The world of SEO is constantly changing, as a result of updates made on Google and the improvement guidelines. This is something crucial that significantly modifies the search results and therefore can affect different websites, depending on the content and the niche. Google is based on offering quality content adapted to the user, increasingly oriented to their search intent.
SEO 2020: January core update
Google confirmed a major update for the first month of the year 2020, which happened more precisely between January 13th and 15th, this video gives you a whole SEO summary in January.
This update affected content on certain sites considered YMYL (your money, your life – your money or your life.)
According to Google, any page that contains content that may interfere with someone’s health, happiness, safety or financial stability is a YMYL page.
So, sites that talk about making money online, health tips like medication recommendations, etc., need to improve their content even more, because Google is watching! We will talk more about this throughout this article.
Therefore, most health and finance domains have been greatly affected by these updates, but not only that, there are many others that have had their ratings declined and many others that have benefited from the update.
In general, these changes mean falls or increases in traffic, but, above all, they need constant attention from professionals working in these segments.
Google’s constant updates focus on user optimization and technical content. This means that users will have more opportunities than ever before when looking for relevant and more honest content. It is as if Google wants to increasingly facilitate searches and sites with high authorities have more to gain from these changes.
The user experience (UX)
User experience and website accessibility are again fundamental factors to improve the performance of pages in searches. As for the user experience, the phases vary from the initial interaction in the SERPs (search results), to the overall landing page experience.
The SEO professional has a lot to do in this regard, in technical fundamentals and best practices. We should also talk about the speed of the site and the page, which, despite being something that “everyone already knows”, the tendency is that more and more sites are slower and this affects the users’ experience. So, good optimization practices to make your site fast will never be considered something old, on the contrary, it is very current and urgent.
Rich Snippet in search results
Probably one of the most controversial issues so far has to do with changing the display of snippets on SERP. Rich Snippets are larger “snippets” of search results, such as videos, lists, among others that Google has shown more and more to streamline the response to a user’s query.
Currently, we can find more sophisticated Rich Snippets in search results, which attract more attention. It is essential to take into account the microdata established in schema.org to add all the necessary information next to the result of the traditional search. And if we talk about excerpts, we can find aspects that we do not consider advantageous.
If the featured snippet already shows all the information the user needs, they will not click on your link and will not report CTR. Therefore, the best way is to define an SEO strategy to offer an “incomplete” response to the user, so that he will access your page and continue reading the information.
From now on, Google will stop showing repeated pages, which has bothered many SEOs who consider this a disadvantage. If you already appear in a Rich Snippet, you will not appear again in the links below it in the SERP.
The only problem that this functionality can present has to do with the fact that searches are increasingly personalized and can provide different results, depending on the user’s history or location. Therefore, what we should implement will be these contents for less personalized searches.
SEO is mobile
Most users use their cell phones to conduct searches, which means adapting the pages to these devices. Therefore, Google will begin to take this much more into account starting this year.
What does it mean?
First, we have to optimize the pages for mobile devices and then make them compatible with a computer, thus changing the paradigm.
According to Google, the “primary” device is now the cell phone and the secondary desktop. Focusing on this detail, we can know what type of optimization will have a successful result and, mainly, what we face when it comes to showing results on mobile SERPs.
It is increasingly evident that Google needs to create professional, responsive, fast sites with excellent content.
Structured data
Although it is not a ranking factor, structured data is essential for a proper Google reading.
What’s new then?
Structured data is information in a more standardized format, made for search engines (robots) so that they can better understand what that content is about.
What happened was that on January 16, the Twitter account Google Search Liaison, which triggers official Google tweets, said in reply to a user:
“Content creators can provide structured data as an * optional * way to improve their webpage listings, but that has no impact on the ranking. Its use can simply help pages that are already well ranked to look more attractive to potential visitors. ”
EAT criteria: brand reputation
Brand reputation and EAT criteria will continue to be one of the essential factors for improving search positioning. In this case, knowing that the acronym EAT stands for Experience, Authority and Trust (in English), we must transfer it to our content.
Trust, in turn, will be achieved if your site has a good loading speed and an SSL code that guarantees security. Authority means having a site with significant metrics compared to other sites with high authority, so always create backlinks from original content sites with high relevance, and ultimately, the experience will be achieved by linking to sites with greater authority.
Undoubtedly, all three problems must be linked to ensure a good reputation for the brand and to improve SEO results.
As you may know, and as we already said, this is not just about reviewing the content, but also about technology and security issues. For this reason, the organic visibility of YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) pages that do not have links to more authoritative pages or the appropriate credentials to write about these types of topics will be affected to a greater extent.
Obviously, fake news is also a concern for Google, which is why the value of trust within EAT criteria is preferred when displaying a page in the results. Once again, we talk about structured data, as the sources will have to correspond to the author’s credentials and the verification of the facts.
We will undoubtedly continue to see the evolution of some of these trends throughout the year, but it is advisable to reconsider certain parameters for improvement to avoid losing positions and visibility. If you don’t want to play around with Google’s changes, we recommend that you hire an SEO specialist for your site, leave that job in his hands, or use free tools that can assist you in this task of pioneering SEO in 2020.
