You Ask, I Answer: SEO Trends for 2020?

In today's episode, Shane asks, which SEO trend helped you dominate search results and generate more revenue. Well, unsurprisingly, the advanced use of machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies have helped us grow uh our own company and our clients' businesses significantly over the last couple of years. Really in the last year or so. Um we've done SEO uh research and analysis and uh trend identification for a number of different companies in all sorts of crazy industries. Um and probably the biggest thing that has been helpful in that has been what we call content forecasting.

Uh using predictive analytics, it's it's been a slam dunk. So you take known search trends, because we have the data for it in the past, for keywords, phrases, ideas, topics, and then identify, forecast forward, and identify when is search volume likely to increase for those terms in the future on a week-by-week basis. When you do that, you time your SEO efforts not only with what people are interested in, but also when they are interested in it, and that is incredibly valuable because you time your SEO efforts to make sure you've got content in market and indexed in advance of when the algorithms uh need it to be able to show it. Um you time it with your social content, you time it with your email, you time it with your pay your paid per click uh SEM. Whatever you use for planning this technology helps inform.

Now, that said, since this is a a question about SEO trends for 2020, that's what was. That was the past. And it's still good. It's still important. But what's coming is going to require SEO practitioners who want to continue winning to really kick it up that to that next level notch.

You need to understand and be reading and researching alongside what the big companies are doing. Microsoft and their Bing service, Google, of course, other major search engines, Baidu, and see what technologies they are publicly saying they're working on, which means that they've already got it, some version of it working internally, and we just have to catch up. Number one is improvements in multilingual natural language processing. There is a strong bias in natural language processing towards the English language, even though English is not the language that the majority of the world's population does things like search in, right? You have a billion and a half Chinese people.

These massively pre-trained models that companies are releasing, like Google's BERT and OpenAI's GPT2, and many of these other ones are starting to uh really, really do incredible stuff at the multiple language layer, particularly um Google's BERT. Having pre-trained models in different languages is a huge step forward for uh any region where English isn't not the dominant language. If you're an SEO practitioner and you care about or want to do business in markets where English is not the dominant language, you have a unique opportunity to leap forward if you can also use these models to predict and forecast the types of content that you need to create in order to take advantage of a local market. So that's number one. Number two, Google released some research earlier this year on question answering and the ability for a an algorithm, an AI algorithm to naively interpret a question and and provide a solid answer.

And naively means it was not specifically trained for um just that task. It's just given a bunch of questions and it has to go and find matches of answers to those questions. Now, what does that mean for SEO? Well, obviously, it means that Google is looking at answering questions in their entirety. Where do we see this?

Of course, we see this with things like Google Assistant on Google Home and stuff like that. When you say, Okay, Google, you don't say an SEO keyword phrase. You say, okay, Google, when is the uh barbershop down the street open? Right? That is a full language construct as opposed to barbershop hours near me, right?

You don't say that when you talk to a smart assistant, and smart assistants have taken over a huge chunk of the search market. So because we know that question answering is a big deal. If you are not doing your research on question answering and building language that can answer questions and having it be indexable in a credible way, you're missing an opportunity. You can double dip on this stuff, right? You can build a page or a series of pages that answer the question in its entirety, plus variations, plus the keywords.

You just have to do that at scale because now instead of trying to predict, you know, barbershop hours near me, you have to forecast and predict and understand the language the people are going to use to ask about the barbershop nearest them. So you, as an SEO practitioner, have to dig in super super detailed and use machine learning to create rational question constructs that you then have to provide answers for. basic question stuff but pay pay more attention to the questions features in each of these tools and start using them to create content at scale and the third thing are massive pre-trained models especially those that are looking at sentence level encoding you're like oh what does that mean that's a bunch of of technology words sentence level encoding is a part of natural language processing that deals with the entities of language go back to what we're talking about the difference between a question and the difference between a keyword keywords are not how we speak we as humans speak in sentences for the most part there are some politicians who can't seem to put four words together but there we speak in sentences and up until now a lot of natural language processing software really has done uh a focus on words which they call tokens uh or combinations of words called ngrams and now we're looking really at sentences and paragraphs and larger language constructs as these tools gain more attention to type of network or awareness of the context in which these phrases exist and so you as an SEO practitioner need to be skilling up on your technology to be looking at tools that can deal with sentences and paragraphs as opposed to words and phrases. So that's what's coming in 2020. That's what's happening now that you need to be catching up for in 2020 if you want to be the most advanced the most impactful the highest revenue generating and most result dominating SEO practitioner.

That's what you're gonna need to be working on between now and 2020. So you got you got some time. It's September as I record this. Get skilled up, get trained up, learn this stuff, or work with a partner. Shameless plug.

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