Here’s What Industry Insiders Say About 2020 SEO Strategy.

The harsh truth on the internet is that if your website doesn’t come up on the top ten when first searched on Google, there is a huge possibility that your website will never receive any traffic ever. HubSpot mentions that close to 75% of all searches are limited to the first page. And if your 2020 SEO strategy isn’t strong enough, you might never come up among the top ten searches on Google. There are different strategies that can bring about changes in the way you digitize and advertise your website, but there are still some basics that everyone needs to master if they want their website skyrocketing to the top. If you follow the best practices as prescribed by SEO, you will find yourself constructing a niche for your website on Google which would get the desired hits every single time. After you have built a sturdy base, you can move on to more complex stuff like link building, or keyword research.

Also Read: How to Do Keyword Research

Here are the 9 best 2020 SEO Strategies that will definitely increase the amount of traffics you receive on your website.

Align Your Content with Search Intent For a 2020 Seo Strategy

Search intent is the first hurdle that every website needs to pass. Search intent basically means understanding and analyzing the meaning behind every search. If a website can understand what the client wants, it will rank on the top of the Google list. Google always aims at prioritizing the satisfaction of the consumer, and if your website can pass the test, you will be on the top 10.

Let’s take an example- if you type ‘how to bake a cake’ on Google, the top ten responses would be posts from websites and blogs that show you how to bake a cake. This is because Google understands that you are more interested in baking it, than buying it. It would lead you to only those websites which cater to the same demand.

But, if you type ‘Where to buy cakes’, it will link you to several bakeries that would serve the cake. If you are coherent enough in your response, Google will respond accordingly. It won’t show you pages that teach baking, but rather show you pages where you can buy cakes from.

There are four types of search intent that you can add to your best strategies.

1. Informational: As the name suggests, this is where you are searching for some random information. These are mostly Wh- or How questions. The user is seeking information and if their query is ‘best SEO strategy 2020’, Google would display all websites and blogs that answer your question.
2. Navigational: This is where the user would be looking for some other site- be it Youtube, or Twitter. If they don’t know the web URL, they can simply type it on Google and link it from there.
3. Commercial: This occurs when the user wants to compare products- commercial products- when they haven’t finalized anything yet. They are simply looking to browse their options.
4. Transactional: They are looking to buy something. This is when Google links them to sites like Amazon, or eBay.

To make your website much more appealing to the search engine, remember to create your content around the search intent. You need to have a clear idea of what you want, and that shouldn’t change.

Write a Compelling Title Tag and Meta Description as Your 2020 SEO Strategy

To ensure that your website is visible on Google, you need to have a strong Title Tag and Meta Description. These are extremely crucial and can make or break your website. A compelling Title Tag will contain keywords that will help strategize the user’s search. The title tag is what they click after browsing through the list- and if the search intent is present in your title, you are set. Similarly, the Meta Description needs to have a proper SEO which will provide a summary of the entire article. You can’t stuff it with words or sentences- it needs to be concise and grammatically sound. According to Google, “A meta description tag should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.”

The best ways to write a meta description would be to have a keyword in the summary, fixate on the search intent, and use an action-oriented copy. And if you can write meta descriptions that are totally unique to each blog, all the better for you.

Optimize Your Images

We all know that images are one of the best SEO strategies there. All of us, at some point, have been heavily invested in choosing the best pictures that would capture the attention of the user. But, simply choosing the most aesthetic pictures isn’t enough. You need to optimize the pictures to elevate the overall standard of the blog.

Here are a few ways you can do that-

1. Choosing the Appropriate File Format- Site Speed matters a lot- so the images you choose need to have the best format- one that can be compressed without compromising the quality of the picture. While everyone believes JPEG to be the best format out there, WEBP isn’t exactly something to be trashed. According to Google, WebP actually is the best format if you want superior lossy and lossless image compression for your website.
2. Compress Your Images- You always need to compress the images you upload on your website because if the image is extremely big, it will take time to load- thereby hampering the site speed of the website. But you don’t have to worry- for there are several sites out there who would help you compress your images for free like TinyPNG, ShortPixel, and ImageOptim.
3. Provide Alt Text for Images- While we are absolutely confident in Google’s ability to analyze images under a particular banner, it wouldn’t exactly be a loss if you did add the alt text to the image. Alt texts help algorithms to access and analyze the image better, and more accessibility always implies better representation on Google. Be concise, and don’t stuff when you are writing the Alt Text.
4. Lazy-Load Your Images- Another technique that can be used to benefit images on a website is lazy-loading. This means that users have the option to load a video or image when they deem fit- it wouldn’t just pop up of its own accord. This not only helps in the reduction of page load time, but it also reduces the weight of the page.

