Today, I’m going to show you the 10 latest search engine marketing trends that will play an important role in your marketing strategies in 2020.
Let’s dive in!
Search engine marketing is a very efficient way for companies to reach new consumers, boost revenue, and reduce acquisition costs.
Search engine marketing has become an unavoidable tool for many businesses.
Keeping up with the search engine marketing trends is an unavoidable task in today’s time.
Search engine marketing is one of the most powerful marketing channels for generating web traffic.
This supports SEO and content marketing and takes the company to the top of Google, Bing, and all the other search engine players around the world.
Search engine marketing is also known as paid search ads, paid advertising, and PPC (Pay-per-click).
Search engine marketing uses keyword phrases to target people while searching on sites such as Google.
Unlike SEO, SEM does not take much time to position you to the top or bottom of the first page.
A company that doesn’t have the current exposure or brand recognition can get some publicity instantly.
People use search engines because there is something they are looking for.
Being the one to deliver it, allows you to build the person’s trust bank account.
Even if that click does not lead to an immediate sale, it is a touchpoint that fosters the journey of the person to become a paying customer.
Search engine marketing allows you to concentrate on your target customers in a way that conventional marketing has never been possible.
You interact and connect on a meaningful scale when you aim at this level.
If an SEM ad is doing really well or you witness an abrupt decline in sales, it is easy to quickly scale up.
By just a few clicks increase traffic and revenue.
Top 10 Search Engine Marketing Trends to Look Out in 2020
1. Artificial Intelligence
The digital marketing industry is constantly moving, it is progressing and renewing every day, enhancing the tools available and providing the possibility that brands give just what the customer needs.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly changing the world and their economic effects are projected to reach $15.7 trillion by 2030.
As for PPC, AI will allow marketers to build more effective ad campaigns.
With the digitalization of our lives, a large amount of data is available that is difficult to process by the human being and AI will enable us to help us understand the behaviors, tastes, and ways of searching for users, making advertising more important to them and more user-efficient.
When AI learns more about the habits of your audience it can more effectively build targeted ads to boost your PPC campaign performance.
And this isn’t only going to impact Google or Bing advertising; AI also has a major impact on Amazon Ads.
AI helps to discover new markets and demographic data predicting consumer behavior patterns that will automatically deliver appropriate and relevant content.
That’ll be crucial to SEM in the coming years.
To anticipate the user’s needs by offering a product before searching and personalizing email marketing with tools that use natural language processing to create customized and much more efficient copies.
2. Automation
One of the biggest search engine marketing trends is the domination of automation.
Intelligent automation is now common practice among many marketers for daily tasks.
It will be more than just a time-saving method in the coming years.
It will instead be a means of gaining strategic advantage over rivals.
Improvements in the past year were focused on the increasingly powerful development of its software, changing the way campaigns are structured, and how this type of technology uses data in such a way as to allow you to leverage resources that reach more effectively to achieve the campaign objectives.
Google confirmed they’d start allowing differences in the same keywords, and now it’s the turn of the other matches.
So long as they have the same meaning, search queries other than existing keywords will continue to gain recognition from now on.
The change will bring some benefits such as providing fewer lengthy keyword lists, exploring new search terms that adapt to the way users search, targeting a larger percentage of searches and thus increasing conversions.
In addition to optimizing your promotions to get new users to download and take action on your application, you will be able to bid for a return on the targeted investment in ads, charging more to users who are likely to yield more interest and less to those who are likely to spend less.
PPC automation has materialized as an effective technique to improve a campaign’s efficiency.
Google set an example and supported vast numbers in expanding automation choices.
Making the algorithms work properly, and also promoting machine learning, is the best way to benefit from PPC automation.
The setting up of reliable and successful conversion tracking along with a well-written ad copy packed with keywords and target market recognition is important for all of these to work efficiently.
Automation lets you save time that you can use to focus on managing your company as well as finding the most possible approach that will be more useful to your business.
3. Smart Bidding
Another search engine marketing trend that will have a major impact this year is the concept of smart bidding.
Smart Bidding’s strength will be more prominent in 2020, thereby making it more prevalent when developing strategies too.
It is an automated process of bidding which uses machine learning to improve conversions and conversion values in auctions.
Google’s AI program optimizes each auction automatically with conversions.
You’re telling Google what your advertisement target is and smart bidding decides how you will get it done within your budget.
Smart bidding works for various PPC targets such as:
- Target CPA (Cost-per-action)
- Target ROAS ( Return-on-ad-Spend)
- Maximize Conversions
In the new year, Google will add value rules.
Value rules allow advertisers to distinguish conversion values based on features such as location, device, and audience.
With more and more customers experimenting in unexpected ways, it has become a challenge for advertisers to keep on top of campaign optimizations.
Smart bidding reduces the burden of managing each ad campaign manually and helps advertisers boost ad efficiency.
Bidding manually will be a thing in the past that can also prove beneficial to companies as they can devote more to their business strategies and analytics.
4. Video Ads
The one search engine marketing trend that is going to rule the ads market is the video ads.
Video advertisements are great tools for promotions and companies to achieve a greater reach.
It also gives a very low budget visual impact.
One of Google’s most interesting video ad innovations is Bumper Machine, which utilizes machine learning to generate 6-second bumper ads from longer videos (90 seconds or less) for viewing across YouTube.
