Hi there, Christie, thanks for your visit and thanks for the kind words.

To be honest, as a rapidly evolving field, SEO itself is about following trends and the latest changes, so choosing just one or a few trends to pay attention to is going to be very difficult. There can be hundreds or thousands of Google algorithm changes in each and every year, so keeping track of all of them is extremely difficult.

However, in my opinion, there is one trend we can pay attention to in 2020 and onwards, which is related to the previous comment: content quality.

While content has been the core, the lifeblood of SEO over the years, the quality and relevance of your content will be even more important in 2020 and onwards for two main reasons:

The recent implementation of Google BERT algorithm, which allows Google to better understand the context of a long-tail keyword, Other algorithm updates like Rankbrain and others, are also focused on recognizing the quality and relevance of a content
Google now includes more “featured snippets” with more search queries (more than 50%). Getting organic traffic is now significantly more difficult, so actually publishing a high-quality, attractive content to attract an audience is more important than ever

So, SEO in 2020 (and for this next decade) should be more focused on content quality.

Hope this can help,

Thanks and best regards,

Mike

Hi there, Jan.

To really answer this question, we’ll need to learn about the full extent of the search engine algorithm, SERP, and especially the important search ranking factors. However, the short answer is yes, SEO is going to be more complex and difficult in 2020 and onwards, because of two reasons:

More people are doing online businesses, so SEO is going to be more competitive
The recent changes in Google’s search engine algorithms have allowed Google to better recognize context, so it’s now very difficult if not impossible to use grey-hat and black-hat SEO tactics

However, the fact remains that if your content is high-quality and relevant, SEO is going to be much easier to implement, as you can have an easier time getting relevant backlinks.

So, although SEO is going to be more complex to implement, as long as you focus on developing and promoting high-quality content, you are on the right track.

One question, do you think SEO in 2020 (and onward?) will be more difficult to implement?