Every year, we come across a question i.e What are the best SEO strategies that will work this year? Or Ways to improve website rankings in 2020?. Browsing habits of users have changed in past years, which requires updating the SEO strategies accordingly. Search Engine Optimization includes many factors which help in ranking websites at the top of search results.
The major factors for website ranking involves website design, website content & website’s link popularity
Here are some ways to improve website rankings in 2020!
Optimize Website for Speed
Due to the increased popularity of mobile browsing, load time of the website plays an important role. When it comes to the website performance, keeping load time short is the key.Google takes it into consideration and helps to rank websites in top 10 searches but if the website load speed is more the website will not rank. Implementing a caching solution, optimizing website’s media files etc are some of the ways to optimize the website for reducing its load time. PageSpeed Insights tool can be used to check the performance of websites over different platforms. It measures load time both from a mobile and a desktop perspective.
Use Schema Markup
Schema is structured data vocabulary that helps search engines to get deeper understanding of web pages. It defines the pages on the basis of entities, actions, and relationships on the Internet.
Adding Markup languages like RDFa, Microdata, and JSON-LD will structure the data and helps the webpages to communicate better with search engines. When Google understands web pages at a deeper level, it serves more relevant results to the user. It will also
improve the display of web pages in a much more meaningful way in search results. Such kind of improved search results are also known as rich snippets. For example, rich snippets will display a product with price, with product image and with review stars whereas a normal looking Google search result with no markup won’t display any of this additional information.
Rank for Rich Answers
Rich answers is Google’s way of providing the quick answers to the users for the searched query without clicking on the website. These answers were captured from third party website’s content and appear in top search.
Generating content for rich answers will trigger web-pages to rank higher. Use the headlines which are very clear & popular. Users often search queries like “How to improve website rankings in 2020?” “What improves website’s Google rankings”. So, the use of ‘How’, ‘What’ etc will imply that your webpage has an answer to the user’s query. Also, use the clear points in the articles or write list based articles. This way users will know what are the main topics this article is covering and it will also improve the website CTR.
Optimize for Voice Search
Voice search has become popular and almost every person is using Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Echo, or Google’s Assistant. Voice search also affects website SEO efforts. As we know, while asking queries with digital assistant, users use more conversational or natural language and this conversational or natural language is the main key of optimizing brands for voice search.
The normal text searches usually involve compressed phrases like “best songs of 2020” However, if the user is asking this to digital assistant, it will be something like: “What are the best songs of this year?”. The second phrase is longer and uses natural language. This suggests that while generating content or optimizing pages for voice search, the use of long-tail keywords having conversational or natural language is required. The ultimate goal is using keywords which people ask in voice search, thereby getting the relevant web pages listed in top results.