Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most unique areas of marketing — people either love it or hate it, there’s usually no middle ground. One of the reasons for this is that since its inception around 15 years ago, SEO has been constantly evolving. Justwords has been around for a decade now and in just 10 years we’ve seen so many shifts in the world of SEO. There was a time when stuffing blogs with keywords and creating hundreds of poor-quality backlinks actually helped increase search engine rankings, but that seems laughable today. Many of our clients ask us if there is any point in investing in SEO when things always change so quickly. In fact, SEO can often seem like a cat-and-mouse game between marketers and Google. The Google search engine algorithm is hell-bent on rewarding only high-quality content and trustworthy websites, and every update becomes another challenge for marketers to overcome. Yet, avoiding SEO is the worst possible answer to this conundrum. The fact of the matter is that organic traffic still contributes as much as 53% of all website traffic. And it’s really the only form of traffic that is sustainable in the long run, just because you don’t have to pay for every additional click on your website. Image Source So what’s the key to successful SEO? It’s fairly simple really — just stay updated. Every year, the Google search algorithm changes — sometimes in small, subtle ways and other times with massive upheavals. In fact, Google made 3200 changes to its algorithm in 2018 alone — that’s right, 3200 changes in just one year! With so much changing almost every single day, it’s important to keep going back to the drawing board to revise your approach to SEO, or there’s a strong chance you’ll get left behind in the organic traffic game. In this article, we break down the 5 best SEO tips for 2020 so that you can get that website ranking in Google once and for all. SEO Tips #1: Search engines are now much “smarter” This was the year Google released BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). BERT is an NLP (Natural Language Processing) based update that focusses on the intent behind the search query. This means that for the first time, Google search is able to take transformer words (to, for, etc) into account while deciding rankings as opposed to just the keywords. Also Read: Google BERT — The Algorithm Update Everyone is Talking about and How it Will Affect Your SEO What does this really mean? It means that Google has started prioritizing the idea that is conveyed by the content over the keywords. So if you’re stuffing keywords like it’s 2010, then you’ll find yourself far from the first page of Google search results. The best way to deal with BERT is to start creating content that is geared towards audiences and not Google search rankings. It’s also important to start focussing on informational search — building content that answers important queries. Mathew Howells-Barby, Director of Acquisition at Hubspot sums it up in a nutshell, “Ultimately, BERT will dramatically increase Google’s ability to better understand the context behind queries being made in the search engine, thus allowing them to better serve results that match intent. But marketers shouldn’t be looking for ways to game the new update. There’s no ‘optimizing for BERT’ in the same way that there was no ‘optimizing for RankBrain’. The result of BERT being introduced has simply meant that Google’s natural language processing engine has reached new heights and you can expect much more granular answering of queries. If you’re already optimizing for intent, you’re in a good place.” SEO Tips #2: High-quality content that focusses on long-tail keywords This is going to be the key to success in SEO this year. Google has started rewarding high-quality content — although there may be exceptions, chances are that if your content is the best in a particular category it will rank highly. In short, you need to make your content the best in the domain that you’re competing in. But with 2 million blog posts getting published every day, this is easier said than done. A good way of doing this is to find long-tail keywords that you want to rank for, and then create content around those. For instance, let’s say you have a bakery in Noida that delivers cakes through online orders. If you create content around ‘Order cake online’, you will find it very hard to find a Google search ranking because of the competition. If you choose to build a high-quality, authoritative piece of content around ‘order cake online in Noida’, then chances are you can create content that will be an industry leader for this phrase. This will make achieving that website ranking in Google a lot easier. Also Read: 5 Types of Content to Get More Traffic to Your Blog For this strategy to succeed, it’s important to pick keywords that are at that sweet spot — where they attract a fair bit of traffic but are not as competitive as some others. Here are some of the best tools to help you figure out the long-tail keywords you need to target: SEMrush SEMrush is one of the most effective long-tail keyword research tools. This is mostly because it lets you see where your competitors stand, across keywords. It also allows you to see which keywords competitors are bidding on so that you can customize your strategy. Google Keyword Planner We have a tendency to underrate Google’s own tools, but the Keyword Planner is one of the best free tools out there. While it may not give you detailed insights like some other tools, it still gives you a fairly comprehensive list of long-tail keywords (along with the traffic) that you can then choose from. BuzzSumo, AuthorityLabs, WordTracker, and UberSuggest are other keyword research tools that work really well. SEO