The full-funnel video strategy allows marketers to manage 6-second bumper ads, in-stream ads that have a skip option and in-stream ads that do not have a skip option.
Businesses will have to adjust to vertical video ads on Youtube.
More and more advertisers will begin to connect in video ads to goods.
Advertisers can begin to integrate virtual reality (VR) to provide the audience with absolute experiences.
Stories on Instagram and Facebook will continue to dominate in video marketing.
5. Voice Search
Voice search assistants such as Google Home, Alexa, and Siri have already made a major impact in voice-assisted internet search, and are expected to overtake online search by the end of 2020.
It has been a huge search engine marketing trend with the advancement in technology.
Paid voice search advertising will join the popular advertising with technological advancement.
And so, if you can already start to plan your strategies, it would be a smart move.
Businesses that fail to develop voice search PPC campaigns will miss the chance to be listed in the voice search results.
One approach that will prove to be very helpful is to plan and adopt a conversational tone on your website.
Because when users conduct voice searches they appear to be more conversational and that will increase your chances of more hits.
Keeping FAQ pages always revised on your website and using long-tail keywords to search for voice is another performance strategy.
Voice search is accessible on a number of devices out of which the most used device is mobile.
When using voice search people use a more natural and communicative style.
This implies that short-tail keywords may not be very helpful.
Most voice searches commence with question-oriented keywords.
Look at the specific search terms that people have already used to see your ad to refine voice search even better.
Voice searches are longer than text searches and are more conversational.
The majority of voice searches begin with questions such as “what”, “when”, “how”, etc.
Google is both Google and Apple’s default search engine, while Bing is Alexa’s default search engine.
6. Audience Segmentation
Search engine marketing trends have been a massive factor in changing the marketing strategies of businesses.
Audience segmentation has been rapidly evolving, with more development in machine learning.
Audience segmentation is a method of community formation based on the interests and choices of the users.
The users are divided by their interests based on similarities.
Segmentation can be based on demographics, archetypes, cognitive characteristics, age, locations, etc, leading users to content that interests them the most.
Information based primarily on recent search history can be performed in segmentation and filtering, with the likes or trending topics.
This helps the websites to remain fun, new, and relevant to each user’s choices.
7. Virtual Reality
As consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and seeking engaging, interactive, and personal interactions, advertisers must employ increased interactivity and increasingly personalized communications to attract their audiences.
This is where VR comes into consideration.
Virtual reality has become one of the most crucial search engine marketing trends for the coming years.
VR technology uses eye-tracking to play an ad.
The ad will start when the consumer looks at it for a few seconds.
VR will give insight into which aspects of the viewers on the screen are looking at and which parts they have chosen to communicate with.
Since the majority of Millennials and Gen Zers use VR, it will be easy to identify the target age group in the coming years.
The concept of driving advertisements for virtual reality is to allow audiences to experience the product before they buy it.
8. PPC and SEO Integration
The fact that there is no distinction between PPC and search engine optimization holds firm as an ad without a strong SEO will produce no performance.
PPC & SEO walk hand in hand.
Even more symbiotically they should be used together to optimize performance.
PPC data will notify the SEO of the most viable and competitive keywords aiming for organic ranking boosts for keyword strategy.
The SEO data, on the other hand, will recognize the keywords that are worth bidding on.
One of the best ways to determine the best performing ad copy is to synchronize PPC and SEO.
Produce and develop blog posts and content to boost your online rating according to the best-performed edition.
As it has become more or less like a general guideline to integrate your SEO and PPC campaigns, it is important to keep these two works together, which will remain a fundamental requirement in PPC advertising even beyond 2020.
9. Amazon and Bing
While Google and Facebook are the pioneers in paid advertising, Amazon is not far behind, as they are now the fastest-growing advertiser and the third-largest.
Online stores have become much more popular with Amazon advertising as they advertise both on and off Amazon.
Amazon’s main advantage is its unique ad inventory and its growing number of users with very high purchasing intent.
Although Google and Facebook are often used for ideas or analysis, Amazon’s sole aim is to sell a product.
Hence a better conversion rate on Amazon platforms can be expected.
Amazon is particularly attractive to CPG brands.
Bing Ads has rebranded as Microsoft Advertising and has also rejuvenated its emphasis on ad stock, audience targeting capabilities, and data making it flourish among consumers as seen in recent months by the increase in the number of Bing users.
10. Social Media
One of the most crucial search engine marketing trends is the uprising platforms of social media.
Social media use is growing and nearly 75 percent of users check their social media accounts at least once per month.
The users check Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn almost daily, particularly millennials.
Concentrating on multiple-social media platforms by PPC marketers will prove to be a great strategy, so focusing on expanding the reach of a larger audience through social media in 2020 should not be ignored.
If you’re a B2B business then LinkedIn is the best advertising site.
You can reach up to 630 million users with targeted options such as job title, business, industry, employment, seniority, interests, and company connections.
Conclusion
In 2020, advertisers who refine their voice search ads will see better results from their PPC campaigns.
Google and Facebook alternatives like Quora, LinkedIn and Amazon will also help you generate better ROI in the years to come.
These are some of the search engine marketing trends that will ensure that all marketers will be up-to-date with these technological advances that will help us make our advertisers a successful strategy.