A lot of us seem to be confused regarding the SEO trends to follow in 2020. The whole industry is looking for strategies that can not only increase traffic but also boost rankings on Google. This seems pretty fair, considering Google keeps changing the algorithms, techniques, and strategies every year to improve its search results.

With so many changes and updates happening in the SEO sphere, you may miss critical factors that are trending in the industry. Missing these vital factors can hamper SEO, and your content might become invisible.

Finding out the details of what will work and what won't in 2020 is of utmost importance for businesses to scale their traffic numbers and, eventually, their revenues.

In this article, we will discuss the three massive SEO changes that digital marketers need to embrace in 2020 to increase their traffic numbers by at least a whopping 188 percent.

Unlike other blogs, this will not be a guide to basic SEO techniques like putting keywords on a page, making content king, etc. Instead, it will be an in-depth analysis of three trending SEO techniques that can increase your business revenues in 2020.

Optimizing for Voice Search

Digital marketing experts from around the world are upvoting this new SEO trend. Although voice search has been here since the later part of the last decade, it has now started becoming a significant market player.

Thanks to Voice Assistants like Alexa and Google, the technology has been making substantial improvements in the last couple of years. The accessibility of voice search enabled devices to the general public has managed to increase its popularity tenfold.

With people being obsessed with their mobile devices, the reasons for using voice search have multiplied. A local store owner has to now ensure that his business is active on Google My Business as a majority of the offline buyings happen after thorough online scrutiny.

Senthil Kumar, an V P Stan Ventures, says, "Smartphones have become the first touchpoint for offline businesses. The reviews, comments, and ratings that an offline store gets on platforms such as Yelp and Google My Business will decide the number of footfalls they get"

This means that businesses need to start optimizing for local searches since most voice searches happen to be local in nature. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for an SEO-based business or any other local venture that has a target audience in a specific geographic area.

Apart from optimizing websites for local voice search, it is also essential to rank equally well for both questions and their answers.

“Most of the voice search queries are questions. It’s important that websites optimize their content by doing in-depth audience research, which will help in mining the frequently asked question of the targets. Optimizing the content as the answers to these FAQs will help to get more people to hear you,” add Senthil.

One of the easiest ways to rank for voice search is by creating high-quality, voice search optimized FAQs.

Ranking For Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are nothing but the search results that appear at the top of the SERP, above the first organic search result. They are also known as Position zero results in SEO terms.

Although featured snippets weren't a popular part of SEO before, they have started gaining popularity in recent times. Nowadays, it has become a critical metric for businesses because of its ability to improve brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, and boost revenue.

Almost all voice-based search results are picked up from what is displayed on featured snippets making this SERP feature all the more important.

According to an Ahrefs report, if you manage to get a featured snippet along with the first position in the SERP, it has the potential to translate into more than 28% of all clicks to your page!

SEO experts, based on a purely data-driven approach, believe that using a paragraph format for simple queries or keywords like "what is a featured snippet?" or "how can I increase my clients?" is the best way to go forward in 2020.

Different industries use different tactics to get featured in snippets. While a list format usually helps how-to blogs rank on featured snippets, a tabular form showing the price comparison can get an E-commerce website to rank on the coveted #0 position of Google.

However, there is no fool-proof way to make sure you get in on the featured snippet bandwagon. But here are some ways that you can try to boost traffic in 2020:

Write Content That Answer Questions

Answer Related Queries

Add FAQ Section to Your Content

Write Short & Crisp Answers

Add a Table of Content With Anchor Links

Add a TL;DR Summary

Mobile-first Indexing

Although it's great to have an expert opinion on the importance of mobile-first indexing in the ever-changing world of SEO, we have a better guide for this feature: Google itself.

If you're not entirely on board with what mobile-first indexing actually means, worry not. Mobile-first indexing is just Google telling websites that it will consider only the mobile version of their website for ranking on both mobile and desktop devices.

If you haven't been able to get a mobile version of your site ready yet, it is high time for you to get down to business. Without a mobile version of your website, your users will only be able to see the desktop version. It may seem to be a small thing, but this can result in your site taking a hit in terms of both rankings and overall traffic.

Google has made it very clear in its last few updates that responsive design is their go-to design pattern. Although it serves the same HTML code on a particular URL regardless of the user's device, Google may end up showing the page differently based on the screen size of the gadget.

This small tweak happens because Google is continuing to annotate m-dot URLs, and not indexing them. Businesses that wish to generate higher traffic volumes on their site should ideally switch to a responsive site. This way, Google can update the annotations for your website and say that it is now mobile-friendly, which saves time.

Conclusion

In the current competitive world of SEO, where new trends keep popping up from time to time, it is vital to be on top of each and every small pattern that catches the eye. Just follow the simple SEO changes mentioned above and combine it with high-quality content, and you will have no trouble increasing your website traffic by almost 188% and building up your company's revenue within the year.