SEO in 2020: A Year in Review

2020 was a tough year because of the pandemic. Search engines have just released major updates in their algorithms that have been pretty helpful in focusing on the most relevant searches. While all these are forced to cater to the increased traffic during long periods of lockdown, it is becoming more relevant to the needs of the so-called “new normal” activities – online shopping, vlogging, digital marketing, etc.

So, what did SEO look like in 2020?

• Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has now powered almost all English-language queries.
• SEO Documentation for Google and Bing was updated.
• SERP has been revamped where featured snippets aren’t repeating as regular listing, as well as the right-side feature snippet variant now on top of the main results column.
• The “key moments” feature and the “licensable” badge are now fully rolled out.
• COVID-19 updates are now distinguished properly during searches.
• Updates on Google Search Console (GSC) have been made (i.e., new removals tool, Core Web Vitals report, crawl stats report, etc.)
• Google Analytics 4 has been rolled out and Bing Webmaster Tools get overhauled.