Search marketing is constantly evolving, and to stay ahead of the tide it is necessary to optimize, drive efficiencies, and deliver on business goals. With that understanding in mind, these are the some of the most important search engine marketing trends to consider.   

Automation is here

Many daily tasks executed by marketers are increasingly being automated. In 2020 this trend is only highly likely to increase: hence rather than complaining it is good to take it as an advantage.

In the New Year, highly effective tools are expected to help in search engine optimization, tracking and reporting. But it should be kept in mind that automation is a tool and hence should be used intelligently; tools and strategies should be chosen according to the brands and the goals that should be achieved.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that automation doesn’t necessarily equate to complete elimination of human skill. It will still require intelligent and careful considerations to ensure process is in concurrence with the objectives.     

Look Beyond Traditional Paid Search

Traditional searches are shifting from text towards voice searches. As per the survey conducted by Alpine.AI there is an estimated one billion voice searches per month. This is likely to increase by atleast 50%. This will alter the way people search and the choice of phrases they use to find information. 

Voice search has not seen much popularity within SEM community, but enterprises can forge ahead by including more long-tail keywords now. Also ensure that landing page has more engaging content. Although not major these initiatives will certainly improve the chances of matching a voice search query. 

Another innovation that would probably has the potential to reform search engine marketing is visual search. Tools like Google Lens and Microsoft visual search tool are some of the tools that would help.  Hence it is essential for brands to redesign websites to support visual search with an extensive image repository.

Amazon is catching up

Google and Facebook are still the leaders in paid advertising, but Amazon is clearly growing in strength. The edge of Amazon over others would be its inventory and widening numbers of users. Although Google and Facebook are used mostly for research, the chief objective of Amazon is to increase sale. Hence it is expected of them to have higher conversion rate.  

Balance PPC & SEO 

PPC and SEO, should be used collectively even more synergistically in order to have optimized results.  

Data from PPC can used to get the most viable keywords to target for increase in organic traffic. At the same time, SEO results can identify the more competitive keywords that should be focused on. To conclude, brands should have a balance of both organic and paid listings on equal measures to have more dominant result in SERP.