1. VOICE SEARCH
This is the year that digital marketers can no longer ignore voice search. There are a lot of things you can do to optimize your site for voice search, but the most important change involves using long-tail keywords like “how to make vegan brownies” instead of a shorter keyword like “vegan brownies.”
Tips for Power Search Optimization
Understand the Language: When people use search engines, many use long sentences with specific keywords. Therefore, to optimize the opportunity to be found in voice search results, use longer keywords and complete sentences(think of what someone would ask a friend about a specific product or service).
Be Conversational: When implementing voice search in your website, use an engaging conversational tone when creating the text but remember to use complete sentences and be grammatically correct.
Answer Questions: Most people use the internet to get information, whether they are researching a product or service that they need or are trying to Google an answer to try to cheat in a late-night trivia contest. Therefore, think about this when creating content for voice-powered searches. Include any questions that people may ask concerning your products and provide detailed answers.
2. SHOPPABLE POSTS
By now, you know that social media is a huge part of online marketing. What you might not realize is just how many people shop on social. 60% of Instagram users say they discover new products on Instagram and in a survey of over 4,000 Pinterest users, a whopping 70% said Pinterest helps them find new products.
These platforms have taken note of the fact that people are using them to shop and have made it easier for merchants to sell via social media. Over the past few years, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook all have ways for eCommerce stores to create shoppable posts using a native integration that makes it easy to tag and shop products directly in your posts. For online retailers, this is a great way to drive traffic to product pages.
3. INTERACTIVE CONTENT
91% of buyers are looking for more interactive content online and in 2020, content marketing will shift its focus to give the people what they want. Shoppable posts, AR/VR, 360-degree video, quizzes, and polls are just a few examples of interactive content.
Interactive content will be one of 2020’s top marketing trends for a few reasons:
This type of content is new and original, helping it cut through the noise
It gives visitors a reason to stay on the page
It’s extremely shareable (almost everyone has seen someone share results of a silly quiz like “What kind of cheese are you?”)
The shareability increases your brand awareness
Last but not least, people just love to interact!
4. SMART BIDDING IN GOOGLE ADS
Automation is nothing new in the digital marketing world, but thanks to recent Google Ads updates announced at Google Marketing Live, we expect automation and smart bidding to become the norm for many PPC account managers.
Google Ads relies on machine learning to optimize your bids so you get the most value out of every conversion. The improvements announced at Google Marketing Live make optimizing your bids better than ever with the ability to choose conversion actions at the campaign level, the ability to optimize your bids across several campaigns with a set of desired conversion actions, and the ability to set bids to automatically change when a sale starts or stops. These improvements will help you maximize your conversions.
5. POSITION “ZERO” IN SERP
The position “#1” is no longer the top spot in search results. Position Zero or “#0” position, the featured snippet of text that appears before the search results, is now the top spot and it’s highly coveted.
This prime-time ranking spot typically answers the question or search query and includes a link back to the source of the information. Dr. Peter J. Meyers wrote an interesting article for Moz about the “0” position and tips for getting this ranking.