• Search information and easy programming of the entire day, through simple voice commands
• Information on nearby stores, traffic, weather, and more
• Set alarms and reminders, search and listen to music, or find movies on Netflix
• Compatible with a variety of apps and smart devices for voice operation via Google Home Mini

Of course it doesn’t support Greek, but the reason I got it in the office is to become more familiar with the use of voice searches and to be able to experiment with them and then apply what we have learned on the websites we support.

I know it is a time consuming process, but voice search is the future of search and when Google Home Mini will support the Greek language it will become a favourite household companion for all the lonely people, pensioners, etc.

Only in 2020, 50% of searches are expected to be via voice search.

However, when using voice searches, the search engine needs to do more work to get the relevant information the user is currently looking for, making the small keywords increasingly insignificant because usually the average user’s questions or searches are key phrases (long tail keywords).

The answers should be in the form of answers, so your website should again be structured in the form of answers. There should be questions in header 2 or header 3 type:

How to get first in voice searches?

To be first in voice searches you need to have a proper structure on your website and respond with the most useful answers to what internet users are asking and looking for in your site.

Apart from devices like the one above, North American mobile users use 31% of voice searches. Soon this trend will come to our country as well as many other countries around the world.

Optimize your brand

Generally speaking, Google favors brands from the larger like BMW and Mercedes to the smaller brands like ours Paramarketing. On my website I have dedicated a special category of articles about branding and personal branding.

So, in 2020 you should devote more time to building your Brand Name and making your brand known on all social media sites, on all websites and building as many quality profile links as possible.

Since the beginning of my site I had opened profiles on more than 350 different social media!

Yes, there are so many… and more than 350 social media around the world.

You still need to create the so-called linkless brand mentions. These are references to your name or business without a link back to your website or you.

These reports, called mentions are taken as real backlinks from Google and help you greatly enhance the value and potential of your brand.

Do not stay in the dark… show yourselves in the blogs and ask influencers to mention you now!

Any kind of mention ranks you in Google!

Of course getting more recognition as a brand and online business gets the ball rolling and SEO is very important and does not only depend on two or three things.

All depend on your corporate identity, your logo, your brand, if you put your logo on your cars, if you have entered all the Skroutz in Greece, generally talking, if you have newsletter that you use regularly, etc.

Artificial intelligence and Bert will further influence search results

In our previous article about Google Bert, I had mentioned the last major change to Google’s algorithm for 2019 that was none other than our friend Bert.

But Bert was just the beginning, as artificial intelligence systems will continue to interfere with Google’s search algorithm to give us better quality search results and more relevant, guessing better the intent of the user.

So the answer to Bert and every Bert, is one … more quality content, better content, more useful content, more content with articles exceeding 2,000 to 2,500 words supported by proportional research, analog images, videos, charts , statistics, tables, tips etc.

Quality content should be classic and timeless. Don’t pay attention to this article here where I write about SEO 2020, because it is not classic, it has a finite life span and aims to capture only one keyword and also give you some useful tips on what to do in SEO 2020.

Your articles and pages should cover more classic topics that will bring traffic to your website for many more years, for at least a decade. This should be your perspective when creating content.

No More AMP

2020 brings an expected prediction and also reality to those who have been bombarded with information to create a second version of AMP for their website.

No, my friends, Google didn’t cut AMPs, but people did cut them off. The use of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology that came to boost the speed of loading a web page on mobile devices seems to be beginning to be abandoned by many of its original supporters.

Just the idea that we need to have 2 different versions for the same site, not only is a functional error, because in the AMP version we need to have a different content format, different ads etc. – so we need double site maintenance time, but it is also wrong from SEO point of view.

Many news websites in their quest to adopt the new technology that seemed attractive, encountered huge problems in crawling and indexing their websites and many saw their ranking in Google and advertising revenue, disappear overnight.

If you are in the process of putting in an AMP version, you should definitely give up and try other ways to improve the loading speed.

Those of you who have WordPress sites can use the WebP Express plugin to accelerate the speed of loading images in your website.

What does WebP technology do;

WebP is a technology developed by Google itself and can be used in all sites, even the ones that are not WordPress.

WebP is a modern image format that provides extremely low loss of compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and developers can create smaller, richer images that make the internet faster.

WebP as an image is 50% faster to load and three times richer in color depth even on animated graphics, banners or gifs.

