. Start by searching Google and see what results appear on the front page for the phrase you want to optimize for. It's no coincidence which pages appear here, so what trends do you see? For example, are they informational pages, product comparisons or guides? The format also has some importance, if the most search results appear with lists, this also gives a hint on how to build your page.

The next step is to write based on what you have seen, but with interesting and unique content. Of course, it's not just for new content that this hack works. It works just as well for updating previously published pages and blog posts. Let's say you had a page that was ranking well but then started to fall. Well, then it might be worth thinking about how you can update the page to better match the search intent.

Content and links remain the foundation of SEO

It's time to round up our SEO trends for 2020, but before we do, we just want to add that SEO optimization won't completely change. If you've recently optimized your site or taken an SEO course, you don't have to feel like you've wasted time and money. On the contrary, good content and links from other relevant sites are still the cornerstones of SEO strategy. Without interesting and thoughtful content, no one will want to link to your website. And without links to your website, it's hard to convince the algorithms that you have a reliable source that belongs on Google's front page. But once you have the basics in place, it's time to experiment with new strategies and techniques.