Main SEO trends in 2020

We interviewed SEO experts at BrightonSEO and got some great insights from them about what they believe are important topics for SEOs to learn in the upcoming year. The top answers from that conference included studying entities and entity search, technical SEO, and machine learning.

Since we got such great answers from the last batch of experts, we decided to ask experts that attended PubCon 2019 in Las Vegas about what they believe will be the biggest trends in SEO in 2020.

I think the most important trend is the localization of searches. More and more searches have switched to local intent - Google is showing localized results for queries that used to show ecommerce or national intent. Businesses that never had to worry about Local SEO now have to rely on it to stay visible in search results. Combined with the fact that Google My Business shows so much rich information that it's basically the new home page for every business, Local SEO is becoming a discipline that every digital marketer needs to learn and utilize

– Greg Gifford

The most popular topic for 2020 mentioned by these experts was content strategy. Content has always been important for SEOs, and it sounds like this year will be no different. So, what’s the best way to approach your content strategy in 2020?

Here’s what the experts say:

With content strategy comes the decision to integrate different forms of content – articles, images, and, of course, video. Two of our experts interviewed at PubCon had the following advice about integrating videos and YouTube into your content plan for 2020.

I feel more energy is going to be focused on the technical discovery side, because of changes in technology and javascript frameworks. We are putting all of our content in a lot of different places, with different methods, and we want the search engines to be able to find them. As SEOs, we have to keep up with the technology to ensure Google can discover all our content, so things like content strategies and link strategies will continue to be effective. If they can't be discovered, we aren't accomplishing anything. I think it’s going to be really challenging, because there are so many changes happening so rapidly and being able to keep up with everything can be difficult.

— Jake Bohall