Optimize your website for mobile first

Mobile First SEO is the new standard in Google searches. This means that your website should be Mobile First Designed.

It should be first designed for mobile devices and then for laptops and desktop computers. We should say that responsive design does not mean that it is mobile first design and that it is compatible with mobile devices.

The last years mobile and smartphone searches have far surpassed PC searches and in the future the mobile will be an extension of ourselves while the laptop will only be used for heavy and boring office work.

To get started with the mobile optimization process, you first need to take Google’s test for mobile devices.

After making all the modofications and changes you need with the help of your web designer and have reduced the download speed to less than 2 seconds or more better less than 1 second, you should better configure the content:

• Keep the paragraphs short: ideally two or three sentences each
• Put headings in the text: after 2-3 paragraphs, insert the next topic with a header for easier reading
• Use dots and numbered lists: break large blocks of text, displaying many related list ideas (like this one!)

Google loves dots and numbering as well as lists because correct formatting, which improves reading and assimilation is a ranking factor.

Optimize more GMB (Google My Business)

In a previous article about local SEO I had mentioned NAP (Name Address Phone) and what it takes to increase our ranking in Google My Business or GMB.

A huge number of the above-mentioned zero-click searches in the so-called featured snippets are local searches for which the results appear in the SERP itself, in so-called local packs, which is not other than Google maps. For mobile devices, a single local pack can take up as much space as an entire SERP displayed to a user.

In a few words, maps showing local businesses appear in many pages and above organic searches.

If you’re a local business the absolute dominance in the SERPs and in Google has to do with your dominance in local search results.

Here are some tips to master your local searches:

• List all the physical presences -your business may have more than one branch
• Provide uniformity in NAP
• Subscribe to all local directories with the right NAP always
• Keep referring your NAP in every article published on third sites cause every NAP has a backlink
• Publish a post on GMB at least every month
• Ask your customers to give you some reviews
• Put your NAP in the footer of your website

Build your E-A-T

Those who are from Larisa, Greece ( Larisa, Greece is my hometown) will think that you have to build one to eat which is a local fast food chain! But it does not have to do with this 🙂 !

EAT is the acronym for the words Expertise Authority Trustworthiness and in accordance with Google’s quality rules, your website needs to have these three features in order to rank well in Google rankings:

• Expertise: That is to say, be expert in your field, have the technical training and knowledge needed to be a professional in this field.
• Authority: Be someone in the area where you work, for example an institute, a service that has a degree of prestige. Of course, Google is not referring here in the Domain Authority.
• Trustworthiness: Enable someone to trust your website to make a purchase or even as a source for an article or information.

What can you do to build your EAT?

First you need to create a page for your website about you, who you are, what you do, how many years you are involved with it, etc.

In particular your website will need to have the following:

• About page with a detailed description
• Easy found contact page with contact information and telephone
• Recommendations to third parties and outgoing backlinks to third sites that have some value
• Privacy Policy Page and Terms of Use Page
• Each article should show the author’s photo and resume

Then you should have referrals and backlinks from other websites that refer to you. One can refer to you through twitter or through his blog or even a tag from his YouTube video.

Generally speaking again Google wants you to be someone on the internet and not the first that happened to be selling goats from a village and built a blog and started writing about this and that.

If you are not someone, then you have to be someone to have a future in Google and in 2020 and all the following decade.

Saying goodbye to 2019

Instead of conclusions I would like to tell you two things now that we are saying goodbye to 2019… and SEO 2019 is leaving and the new SEO of 2020 is coming.

Now your goals for SEO 2020 should not be short-lived and temporary but long-term. SEO is an investment that takes months to pay off, but SEO can bring you passive traffic for years, as we say passive income.

So aim for passive organic traffic for the next decade. Secure your future and your children’s future, and don’t rely on temporary crutches to get traffic to your website.

As you saw this year, the social dividend was cut for good, because we cannot live on state benefits, we can live when we are productive, when we have our own job to offer to the community.

…And I am saying this to you as a man who built this site in 2013 when I was a soldier in the Army of Larissa, when everyone else was just drinking coffee and wasting their time.

At that time, I also wrote the first SEO guide doing my duty to the army that has been read by more than 7,000 people and has helped dozens built their own site and rank first in Google!

 

Me and my Paramarketing team wish you,

Happy new year and happy 2020!