Have you ever wondered how to get traffic to your website without paying a fortune for advertising? SEO is the best way to do that.

You’re missing out on a lot of potential traffic if you don’t take advantage of Google. After all, 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search results. You need to know how to handle SEO for your website if you want to tap into free traffic.

If you’re trying to learn what the big trends are for SEO in 2020, look no further. Below are nine things you need to pay attention to in SEO this year.

1. Voice Search

Have you ever compared how you type a question in a search engine to how you ask someone in-person? The chances are the way you ask your question is entirely different. The same goes for everyone else.

Over the past several years, smart devices have gotten better at recognizing speech. More people than ever are beginning to use their voice to ask their devices their questions.

This trend means you have many more search terms to rank for. If you can optimize your website for voice search before your competitors, you can rank for these new terms before everyone else starts trying.

2. Structured Data

You’ve probably noticed that Google answers many of your questions right on the search engines these days. These answers are what are known as rich text snippets.

The question is, how can you get your site to rank in these spots? You can do this by adding structured data to your website.

Using structured data better allows search engines to understand the content of your website. You divide your content into sections that can easily be scanned. This information is what Google brings into the rich snippet area on search results.

Structured data will help you get your site to the number zero position on Google. You can get more search engine traffic without getting the number one spot.

3. Mobile Design

Your mobile design can’t be an afterthought anymore. With more traffic than ever coming from mobile devices than ever, you need to make sure you optimize your website for every device.

Having an unoptimized site won’t only hurt your chance to get new customers, either. Google is smart enough to recognize a bad mobile experience. If you can’t provide a pleasant experience to mobile users, you can expect Google to drop your position in the rankings for mobile searches.

4. Visual Search

Have you ever had the experience of getting your hands on a product and not knowing what it is? You can look online to find most of the information you want. The problem is, you can’t do that when you don’t know what you need to look for.

The good news is that technology has gotten good enough to handle this for you. Take Google Lens, for instance. All you need to do is take a photo, and it will tell you what you’re looking at.

You need to make sure you optimize your image SEO if you want to take advantage of this trend. You want your information and products to show up in the top image results.

5. Search Intent

Search engines haven’t always been great at understanding what people are looking for when typing a question. They relied on a lot of different variables to try and match a user’s query to websites that could answer it. With the advancements in AI, search engines have gotten good at understanding questions.

This makes creating content that answers your visitor’s question more crucial than ever. You can’t only give lip service to a keyword anymore. You need to provide the best resource possible, so your visitor’s question is answered.

6. Video

Video content is more popular than ever. More sites are beginning to integrate video into their websites. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should stop there.

Google ranks a lot of videos at the top of the search results. You can use this to your advantage by creating a YouTube channel and create relevant content for your audience.

If you can create valuable information, it can move you straight to the top of the search results. You can drive your YouTube viewers back to your website from there.

7. CTR Optimization

Have you ever wondered how many people looked at your page in the search results and not clicked because of your title?

Here’s a secret: Google knows.

CTR optimization is the process of changing your title and meta-description to make your search result more appealing to click on. You want to provide a web page that thoroughly answers a searcher’s question. If you have a high click-through rate and visitors stay on your site, Google knows that your website is giving people what they’re looking for.

8. Backlinks

There has been a lot of talk about backlinks losing relevance in the future of SEO. Unfortunately, that still isn’t the case.

Backlinks are still an essential part of getting your website to rank high on Google. If it comes down to several sites with high-quality content, the website with high-quality backlinks is going to have a higher chance of ranking at the top.

Talk to your SEO company to create a backlink strategy so you can boost your rankings.

9. Consolidated Search Results

Organic search results used to take up most of the search engine page. That’s changed over the past several years.

It started with the inclusion of paid ads. These ads show up at the top of the search results and push the organic results down. Advertisements made search engines pay to rank if you wanted to be at the top.

Things are even worse today. Now you have video, rich text snippets, carousels, and information panels in the mix. Expect less room on the front page of search engines in the future.

Keep up With All the Big Trends in SEO

A lot is happening in the world of SEO. Make sure to keep up with all the big trends so that you know what needs to happen on your website. If you keep up to date and please Google, you’re going to increase your chances of ranking on the first page.