Investing in search engine optimization can transform your online visibility. Since SEO’s humble beginnings in 1997, countless algorithms, ranking factors, and types of on-page search results have emerged. Check out these top 5 SEO best practices to top the search engine results pages in 2020.
1. Prioritize Local Search
Complete, accurate location data is fundamental to improving your local online visibility. When you provide up-to-date information about your business, including store hours, address, phone number, photos, schedules, product offerings, and menus, you can drive more sales because customers are able to easily find what they’re looking for. In fact, a BrandMuscle study found that businesses that complete more than 30 data fields saw a 25% increase in search volume and a 37% increase in profile views. As local packs become more prominent on SERPs, prioritizing location data management and local search can help your business stand out.
2. Keep Feeding the Content Beast
Regularly creating and sharing helpful, relevant, timely content to answer customer inquiries and generate leads is the best way to cultivate a brand and earn higher search engine rankings in today’s marketing landscape. Businesses across all industries can see a significant ROI from ongoing content creation, because search engines reward websites that publish fresh content. Think about how users search for your business offering, then base the content of your site around those searches. You can also leverage social media to seed and share links to your most valuable content.
3. Target Voice Search Results and Featured Snippets
The rise of voice search through mobile devices and voice assistants demands SEO lay the groundwork for voice-specific queries to establish a strong ranking. Google Search’s recent algorithm update, BERT, allows it to answer more queries that are posed as they would be verbally phrased. With this in mind, predict what questions your customers are likely to ask. Then, craft your content by directly answering those questions using language and terms they’re familiar with. SERPs for voice inquires often look similar to featured snippet sections, so concise, hyper-specific content will dominate these results. The BERT update was introduced in October 2019 and will likely continue to expand to more searches in 2020.
4. Provide Rapid Page Speeds
Page speed has affected website rankings since 2010, but since then, users have grown increasingly impatient. An ideal load time is less than three seconds. If your pages take any longer to load, you risk losing users before they even enter your site, which could subsequently lower its click-through rate and decrease its ranking. Consider leveraging a content delivery network (CDN) for high traffic pages and large files, such as images. Also consider prioritizing pagination of viewable page assets. As the 5G rollout continues through 2020, millions of people will gain access to high-speed mobile data, setting load time expectations even higher.
5. Optimize for Mobile
With an ever-increasing amount of searches happening on mobile devices, Google has implemented mobile-first indexing. This means that Google crawls, indexes, and ranks the mobile version of your website instead of the desktop version. To avoid negatively impacting your rankings, first make sure you have a mobile-friendly site. This is critical to your SEO and for users’ experience, as mobile users will likely leave your site immediately if it’s not easy to read and navigate. Then, make sure the content and structured data are the same on both versions of your site. You can also use tools like Google Lighthouse to ensure that page elements adhere to mobile usability best practices.
Elevate Your SEO and Drive More Traffic
Ready to increase your business visibility, site traffic, and leads? To put these SEO best practices into action in 2020?
Contact BrandMuscle to work with our leading team of SEO and local search experts.
