Content marketing is not a marketing experiment. It is actually an entire strategy which can be quite beneficial for your brand.

In this article, we are going to discuss some top content marketing trends that we are going to see in 2020.

Convincing visuals in content

Platforms where visual content is shared continue to be trendy and it seems that this popularity will continue to rise in 2020. Examples include Instagram, YouTube, and SnapChat. These are the favorite platforms for teens.

Adults are more attracted towards YouTube. And it is an intelligent guess that visual content is going to be more interesting in 2020.

Video content and visual storytelling

While talking about the importance of video content, let’s have a look at some stats. The popularity of YouTube, digital imagery and AR has given boost to video content and visual storytelling.

• In 2018, about 85% of internet users in US watched video content in monthly basis using different devices.
• About 56% of the people aging between 25 and 34 years and 54% of the people aging between 35 to 44 years actually want to see more video content from the brands they like to hear from.

Moreover, 62% of internet users say that they consume video content more thoroughly as compared to the text content. It means they are better able to pay attention to the video content.

E-A-T

Google published a blog on Webmaster Central in August 2019 reminding about the core updates. It also told about the ways to handle those updates.

Among other suggestions, Google pointed at the importance of paying attention to E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Now, you may wonder what’s so special about it since there is a majority of people already working on it. The fact that Google pointed out specifically at this factor emphasizes the importance of it. And it also means that Google is going to pay even more attention to this factor.

So, what is E-A-T all about?

• It starts with earning links or brand mentions from high authority resources.
• Then you need to provide E-A-T information on your site. For instance, you can include bio and other credentials on your about page.
• Then you need to link out to authoritative sources.
• Lastly, you are going to have to update your site and content on a regular basis. Make sure that the content you are placing is relevant and accurate.

Customer first content

In 2018-2019, we saw that the content that targeted customers rather than insisting on sales was more successful. This is actually the trust-building strategy that worked. The only way you can confirm sales from the customers now is that you have trust from those customers. And good thing is that Google’s systems are updated enough to support this type of marketing. So, it is all becoming more natural as your content can rank only if it is capable of convincing your target audience.

First, get some keywords to figure out the demographics. Keyword research should be targeted to relevant services and products, which is something already known. Once you have a solid list, select the five that best represent the brand and the demographics associated with this.  From there, you can figure out the audience and who you’re marketing to. Once you have that, you can look for ways to link these in order to target them.

Next, identify who is visiting the site.  This is kind of like painting the target around where the arrow is, but you should understand who is coming to the site to figure out the right audience. You can consult google analytics, and from there, once you enable the demographics and interest reports, you’ll be able to find the correct information that you need of your audiences.

You can also check to see what other brands and competitors are doing. You can look at the demographics and the psychographics, and collect as much information as possible. Quantcast is a good one since it will help you analyze everything that you need to see from your site, and really get a feel for what you’re looking at.

Social insights is another one.  For example, if you do use facebook, you’ve already got that put in. you can look at that and see the audience information, and a good idea of what you’re looking at.  You can what people are looking at when they look at your social media pages.

Then you have surveys, and you can send these out to the current email list.  You can also do this after a customer checks out, and the surveys can be short, and get to the point, and you can literally ask basic demographic questions, overall interests and other needs and such. From there, you can cater to the site, and from there, build it around the major needs of your customers.

Finally, try identifying questions. when google shows answers in the SERPs you want common user questions that are there too.  For example, answer the public, BuzzSumo, and the like can help with figuring out all of this, and you can from there, get an answer about the public that visits the sites.

With the right information, you can create the best SEO campaigns possible, and from here, put together a lot of better options for your business. With the right tools and tricks, you too can get a lot of great results from this, and in turn, create great campaigns.

Well, it depends on who you talk to. Some have a contentious attitude towards this, and that’s because it may not even add value to the site.  Some old SEO advice that you write content for may not be generated for users, but instead link building and the search engine.  You shouldn’t build your links because you think they’ll bring a value, but you want to build these links to drive the targeted traffic.