Optimize Your Page Speed For a 2020 Seo Strategy

The equation is simple- if your webpage takes time to reload, people will get disgruntled. There are no two ways about it. But thankfully, Google has a range of options where you can deal with this. PageSpeed Insights can help one improve their Google PageSpeed Insights Score. SEMRush can also be used to work out a site audit that would help fix every performance issue that is plaguing your site. This is how you go through it-

1. First, you have to log in to your SEMRush account, and then move onto Projects, then Add New Project, and finally Enter your Domain.
2. Put in all the details and click on ‘Start Site Audit’.
3. You need to wait a few seconds before SEMRush will produce an audit report which would highlight all the different errors that are present in the document- with the procedure to take care of them easily. This will heavily increase your SEO score.
4. After you have checked the Audit Report, you have to move to Site Performance and then ‘View Details.
5. Here you would get an in-depth report of all the mistakes in your blog, which you can start rectifying.

Use Internal Linking

Internal links can get increasingly important for your website for they would create a hierarchy and make it easier for Google to actually understand what’s on your page. If they are used appropriately, internal links can skyrocket your SEO rankings. The best SEO strategy would be to use internal links from top websites and add them to your blog. SEMRush does help users identify and fix errors in internal linking.

Improve the User Experience on Your Website

Since Google is quite observant about what users think of your website, you need to make it easily accessible, and informative. After the basic structure is off the ground, you actually need to put in information in a very orderly way that will make it very easy for people to navigate through.

Here are a few tips that can help improve the experience of users on your website.

1. You should use appropriate subheadings, that will help Google understand where the paragraph ends, and the next point begins.
2. Images are the way to go. Users are much more attentive towards visual media, so if your blog isn’t filled with images, things might get hard.
3. Do not use pop-ups. Not only do they affect the SEO score, but they can also be very irritating for the user. One of the best 2020 SEO strategy would be to use them only when necessary, to avoid getting penalized by Google.
4. Use white space, for it grabs attention, and actually makes your information legible. The neater your website is, the more views it would garner.

Include Keywords in Your URL as a 2020 Seo Strategy

Some sites overlook their URL structure, completely forgetting that it tells the user and Google what the page is all about. Google believes that a URL should be absolutely simple, and easy to read. It should have a keyword, and a proper structure, rather than rows and rows of numbers. There are a few things one can do to improve their URL, something that ranks very high on the 2020 SEO strategy.

1. One should always use short URLs over long URLs because statistically the former performs better in SERPs.
2. Your URL should always have keywords, for that would help improve the chances of its ranking on Google.
3. Stop words should be erased to give your URL a very neat, succinct, and clean look.

Focus on Getting More Authoritative Backlinks

Backlinks are extremely important for Google rankings, even though a huge amount of changes have been made to the algorithms. To Google, Backlinks are something of a vote of confidence. If a webpage has backlinks, chances are Google will rank it better than other sites, and help increase the traffic to that page. Yet, there are some backlinks that might simply reduce your rankings, and make it difficult to get back on the first list. You need to always search for authoritative backlinks, which guarantee a high SEO score. You could also use SEMRush to look at the backlinks that connect to your competitor’s domains and simply kickstart a plan to steal them.

Publish Long-Form Content

The plain truth is, long-form content is always received better than short ones. According to several reports, long-form content with a word limit of 3000 and above get thrice the amount of traffic that an article of 900-1200 words might get. Therefore, we can easily assume that there is a huge correlation between articles of a large word count and search intent. So, what you need to do to improve the traffic to your page is to write extremely well-researched content which can be huge in nature. For Google has always prioritized the user needs, over SEO- which doesn’t mean you forget them.

If you are writing anything which goes beyond 2000 words, make sure that your keyword is apt. If you are writing a 2000 word article on ‘SEO Best Practices’, you need to put keywords such as ‘2020 SEO Strategy’, because that will strike a balance between keyword difficulty and search volume.

Also Read: How to create an SEO-friendly content?

A website can only garner traffic and recognition on Google when there is something solid backing it up. Using the best 2020 SEO strategy available, you could create a perfect blog or webpage, that would be on top of the query list on Google. So, is your website ready for 2020 SEO Strategy to take it to the top?