2020 will bring with it more new marketing trends for the digital sphere – not just for a new year, but for a new decade. Overall, we can see that things are becoming smarter, more automated, and always more oriented towards giving the best convenience and value to the consumer. Here are some trends we can expect to grow throughout the year.

Zero-click searches

What is a zero-click search? It’s a search in which the user does not end up clicking on any of the results, but instead navigates away. But it’s not because they didn’t find what they were looking for: it’s because search engines, notably Google, are getting better at displaying the relevant information in infoboxes right there in the search, meaning no one has to click to go deeper.

If that sounds scary to you, it should. Lower clickthrough rates mean less visibility for your brand, and if a rival brand claims the infoboxes in your niche, you won’t even get the kudos or brand awareness of that expert status. Make sure that you rework your sites to provide concise and apparent answers to common questions, getting you a chance to claim those infoboxes.

User experience as SEO

Google has wised up to the fact that continuing to tweak the rules on what you can and can’t do on a page only encourages cheating and corrupt practices. There’s always someone who manages to find a way to fool the algorithm, but there’s one set of data that can’t be tricked: user data.

SEO will more and more become based on what users are doing as they interact with search results. If people are clicking the top link, spending only a matter of seconds, then going back and clicking the second link, it will tell Google that the first link is not relevant.

What does this mean for SEO? It means putting the user experience first, as it always should have been. Make sure that your site is relevant, informative, easy to use, and fast to load. These criteria will be more critical as time goes on.

The death of keywords

Keyword bidding is becoming more and more automated, and it’s also getting harder to track the results. New updates to attribution in browsers such as Safari mean that it’s getting to be impossible to know when a user is visiting a link because of a search, or through a direct visit, because of cookie data getting wiped.

This makes it hard to track keyword success, and if you have sparse user data, your keyword bids are going to go haywire. Instead, start thinking about audiences rather than keywords. Target your ideal customer in other ways. Google and other platforms are likely to be implementing more audience targeting options throughout the year and the decade.

There are lots of changes coming that may seem scary to SEO specialists and website owners. As ever, the important thing is this: cater to your intended audience well, give them what they want, and make your site as smooth as possible for the best results.