You should look at some of the link building practices that look spammy, and how the rise of “arbitrary metrics” have blurred the link between what works, and what doesn’t.  You should also look at the fact that lots of times, internal linking is limited, and you should be investing in the content, rather than the link building.  The argument of that it doesn’t work is usually focused on building a better user experience, and be obsessive about the matching user intent, and the ultimate goal of that is genuinely to provide a result that’s good, and you should always, no matter what, aspire to be the authority in the field, and it’s better to earn than to build.

But, some people like to have links to build and distinguish the high-quality content in these competition niches.  The problem is that a lot of it isn’t seen, and if you don’t reach out directly or socialize, you’re missing out on linking.  You should look at how you secure these, and you can figure out, via networking, how you can build links into content that you already have, and how you can prevent people from missing out on your links.

Building links are something that, if you do choose to use this type of means to generate support, should be done in a way that is organic. Don’t’ try to farm links from anyone and everyone. Instead, you should make sure that the links you’re building are real, authentic, and actually generate a good result form this.

So are they bad? Not necessarily. Lots of people do believe that they are doing the right thing with linking, but if you’re creating spammy content and bad links, you’re pretty much shooting yourself in the foot, so always make sure that if you do choose to link, you do it in a way that not only benefits you but the other users of the site too.

You may wonder if it really is all that complex. Well, it’s a complicated discipline where it combines tools, practices, and adjusting to the updates.  The broad core algorithm updates, chrome security warnings, the mobile speed update, and video carousels definitely affect the algorithm, and it’s new technology that you have to keep yourself in the know about since it modifies the way that search engines work.

But, keeping yourself in the know about what is happening is actually very important, and let’s face it, if you know about this, that’s half the battle, and this will help with improving your efforts for making SEO reasonable and manageable for people.

There is a common issue that overcomplicates SEO though, and that’s misunderstanding how the algorithms work. We tend to misinterpret what google brings to the table, and from there, it can cause you to spend a lot more time on tasks that have nothing to do with what you need to do and gets you absolutely no results. Google benchmark is a prime example, and once it was announced, people dashed there to improve the page speed in every way possible.

But, is that necessary? Well, if a page tends to slow down, you can expect the site to go down in the SERPs too. But you should realize that there are some things that you don’t need to cull over for hours upon hours on end just to get an understanding of it, and you’ll want to make sure that you’re knowledgeable in all of this, as best as you can be.

But finally, there are tools. New restrictions force you to think outside the box, but it also allows for you to use a vast selection of SEO tools. We are moving from different SEO skills, and you can learn new approaches, and your clients will want to use different tools, such as learning to promote their latest projects internationally. that’s a much different landscape than a local SEO climate so, the truth is, it’s not all that complicated at the core.  You have basic tools, but the sheer number of tools is what makes it much more complicated, and the fact that there is just so much out there which can make the job so much harder for you too.

So to answer the question, SEO isn’t all that complicated, but if you focus on the wrong things at the wrong time, and you try to work to overcomplicate the nature of SEO, you’re going to end up having a bad time, because welcome to overcomplex systems, and overthinking as well too.

Those marketers that are successful understand the audience motivation, and how to persuade others into taking the correct actions, which is true in the arena of searchin.g. the average relationship with customers and search engines has changed, which involves searching now, and the process of “micro moments” that are built entirely on this.

The game here is to fulfill the “age of assistance” where the need is fulfilled via the electronics and software.  Serch isn’t a niche or discipline, but it’s ambient, dependable, and is connected to consumers through a range of intent states every day. For search marketers, the holy grail is to give good experiences to the customer through loyalty.

Keyword stuffed content doesn’t work in this, and the technology has helped us build that gap, and help to create a new, more innovative means of the potential of psychology, and how we understand the audience and develop things further.

The marketers that excel are those who understand both the strengths within technology, and people as well, allowing them to use technology in the areas they want to perform, using the base t bring forth and extend the capabilities. it’s been called extended intelligence, which is how it plays a beneficial role.  Sensationalist headlines about AI taking our jobs happen, but that’s unlikely, due to the fact that the psychology of marketing involves human emotion and catering to that.

