Seo in 2020: It Hasn’t Changed (Much)

SEO in 2020 both has and hasn't changed let me explain in 2019 there were three core algorithm updates one in March another in June in the final one in September and do you know what happened in each one of these updates probably not but I can guarantee you that 99.99% of people watching this video don't either and it's not because the updates weren't important it's because they didn't affect the fundamental principles of SEO success so rather than searching for the latest eat hack or trying to optimize for a bird you should focus on the three most important things that will determine the fate of your rankings and that's what we're covering in this video today stay tuned Google's algorithm is always changing but the one thing that hasn't changed is what the algorithm is trying to do Google's job is to provide the best search results for any given query they need to find pages and rank the ones that best match and serve the users intent and to figure this out they use hundreds of different ranking factors so there's really no point in chasing algorithms instead our job as content creators and marketers is to show search engines that are pages deserve to rank and the three things that will determine whether you rank or not our content backlinks and indexation let's go through each one of these first and arguably the most important thing in SEO is content no matter how prolific your writing skills are you won't rank unless you've gotten your content right and by right there are a few major things to consider first is search intent search intent means the reason behind the search is query to figure this out just do a search in Google for your target keyword and look through the titles of the top ranking pages from these you should be able to figure out the three C's of search intent the first see is content type content type can usually be categorized into blog posts products category and landing pages the second C is content format and this applies more to blog posts and landing pages a few common blog formats you'll see are how to's step-by-step tutorials lists pose opinion editorials for a landing page that might be something like a tool or calculator in the third see is content angle which often depicts the benefit it's basically your hook as to why someone should click through to your page search intent today is more important than ever and if you want to rank high you'll want to match the type format and angle of other top pages second make sure you've covered the topic info this doesn't mean that you have to give every last detail on the topic for example if you're writing about a topic like the best headphones you don't have to mention every single manufacturer and/or model instead look at what the top ranking pages are talking about so for best headphones you'll see that TechRadar has organized their posts by best type headphones like best in your headphones best on ear headphones and so on see the article from Digital Trends and they follow the same or at least very similar format you can also use hf s-- content gap tool to see common keyword rankings among the top three to five pages just enter the top ranking URLs here which I've already done and run the search and now that we can see keywords that the top pages rank for we can extract subtopics and create a thorough page to maximize search traffic so I might want to talk about budget headphones as well as the best portable headphones and categorize my post that way finally make sure you get the on-page stuff down pet things like titles URL slugs and heading tags are basic things in on-page SEO but they're important rather than going into the details I recommend watching our full on-page SEO checklist tutorial which will walk you through all of the important steps the second thing is to continue focusing on building backlinks links have been and still are one of the strongest ranking signals and if you want to rank for anything remotely competitive you'll need to build them now while you might be searching for new and revolutionary link building tactics in 2020 my recommendation is to stop things like broken link building the skyscraper technique and guest posting all work really well what doesn't work is when you copy other people's templates Batum by doing that you're essentially putting yourself in a box with hundreds of other people setting the exact same email which probably won't yield the best results try and provide value to the person who's receiving the email to increase your chances of getting links we have an awesome playlist on various link building strategies so if you're relatively new to link building or struggling to build quality backlinks I highly recommend watching those videos choosing a strategy for your pages and executing alright the final piece to ranking is indexation search engines crawl parse and store information in a database called a search index and users are then able to access this information using Google search so if your pages aren't indexed then it's impossible to get your site or pages discovered in search to check if your site is indexed go to the coverage report in Google search console and you should be able to see which pages Google is indexed also if you haven't submitted a sitemap then you can do that here too now if you don't have search console setup go to Google and search for site colon your domain hopefully you'll see most of your pages there if you're seeing zero results it means your site isn't indexed if this is you there are three things you should look for first make sure you have an unintentionally no index all of your pages this often happens with redesigns where developers will no index an entire site during development and forget to switch it back when migrating just open the source code on your home page and search for no index if you see it in your meta robots tag then you'll want to fix that second make sure you're not blocking Googlebot or all user agents in your robots.txt file just go to your domain comm slash robots.txt and if you see something like this it means you're blocking all BOTS from calling any page on your website and third check search console for a manual action you can do that by clicking on manual actions in the sidebar fix whatever it is and submit a reconsideration request now if you have specific pages that aren't being indexed then you likely have more of a technical SEO issue first do the same checks that I mentioned like making sure you didn't know index the page another reason can be if you're automatically generating millions of indexable pages these are most likely going to be low quality and will affect your crawl budget some examples are forum profiles or faceted navigation issues on e-commerce pages there are literally an endless number of things to check for if your pages aren't being indexed but these are the most common bottom line if your pages aren't in Google's index your SEO future in 2020 or even 2222 won't be very promising now while things like Bert or using Python to automate SEO tasks might seem exciting prioritize and don't lose focus on these three things that are actually going to get your pages ranking high think about it like this you don't need to know how running shoes are made in order to become a better sprinter you need to strengthen your core muscle groups practice the fundamentals like starting accelerating and finishing most importantly you need to get out there and compete with others in the same way SEO is all about fundamentals focus on the things that matter most rather than chasing shiny tactics from headlines claiming SEO has completely changed now I'd love to hear from you do you think that SEO will be more or less the same in 2020 versus last year let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed this video make sure to like share and subscribe for more actionable SEO tutorials so keep grinding away stay focused and I'll see you in the next tutorial

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