Medic, Fred, Bert, Penguin, Panda, these names may not ring a bell, but these are the various updates to Google’s indexing algorithm (94% market share *). In other words, these are the different criteria used by the Mountain View giant to classify the content of your website and rank them by relevance in search results. This algorithm is constantly being refined, we are talking about several thousand updates each year, but major SEO trends are emerging for 2020 and the years to come… Come on, let’s explain!
90% of the pages identified by Google register zero traffic, due to the lack of an SEO strategy *
* Source Ahrefs
Machine learning for SEO
Thanks to its artificial intelligence, Google is now able to better understand the intentions of users and thus anticipate their needs. This is the subject of the update named RankBrain which looks at the intentions of consumers when they search on Google.
The mobile first index
As its name suggests, this algorithm proposes to rank search results using the mobile version of web pages as a basis. When we know that 68 million searches are carried out every minute on Google from mobile devices (source Comarketing-news.com ), we quickly understand the need for a website and mobile SEO friendly (optimized for smartphones and tablets).
SXO vs SEO
The SXO eXperience Optimization for Search, closely related to the user experience, designates what to do (or not do) to a lively user a positive experience on a website. Intuitive ergonomics, fluid navigation, the relevance of the internal mesh, and action buttons, Google could look into these themes very soon to penalize bad students.
The development of voice searches
Voice search consists of making a request on search engines by voice, for example, Siri or Google Assistant. What does this change for SEO? Almost all! Voice queries are generally formulated in more natural language with fewer keywords. They are often interrogative and in a large majority, the research is local (ex: What restaurants are there around me?).
Visual search
Google Images is now the second largest search engine behind Google Search. Visual search allows you to upload an image to use as the basis for the query. Based on artificial intelligence, this feature can read the image and interpret it to provide suitable search results. With ever more intense competition for “search”, image search is certainly a major opportunity.
The Topic Cluster
Closely linked to content marketing, this new approach to SEO strategy consists of grouping content by theme by working on a series of identified keywords. These contents are then linked to each other by a well-tied internal mesh. The benefits of such a strategy are notable:
– the website sees its authority increased since the search engines consider it as an expert on a theme
– Internet users benefit from additional content that allows them to go further on the subject initially sought
– the variety of keywords processed allows the website to position itself on more target queries and to attract a greater diversity of Internet users.
As you can see, major SEO trends are emerging for 2020 and the years to come. Google strives to be ever more precise in its search results by taking into account the new uses of Internet users and the way they search for information on its search engine. There is no doubt that the algorithmic evolutions of the giant of Mountain View will still be numerous in the coming months, Web Creation London remains on the spot!