AI can work in areas involving getting a task done faster, such as data analysis, but her’s the thing, the mind-numbing tasks should be automated, so that marketer s can work on the human skills, and catering to that.

The automation of tasks, however, leads to complacency, rather than more production, and it’s why people need to look at using the information that AI gives us, rather than trying t just let the AI do everything.

that’s why, when using marketing to help benefit other people, you want to make sure that you’re choosing humanlike topics that can resonate with others, and create compelling content that will ultimately engage and help the audience.

Marketers are the interlocutors between technology and the audience. They understand the role of emotions, and they can help to make decisions for others, and even nudge different people into taking actions. When we look at the result page, there is a lot of clamoring, but marketers need to know what makes the audience tick and appeal to those needs.

The key to having a successful ad campaign isn’t just putting the money in the right place, or even the crawlability or indexing, but instead, you should know the psychology behind people, their motivators, and understanding how the brain works when decisions are bing made, which in turn can help others become influencers to these decisions to help them choose right.

These links should have a shallow click-depth, include to the main content of your page, the keywords in the anchor text should have a reasonable number of links within the page, and from there, you’ll be able to put together the important links that work with this.  You need one of these since it will help you get more information to your visitors, help get better crawlability, and from there, increase the traffic to those that are higher converting and bring you more results.

Using internal links for high search volumes is a good strategy, to begin with since it will help give you a landing page style that will help you persuade, convert, and attract the leads that you have going on.  However, you should make sure that they rank to the home page because that’s how you will improve this.

Then there is using the internal links to target the mid search volume keywords in order to drive the traffic to key landing pages. This is a strategy that you want to have it links to products, and this works for comparison posts, blogs, and other such.  you’ll be using different links to get people to visit information externally within an internal article.

The final one is to use your target keywords to hit the low-traffic pages. When you work with a narrow type of niche, and you want to drive your leads to bottom-level pages, such as your blog posts or product listings, this is the best way to do it.  You can include copy images that can be linked organically to the other bottom-level pages. This will allow the users to see the big picture when they get multiple products or consume numerous pieces of content, so you can create a multi-part blog for example that gives internal links or product pages that do link to other product comparisons along with DIY pages that you can build with these.

The less keyword competition, the more likely pages will rank. So remember this when you’re looking to use this one.

From here, you can assess which one will work for you, and from there, generate the content that works for you. you’ll be amazed at the difference that this makes, and the results that you get from your strategies at hand and the results generated.

Migrations are important since they avoid redirection errors, and migration is usually from moving from one point of the site to another.

One example of migration is the CMS moving and the URL format, where it can be typing in a URL, and it doesn’t take you to where you want to go, simply because it might be dated or something.

If you change the CMS, sometimes you’ll have more flexibility. If your URLs are structured, you can move it to post or something similar, and moving URLS around will help improve structure and migration.

Also, look at the keywords that you use. Sometimes keywordy or dated URLs can be changed to make them shorter or cleaner, better for humans to read.

Another way to improve this is a content overhaul. If you have a client that comes to you, and you see that their content isn’t giving them the traffic and rankings that they want, sometimes a content audit works, but usually looking at the pages that are redundant, stronger together, and those that don’t serve a purpose, you can filter this out. Sometimes even merging the USL, moving pages about, or dropping them completely will help with this. It can affect how your pages rank, and you want to make sure that you’re doing all of this.

Mistakes do happen with redirects, and if you aren’t touching on this or fixing it, you’re going to have a bad time. For example, unclear ownership does happen if you’re on a bad team or a smaller one that doesn’t know how to handle this. There are situations where the tech will say they can do it, and then they don’t. If it gets dropped, then you can’t take responsibility.

Another reason why this happens is deadlines. Internal and external ones are a big part of this, and sometimes, you may focus on one part of it, but not the other five pages that need redirects, resulting in the migration happening for a singular site, but not for others.

