What Will It Mean to Do SEO in 2020 and Beyond?
Exploring the evolution of SEO as search engines become smarter and user behaviour shifts across platforms.
SEOs must monitor emerging Google technologies and algorithm changes to maintain effective strategies. Over the past 12 months, Google Search has undergone significant transformations affecting campaign planning, implementation, and reporting.
Artificial Intelligence Will Continue to Evolve
Google introduced RankBrain in 2015 as a machine-based search algorithm improving result relevance. The recent launch of BERT (Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding) represents a major advancement in natural language processing, affecting one in ten searches.
BERT helps Google comprehend context within individual search queries better than previous methods. According to Google, this algorithm represents “the biggest leap forward in the past five years” in Search history.
Key insight for SEOs: You cannot optimize directly for BERT or RankBrain. Instead, focus on creating useful, natural, high-quality content that serves user needs genuinely.
Voice Search Is Here to Stay
Voice Search technology, launched in 2012, has proven more persistent than initially expected. Smart speakers now number 120 million in the US alone, with voice search generating 35.6 million monthly queries.
Structured data markup significantly influences voice search results and featured snippets. Schema.org markup continues expanding — recent additions include movie markup and specialized tags like Speakable, which Google Assistant uses to provide audio responses to user questions.
Google Actions, developed through Dialogflow, allow third-party developers to create custom actions for the Google Assistant, extending functionality through voice-activated features.
Google Is Heavily Invested in Using Entities
Google defines entities as: “A thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.”
Entities form the foundation of Google’s Knowledge Graph. Companies and personalities can claim their Knowledge Graph panels, allowing them to control displayed information including images, descriptions, and social profiles.
Strategic implications: Entity-based optimization reduces reliance on traditional links as ranking factors. Google extracts entity information from Wikipedia, homepages, and third-party sources. Building brand mentions and authorships gradually helps Google recognize entities as notable.
The Budapest update demonstrated that entities can appear in Knowledge Panels without Wikipedia pages when companies establish sufficient brand authority across multiple sources.
The Knowledge Graph Will Be Important for Personalities and Brands
Google allows entities to claim Knowledge Graph panels through these steps:
- Verify your website with Search Console
- Suggest changes to your panel information
Benefits include displaying accurate, authoritative information, building trust signals, and providing quick website access through the Knowledge Panel.
Google Cameos enables verified entities to answer Q&As through short videos displayed directly in search results, creating additional visibility opportunities.
SEO recommendations: Claiming your Knowledge Graph panel increases brand authenticity and visibility. Building a notable presence requires consistent brand mentions, author establishment, and gradual authority development across multiple platforms.
Query-Less Proactive Predictive Search Is Getting Better
Google Discover, launched in June 2017, delivers 80 million active users through AI-driven content recommendations. Unlike traditional search, Discover shows content based on user interests rather than explicit queries.
Google’s Topic Layer technology understands how user interests develop over time, enabling more accurate content delivery across diverse websites.
Requirements for Discover visibility: Pages must be indexed and meet Google News content policies. High-quality, unique content performs better than clickbait articles. No special markup is required, though quality signals matter significantly.
Optimization strategies: Use high-quality images (which increase clickthrough by 5%), arrange content semantically, maintain technical proficiency, and build authority around relevant entities. The “Follow” button next to entities indicates content frequency and relevance.
Google Discover performance can be tracked through Search Console’s performance section, though native Analytics segmentation requires custom implementation.
We Are Yet to See the Biggest Changes in Visual Image Search
John Mueller predicted major Image Search changes would arrive in 2020, shifting from passive viewing toward using images to accomplish goals and purchase products.
September 2018 brought significant updates: Google Lens integration, featured videos, AMP stories, new ranking algorithms, and removal of the “View Image” button. Recent desktop redesigns further transformed Image Search.
Visual search attributes now appear in image carousels within main search results, allowing users to filter by specific entity characteristics like color, style, or size.
E-commerce implications: 35% of Google product searches result in transactions within five days. Properly tagged and marked images enable visual search discovery. E-commerce sites should prioritize image optimization, structured markup, and semantic arrangement.
E-A-T Doesn’t Apply to Every Site — But It Still Matters
E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) is critical for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content — pages affecting happiness, health, finances, or safety.
Important clarifications: E-A-T is not a ranking algorithm. However, quality signals supporting E-A-T significantly impact YMYL content visibility. Most invested SEO sites contain YMYL elements requiring trustworthiness demonstration.
Google has intensified quality controls addressing fake news, health misinformation, and government scrutiny regarding content reliability.
Implementation approach: While you cannot directly optimize for E-A-T, you can signal quality through author credentials, source citations, expertise demonstration, and established reputation within your field.
Topics and Semantics Over Keywords
Google increasingly prioritizes semantic understanding and topic modeling rather than exact keyword matching. The introduction of Google’s Topic Layer (September 2018) demonstrates this shift toward understanding user search intent through context.
Creating in-depth, meaningful content clustered into topic compartments improves both user navigation and crawler comprehension. Websites organized around topic models receive preferential treatment from Google’s crawlers.
Content strategy: Rather than optimizing individual keywords, develop comprehensive topic clusters covering subtopics semantically. For example, running-related content might cluster into: Food & Fitness, Trainer Hub, and Fitness Tech, with interconnected articles supporting each vertical.
Tools like MarketMuse and SEOMonitor facilitate topic analysis and semantic mapping, helping identify content gaps and optimization opportunities.
Search Results Pages (SERPs) Will Continue to Evolve
Traditional organic rankings have become less dominant as Google introduces featured snippets, knowledge panels, rich results, voice search results, Google My Business listings, and evolved image galleries.
First-position rankings no longer guarantee maximum visibility or traffic. SERPs now display diverse content formats addressing different user intents and query types.
Adaptive strategy: Maintain flexibility and continuously monitor SERP evolution. Analyze featured content types for target queries — if Google prioritizes videos, develop video content; if images dominate, optimize visuals accordingly.
Monitoring approach: Use Search Console to track performance across different result types. Evaluate seasonality patterns with Google Trends. Analyze SERP layouts to match content type to dominant formats. Consider search intent variations requiring different content approaches.
Conclusion
Modern SEO requires moving beyond traditional link-building and keyword-focused strategies. Investment in technical optimization, entity development, and semantic content architecture has become essential.
The 2020 SEO landscape demands more sophisticated planning and implementation than previous years. Success requires balancing traditional ranking factors with emerging technologies: artificial intelligence, voice search, entity optimization, visual search, and semantic topic modeling.
Professionals must prepare for rapid change, remaining flexible as Google continues evolving search functionality and ranking algorithms.
