SEO priorities for 2020 and beyond

The world of SEO constantly moves and changes at a breakneck speed. New tech, new methodologies, constant algorithm updates from Google, new user behaviours and search methods. The list goes on…

So, what should you do in 2020 (and beyond) to keep up with the leaders in this ever-changing landscape?

Aymen Loukil shared some important insights to focus on, so let’s take a quick look at it.

+ Mobile-first indexing: Googlebot is now Mobile, meaning the mobile version of a site is evaluated to decide on its relevance and ranking. So, make sure you have the same content on both versions.

• Keep the same meta and SEO tags (title, description, headings, image alt tags, canonical if responsive implementation).
• Keep identical meta robots.
• Keep an exact structured data markup.
• On mobile, avoid interaction-based lazy loading such as clicking, swiping or typing.
• If you have a video on your page, make sure it’s placed in an easy to find location.

+ Web performance: According to The Web Almanac 2019 performance report, only 13% of all websites are considered fast.

• Define your performance KPIs & metrics. Use Time to first byte (TTFB) for the back-end, First Contentful Paint (FCP), SpeedIndex and TTI for the front-end.
• Setup synthetic and field tools. Use Google Lighthouse for the first and CRuX for the second.
• Compare your website against your competition.

+ Visual Search: The visibility of the classic blue links is decreasing, leaving more room for images and video snippets on SERPs. Make use of this to grow your site visitors.

• Use unique, original and high-quality images (minimum 50k pixels).
• Use descriptive file names, alt tags and captions. Avoid image titles like IMG168393.jpg.
• Markup your images with structured data (Schema/Product, Schema/ImageObject, Schema/VideoObject).
• If you use Schema/VideoObject, remember to fill the thumbnailUrl attribute with the video thumbnail image.
• If you use Schema/Product, remember to fill the availability attribute to show up on Google images product search.
• Use Google Cloud Vision API to check that Google can correctly identify the main topic of your images.

+ Video optimization: Your videos can show up on Google search, Google images, Videos search results and Google Discover.

• Use crawlable and indexable videos with persistent URLs, embedded on crawlable and indexable pages.
• Markup your videos with Schema/VideoObject. Provide a description, name, thumbnailUrl, uploadDate.
• Two attributes could help Google understand the sections of your video : hasPart, clips.

Source: https://www.aymen-loukil.com/en/blog-en/seo-priorities-2020/

Mobile-first indexing will change the mobile SEO game. It's expected to be completely rolled out by Google on September this year.

Scheme Mark up is another thing for sure paving way to more voice searches.

So the priorities for 2020 are the same as for last 2-3 years.

These priorities for 2020 are the same from the 2-3 years. Like
High-Quality Optimized Content, UX design, Mobile-First indexing SEO, Structured Data