Search engine optimization, or as we prefer to call it nowadays, SEO, is evolving rapidly. Not as fast as many people think, however, which is why we would like to offer a second opinion on what SEO should look like in 2020 if you want to truly succeed in the search results.
Expertise, Authority, and Trust are what everyone in the SEO industry echo chamber has been talking about over the past year. In English: EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust). These ideas come from Google’s own staff and serve as a kind of guideline for what they want to display in the search results. Is the publisher of this blog post an expert in their field? If so, Google wants it to rank well.
Another hot topic is Google’s investment in AI, allowing artificial intelligence to play a role in how search results are ordered. This is not entirely new, as Google has been experimenting with self-learning algorithms (which is essentially what this is) for quite some time. Both Panda and Penguin, which have been around for years, are self-learning.
Wait before chasing these factors
Of course, being an expert in your subject is always a good thing, and yes, authority can give you a boost. Naturally, AI also has an impact on search results, especially for very unpopular keywords.
However, this is almost never where you should focus your efforts. Nearly everyone has much lower-hanging fruit to pick.
If you want to win the EAT game, the easiest way is to be a well-known doctor. A medical degree from a good university and a few hundred TV appearances can indeed improve your rankings. In 99% of the assignments we receive, however, there is far lower-hanging fruit. Often, changing a page title can yield the same result (at least in the search results) as thousands of anxiety-filled hours of exam studying.
When you still lack unique content or your headings do not include the right keywords, focusing on EAT is close to pointless.
What should you do in 2020?
There are a number of obstacles that, over the past year, have started resurfacing for many websites. Therefore, I would rather highlight a few warnings. The first is indexing.
Do not break your indexing
For some reason, websites are once again being built in ways that Google cannot properly index. Many might think this is something from the past involving Frames, Flash, and JavaScript, but it is more common than you might expect.
A number of JavaScript frameworks have emerged recently, and the one thing they often have in common is that they harm your SEO. I am fully aware that Google claims it can index JavaScript, but that is a bit like me saying I can play hockey. I can stand on skates and I recognize a stick, but I am not scoring any goals in the NHL.
Do not Panda your site
Many people seem to have forgotten about Panda today, and that is dangerous. It is very easy to add a few more landing pages by simply rearranging existing content. Surely we can place this product in a few more categories and start gaining traffic for those keywords as well?
Yes, that is technically true. You can rearrange your content repeatedly and even gain rankings with duplicated content. However, this works only up to a certain point, and almost no one seems to know where that limit is. Be very careful when adding “unnecessary” pages to your site, or you may find a Panda waiting around the corner.
Do not blast too many low-quality links
In recent years, Google has been more cautious with penalties related to spammy link profiles. As a result, many newer SEO practitioners are more aggressive than veterans, simply because they have not seen how hard Google can strike when it does. Yes, you can push rankings slightly by linking from an article about dog hospitals to a motorcycle website, or from an article about riding a motorcycle with tips suggesting you do it while holding an umbrella with a logo printed on it. That said, this is not sustainable in the long term (both are real examples we have seen).
If you only have a few years of experience, you may not be aware that those who build links in this way can very easily get ALL of their clients hit by filters that are extremely difficult to recover from.
Summary
As a final takeaway, I would like to emphasize that solid, honest SEO is still what matters, even though many new things are happening. It is incredibly easy for SEO professionals to get stuck in shiny object syndrome, so much so that I already warned about it back in 2011.