You need to realize that redirects need to be one to one, and not have them go to three pages, but literally just one to one. You should link the URL to one singular location for every single one to one.

With this as well, watch out for loops and redirect chains. You should keep them anywhere from 3-5, and make sure that they aren’t looping back and forth.

Redirects affect your page speed and rankings, and you need to make sure that you can migrate around to the site in an effective manner. By making sure that you’re tacking these aspects, you’ll be able to improve the SEO of the site and help it rank in a more effective manner too.

In order to overlap the query space, you want to take a specific word bag approach, and by operating on a SERP-by-SERP analysis, you can see the suggestions and features that are there, filtering stop words, and comparing one to another. By looking at these, you’ll be able to look at the overlaps and the entity overlap between every single feature.

So, there is a lot happening with a few features. 4% of the search suggestions had duplication, so Google is putting a lot of consideration into care into each feature, so you should watch all of them and figure out how to weed out the duplicate content every so often.

Now, the first thing that you’ll want to look at is carousal snippets, which holds the answers to questions thanks to the bubbles that run along the bottom of these. When clicked, the script takes over the snippet and gives a new query. The combination of your original term and text does have a bit of research to it.

The carousal snippet IQ bubbles had the least overlap of the other features since the bubbles typically contained subcategories that live within a higher category level introduced by the search term. It’s a snippet that gives you features and general level, but these bubbles may showcase other distinct keyword suggestions.

There is also the “people also ask” box, which essentially contains four different questions related to the query, and it expands to get the links that Google has pulled from other sites. These are great for long-tail keywords and are awesome for content inspiration so you can target these keywords.

Related searches is another place, and you’ll notice that when you click on them, you’ll see little duplication with the SERO features, which means that they’re oddly unique, and they’re shorter and more iterative of the query originally used, while still staying on topic.

Then there are the people also search for, which allows for after clicking on an organic result and then going back to the SERP page, and there are either 8 or six of these.

These features allow you to utilize different ideas, and it can be used for keywords as well. Google might be running out of different names for them, but understanding the topic hierarchies is important for narrowing out the queries you want to tackle, and by understanding the SERO suggestions, you can work to tackle each of these, and make sure that you’re throwing content that does work with good duplication onto this, no matter what too.

The issue of accuracy of results, and accusations of political bias, and privacy issues especially with filter bubbles not hiding the location in all of the different aspects. International data came under fire too, especially involving political issues, and Google’s willingness to even work with the censorship that China put forward. It’s been a rough year in terms of politics, and Google needs to make changes.

Google makes money via ads so they’ll follow the money. They want to deliver cost-effective and relevant advertising, since well, that’s important. So what does that mean?

Well, it’s going to get the brands known, and will double down on the known sites, and will triple down on facts, including fact checking and flagging pages that aren’t fact-checked, and it will affect medical communities even more since they want accuracy. They will also look at multi-perspective answers more than anything so that it doesn’t just create confirmation bias.

Google will also be working to be the traction go-to on the web and will look to pull conversions via Amazon, push google home much more, and will work to improve the Amazon Prime experience.

It also will double down on security, prioritizing the HTTPS sites, giving more education and will be more transparent, and will audit and notify hacked sites. It also will probably be looking to increase the notifications for cookies and where they are being stored as well.

It will also be looking to integrate more hardware, especially in terms of google home and android implementation.

Companies in term should look to find the seamlessness that works for them, and delight the users to make it even better for them, whether it be via website, search, apps, voice search, and the light. Create better conversions, understand customer intent, create the best infrastructure needed, such as creating a skill or whatever personalization works, make sure that your website provides the correct results, make sure that you can restock items quickly and efficiently, make sure that the chatbots help with questions, make sure that physical locations are explicitly stated, give them good fulfillment forms that are easy to process, and finally be transparent and make sure that they funnel into the conversions that you desire. These are all major factors, and if you’re considering going into marketing or anything of the like, you need to follow the trends.

Google is changing, and in this next year, focus on all of these in order to improve conversions and make it better too.