When we celebrated New Years Eve 2019 and saw the dawn of a new year and a new decade we were full of optimism, hope and excitement.
What plans we had a foot. We had great ideas, bags full of enthusiasm and a real belief that 2020 would be an exciting year for all things Digital. We also had some great events to look forward to like the Tokyo Olympics and the Euros. What we ended up experiencing was the cancelling of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter! As we write we still await the outcome for Christmas 2020. It has been a year like no other and none of us can say with any certainty what is round the corner and what the future will hold for us in 2021. As a society we do of course have some hope with potential vaccines but as it stands today none of us can be certain what will happen next and how these vaccines will work.
What we have seen in 2020 is Digital being embraced in a way that none of could have ever predicted...who saw ZOOM and TEAMS being common place? How many of you have spend a whole day in 2020 doing back to back ZOOM meetings? Who would have thought that working from home would become such normal place. We spent Lockdown one stepping on our front step clapping the carers. Those that could not work from home, those that were keeping the country going and looking after our sick. We all clapped for the Doctors, Nurses, Porters, Bin Men, Posties, Supermarket workers, Delivery people and all those other people that worked tirelessly to keep the country going.
As a Digital Marketing agency during 2020 we have seen more business begin to understand and appreciate the power and importance of their websites. This to some degree has been forced upon many with face to face meeting being either stopped or limited.
At the end of 2019 we made our predictions for 2020:
On-SERP SEO. This refers to the process of tuning content so that it is optimised for the ever-changing layout of Google’s search results page (think featured snippets and the like).
This has become more prevalent during 2020 and with more people spending more time on line in 2020 it has actually had more of an impact that considered at the end of 2019.
The continued dominance of mobile-first indexing. It’s going nowhere. And, if your website isn’t mobile-ready, 2020 is the time to get it sorted.
In all honesty we have not seen much of a change in 2020. The world being tipped upside down will have had some impact but what is sure is that the dominance of mobile and mobile search is going nowhere!
Visual search. Pinterest and other image-based websites have done this for a while, but 2020 could be the year we see more visual search options on Google. This is when a user can upload an image of something and watch as the search engine finds results based on the image. It’ll certainly put another spin on SEO.
This has not happened....yet....2021?
Voice search optimisation. “Hey, Siri”, “Alexa...”; we’re all increasingly talking to tech - and increasingly asking it to find results for us on the web. This is changing the way keyword research is being undertaken, and 2020 will continue this trend, big time. If you haven’t spoken to your SEO company about optimising for voice search yet, now is the time.
As an agency we have not seen much activity with voice search but we remain certain that this is only going to become more important over the next few years.
So what will be the impact of Covid-19 into 2021? Travel was completely changed in 2020. We are sure that at some point the doors will open again but who is to say that the impact of Covid-19 will not be with us for the next decade? With that thought what will the future of Digital Marketing and SEO look like? Will we see more voice, more virtual? Will we see a challenger to Google or will Google become a thing of the past? Will the website still be relevant or will we use another method to show case our products/services. Will the change to the high street impact how we work on-line?