Changes to the Google algorithm can jeopardize a company’s assets. With the increasing shift in online marketing, digital is no longer an optional extra, but the crucial component that separates success and failure.
A prominent example is ASOS, whose challenges in the e-commerce market were well reported in 2019. While the comments focused on inventory and supply chain issues, there may have been a less visible elephant in the room: SEO.
ASOS ‘decision to publish 200 versions of its website, depending on the country, had a massive negative impact on the score and commercial performance. Trying to provide a customized experience geographically contradicted Google’s tendency to have a more aggregated ad. The biggest challenge was that users didn’t enjoy their time on site. For this reason, Google responded by making the websites less visible and demonstrably affecting the bottom line. The lesson? Pay attention to the direction of travel from Google.
What smoke signals have we seen from Mountain Valley and what do intelligent digital marketers have to do to be ahead of 2020? Here are four SEO trends to watch out for.
SERPs replace website retention time
All technology giants want to extend the time spent on their platforms. Facebook has been trying to do this for years to develop a rich content offering with videos, news, and engagement that helps collect advertising dollars. Google is no different. However, a major advantage of Google is that professional website content supports the user interface. The desire that all websites rank on Google also means that the website is indeed subject to certain conditions.
In the past 12 months, Google has displayed more and more third-party content directly in SERPs. The search results now show sections of the website, graphics, maps, answer fields, video content that can be played with a click, and carousels of images. The net result? There are fewer reasons for a user to click on a brand’s website.
While this trend could easily raise alarm bells, it doesn’t have to be for marketers who are targeting conversions rather than website vanity metrics. What really matters if the SERPS contains all the information a user needs to convert? In fact, developing organic carousels means brands can have three or four powerful touchpoints on a single result page.
However, a change in analytical coverage is required. Digital marketers need to consider both Google’s SERPs and their own websites when measuring KPIs. Monitoring impressions becomes as important as monitoring a website’s organic traffic because users interact with a website’s content both on the website itself and through Google.
Need for mobile page speed
We have now reached critical mass because the majority of all searches are done on mobile devices. It is the de facto device for internet users – also because Google has urged web developers to improve page loading speed and respond to the main complaint from mobile users.
Google Search Console has had a report on issues with mobile devices for years. A page speed report was also added in 2019 to identify the bottom performing pages for each website. Development teams have no choice but to deliver faster experiences across devices to keep their websites ranked. Expect page load speed to become a more important ranking factor in 2020.
The new language from BERT
BERT stands for the slightly less nimble bidirectional encoder representations of transformers. Through machine learning, BERT improves Google’s understanding of the user intent behind complicated or ambiguous queries. The company believes it is “the biggest leap forward in the past five years and one of the biggest leaps in Search history”.
BERT will be launched in the U.S. from October 2019 and expanded to other countries and languages by 2020. This affects not only the type of ranking content, but also the type of rich snippets, extracts and other information displayed. But what does that mean for digital marketers? The winners are high-quality websites with detailed content (page copy and scheme) about their products and services. Good SEO practice will be key and will not fall back on the misguided belief that your content will speak for itself.
E-A-T is an acronym that you have to digest
While digital marketers are forgiven for not being able to imitate what BERT stands for, it is important to know that E-A-T stands for: expertise-authority-trustworthiness.
These are the guiding principles for some core updates to the Google algorithm, each of which enhances the search engine’s understanding of website content to better direct search traffic. As Google continues to develop its core algorithm, the websites it believes to be published by the best experts with the greatest authority are selected to best meet users’ needs.
This new focus means that the ranking goes beyond technical SEO and on-page and off-page updates. Any organic traffic professional needs to focus more on great content, brand awareness, links, and mentions from trusted, authoritative websites.
Be ahead of the curve
If you already have the right basics and your content is of high quality and optimized, you should be one step ahead of the developments in 2020. But there is a big difference between not leaving and actively advancing.
Stay on top of the times if you want your search engine optimization to continue to make a meaningful and measurable contribution to your business results – take a look at this area and we will keep you up to date on the best options.
Mike Fantis, VP Managing Partner, DAC
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