Top SEO Lessons You Should Learn in 2020 to Thrive

A seasoned SEO professional can share many of his thoughts and ideas after working in this competitive industry for many years. Becoming an SEO professional in 2020 is both challenging and rewarding. Sadly, after working for one decade, so many SEO professionals are still not able to understand and implement the best practices and fail to learn the peculiarities that come with optimizing the websites. For example, if you started your SEO career in 2005, starting with some web pages and sites of businesses, this would have helped you to understand the basics of SEO and search engines. As time progressed, you might have developed many skills and now been working as a consultant or an expert digital marketer.

If you have managed SEO for startups and in-house for many organizations, you may have come across a lot of technologies and learned a lot. But by the time you reach your 20-year mark in SEO career, will you be able to say you have achieved significantly and perfectly able to share your expertise with so many other individuals? Let us share some best-proven SEO practices used by experts over years and how these strategies can work for you in 2020 to thrive.

1.     Things have Changed a Lot in SEO World

The first and foremost lesson learned by SEO professional is that things have dramatically changed in the course of the last 20 years in the SEO sphere. In the early days of search engine optimization, optimization of a website was a lot less challenging compared to this day in 2020 when professionals have to work their guts out to solve complex problems. All you had to do is to insert a few keyword phrases into a website of a client and a small description of few words to play the game of SEO. That website would be identified by the search engines and other online directories that would help many small and large businesses to drive traffic to their websites.

There are no keyword tools of analytics used today that were present in the last decade, like SEMrush and Google Trends. However, the reason for not using any analytics or SEO reports was because there was so little competition on the Internet and no complex algorithms of Google and other search engines to restrict the black hat SEO practices. The technology has advanced dramatically over the past ten years with advancement in knowledge of machine learning, neural matching, and Google algorithms. Now the professionals are working in a complex environment that is extensive and data-driven. This shows that the game of SEO has become harder and harder each year due to the evolving technologies and world.

2.     Males only Dominated SEO

Like many other professionals such as sports and engineering, being a woman in search engine optimization world was a bit challenging in the previous decades. Even in 2015, many well-known SEO women have shared their stories and their struggles to survive in this industry dominated by men. In the early years of SEO and even today, most of the popular blogs, SEO agencies, conferences, and publications were dominated by males compared to females.

In recent years from 2016-2020, there have been many debates as to how many women are going to join or continue the SEO profession and thrive like a few well-known ladies. In 2020, in the United States, a Search Engine Journal post reveals that more women have applied for SEO jobs than in any other year. There are more women in America and Canada speaking at conferences compared to past ten years. Women are doing well in SEO and SMM in 2020 and gaining much respect compared to the past ten years. For example, a woman in this industry named Areej Ali is working on transforming the way SEO professionals perceive women in this challenging industry.

Other most prominent women in the search engine optimization world who have been working since the early days and have now reached an expert consultancy status include Rhea Drysdale, Lisa Myers, Ann Smarty, Laura Lippay, Julia McCoy, and many other female mentors of these women. These are the ladies who have made it easy for other young women to join the exciting world of SEO. You can reach these women on their Twitter or Facebook pages and learn quickly to gain new skills.

3.     SEO in 2020 is more than Just Knowing the Search Engines

Back in the days of early SEO, knowing the basics of SEO and search engines was a good luck charm for the professionals. Nowadays, an SEO individual has to take on many roles and responsibilities to use creative approaches and tools to accomplish marketing goals. Nowadays, search engine optimization SEO is all about two most important things:

• Making a powerful keywords strategy that users are using
• Having a complete understanding of why users are using these keywords or their search intent.

Going beyond keywords in the content, URL, structure, and data make you uncomfortable, but this is the only way to help users find out that your website or URL is the solution to their problem. Moreover, nowadays, SEO professionals must also have an eye for a design of their website and a feeling of usability. The marketing efforts must be diverted towards a specific target audience; that makes it important to understand a technology that makes a site run faster. Therefore, all the aspects of technology and basic SEO are important to have overall success in 2020.

4.     Technology is Important to Learn in 2020

Many men and women have been assigned challenging roles in SEO due to their expertise in technology and tools. For example, in the United States, many women are not given a job role in the SEO department because they do not have an experience or skill regarding SEO tools such as Google Analytics or SEMrush. If you are not technical enough yet, then the SEO role would be difficult to manage for you in 2020 even if you can land on your first job. Therefore, it is important to identify the roles that you can do well with a grip on technology.

A good strategy suggested by one of the best SEO experts in Pakistan, Mr Rizwan Zahid, the director of oldest SEO firm (SEO.COM.PK), is that Rizwan made himself a goal to become a guru in technical SEO so he could work on bigger and more complex websites in a few years. Rizwan reveals that to work on the large-scale websites, understanding of both backend and front end is vital in addition to SEO techniques and tools. Therefore, the hard work seems to have paid off in the career and now his company can come up with many innovative SEO solutions for both local and international businesses.

