SEO Tips for 2020

Photo courtesy Good Free Photos

Last week I went to a networking event at the Chicago chapter of the American Marketing Association. It was fun! I think I—dare I say it—actually like networking and talking to people about their work. Who knew?

In addition to the opportunity to gab with people in between stuffing food in one’s mouth, the event included some roundtables on marketing topics. Of these, I found the SEO discussion really interesting. Led by Zach Wilson of the web design agency Gulo, he gave some helpful tips on SEO trends and insights for the coming year.

• Long-form content is best—anything above 800 words. Around 1200 is ideal. Can you hear my long-form-loving heart beating in excitement?
• Any original content using research is highly valuable. So gear up those critical thinking skills, or find a writer who knows how to find and use reliable sources. Of course, this kind of content takes effort. Zach said research shows it takes an average of six hours to write this type of long-form article or blog post. This aligns with my experience. That’s why experienced writers don’t work for content mills or SEO agencies that pay $100 per post. You get what you pay for.
• Backlinks are a big help with rankings.
• Voice search is changing the game thanks to the exploding popularity of Alexa and Google Home. Empathy is key here—ask yourself what someone might ask, and how they might ask, that you’d like to rank for. Formulate some questions for Alexa, Echo, or Siri and see where you end up.

As an exercise, he recommended looking at the top ten pages on your site in Google Analytics. If you don’t know why they’re so popular, it may be because you optimized for a particular keyword by accident—which means you may be attracting people who actually have no need for your product or service. Figure out what’s drawing people to those pages and optimize them for the audience that you DO want.