Google is the most used search engine across the globe. The internet is an extensive and vast space where small businesses could easily get lost – however, there is one way to ensure that Google can find your content and make it available to users so that you can generate leads to your business – as you likely know, it’s to make sure your website and content is search engine optimized (SEO). As you likely know or have heard, Google’s algorithm for ranking websites is ever-changing, so it’s important to stay on top of the latest changes so that you can ensure you rank well. In this post, we’ll cover SEO Tips for 2020.
Google Innovating in 2020 to Improve Your Search
Previously, it may have seemed easy to enhance your content towards SEO, merely adding keywords as many times as possible within a short article or webpage. In 2018, Google introduced Natural Language Processing (NLP), allowing Google to search with more everyday language. In 2019, Google rolled out Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT); this is a lot of fancy words for what BERT accomplishes. The BERT program reads the keyword that you are looking for and the words before and after the keyword, determining how the keyword is being used.
In the past, you might have strung a bunch of keywords together to get close to something that you are searching for, then scan and weed out search results that aren?t what you want. Now, in 2020, BERT has only improved, and you can phrase a question in more everyday speech with search results that fit your needs better.
Tips for SEO with BERT
So what does that mean for SEO on your website? There are ways to improve your SEO with BERT in mind:
??????????? ??????????? Build a target market profile ? if you decide to blog or update your website?s content, it is best to have a specific customer persona in mind while you are writing. Know your customer?s personal information, such as age, gender, children, marital status, income, and education. When you have this information in mind, you can gear your content to your audience.
??????????? ??????????? Fast loading speeds ? Research has shown that if a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40 percent of visitors will abandon the site, and 80 percent of those people will remember that site and will never return. Don?t let your load speed turn potential business leads away.
??????????? ??????????? Improve your dwell time ? When you provide content to your customers that is highly informative, it will increase the user dwell time on your website. When customers spend more time on your website, they are more likely to add things to the cart or to seek out your business in the future.
??????????? ??????????? Break up content ? most people, when faced with a wall of text or too many options, their brains say that this is too hard, and they will navigate away. Break up content with bullet points, outlines, header tags, or even pictures. Giving time for the users to process information between paragraphs will encourage them to read on.
??????????? ??????????? Focus on key phrases ? As stated above, BERT focuses on what comes before and after a keyword. Writing in a natural tone that focuses on key phrases will allow BERT to give your site a higher SEO score and will make your website rise in the search results.