5.     Relationships are More Important in SEO World Today

As the great Neil Patel recalls on his blog, “I often think back of the olden days and how much my success depends on the people I worked with and the relationships we created”. This shows that if you are a seasoned SEO professional or has been working in the industry for five years, you must have worked with engineers, graphic designers, web development professionals, data base engineers, marketing professionals, and many other stakeholders that are directly involved in the operation of your SEO. If your leadership in the firm is not able to understand SEO, then the work they do in SEO will not get prioritized, and the optimization efforts will not work diligently if the relationships between the director and the employees are not strong. Therefore, in the field of professional SEO, the relationships of professionals with their mangers and subordinates’ matter to achieve successful results.

Moreover, the SEO success of your organization mostly depends on the working of content writers and developers. For example, if the content writers are not aware of the density of keywords to be used in a specific article or blog, then they will not be able to balance the keywords and use keyword stuffing that will ruin the results on the Google SERP. Similarly, if your engineers are not able to understand aspects of SEO, then chances are that your website will have issues that will drive the quality of your domain down. You can speak about this in more detail with your department employees and fix any relationship issues to help the teams work more efficiently.

6.     Do Not Argue

Many search engine optimization professionals often argue with their teams that the work should be done on time. In this industry, the building of frustration is possible because this is a different industry that demands hard work and patience to arrive at the visible results. You cannot put some corn in the machine and get the ground corn out as a result, SEO takes time, money, and patience to receive positive outcomes. Therefore, arguing with your employer will not get you anywhere and will not get the job done for SEO.

The best strategy for solving this problem is to find creative ways of doing work in the SEO field and have some patience and finesse. If you work diligently on a project for months to come, the chances are that you will be able to see its results in a positive direction. The hard work can speak for itself when it is presented in a clean and precise manner.

7.     Understand your Audience and Users

Another most important lesson to learn for SEO professionals is to understand their users and audiences so that you not only get results but will also encourage the buyers to complete a transaction that can increase your sales. Businesses need to increase their sales in 2020 and your SEO is the key to their success to drive traffic to their websites; a good way to do that is to tag your keywords with what your audiences are trying to search for and guide you overall keywords strategy around the search intent of the users. For example, take a look at an example of an eCommerce site. If men are searching for a necktie on the internet, then they could be searching for anything like a bow tie or a railroad tie. If a user is typing a specific keyword on Google to search for a tie, then they could be looking to purchase a neck tie on Google and find the nearest shop to do so.

It is your duty as a responsible SEO professional is to understand the intent of the user and create keywords and content that matches their search intent. Understand the users’ intent will also allow you to understand your SEO better and create content around their search intent.

8.     There is No Right Strategy for Getting SEO Right

Yes, as many experts like Neil Patel reveal that SEO is a nuance, not a game of chance or a standard strategy that can help you win the game. SEO is not a calculation-based practice, or is based on a specific formula to form your strategy to get results every time. So what is SEO all about?

• SEO is all about building an understanding that what your users are searching for on the Internet and matching those things with your website content.
• SEO is about understanding your competition and knowing that what you need to do to obtain the positive results.
• SEO is about spending the time on what really matters to you such as adding structured data, writing title tags, and crafting descriptions that are useful for the readers who love to click on them. Therefore, understanding the flow of content is important in SEO on a website.

9.     Telling a Story is Important Tactic in 2020

SEO is a bigger picture of copywriting that also involves the art of using storytelling. SEO is all about telling search engines and what story you want them to know that can help Google to rank your site. For example, if you are running an eCommerce site or a shoe website, then the only way to inform Google about you are selling shoes and apparel is to create a content around these commodities. For example, you can create a range of topics such as ‘how to fit shoes’ and ‘how to select the best pair of shoes for your 2020 Christmas’. While optimizing your shoe website, it is important for you to tell a complete story and present it in an appropriate fashion so that search engines can digest them properly and rank your website accordingly.

10.    SEO Firm is Different from In-House Work

If you are an experienced SEO professional working in this industry for the past ten years, then you must have known the difference between running an entire SEO agency or working as an employee in-house. It is clear that when you work for an SEO firm, there may be one website you are dealing with rather than running an agency with 20 websites. In the agency, the more focus of a director is to keep the customers happy and satisfied. This happens when you get them the positive results regarding your SEO efforts. However, when a client becomes unsatisfied or unhappy with your agency, he may choose to terminate the contract and windup the outsourcing.

Therefore, the pressure on SEO professionals is always on even if they are working in an agency as employees or director. On the other hand, working in a large enterprise is another beast you have to battle that is different from a small or mid-sized SEO company.

11.    Enterprise Level SEO Challenges

When you work for an enterprise instead of a small firm, the way you approach your SEO and how you work completely changes according to the situation of your country. In a large enterprise, the SEO tasks become more complex, and you have to battle the giants in the industry to manage billions of impressions. SEO becomes very complex that needs to be understood and organized with a strategy that is communicated clearly. First, you can plan and pick up a few pages before managing a million pages of content. You can handle specific topics on a specific day and get through all the generated content.

Conclusion

The above pieces of evidence from the industry and suggestions of the experts reveal that SEO is altogether a much difficult and different game in 2020. If you and your peers have been in this industry for a decade or long, then you must have seen many people come and go in this industry. The rule remains the same in this ever-evolving industry. One who fears the SEO loses his grip on techniques and tools and finally loses the battle of SEO to make an impression on the industry. Therefore, it is important to realize that SEO has changed in 2020, and now professionals have to use technological tools and creative skills to optimize websites.