SEO in the Year 2020 – RAND FISHKIN | DMR #148

Today I'm joined by a man, who for over 10 years has been one of the most consistent leaders in the field of organic search marketing. He’s author of 2 books, and also co-founder of Inbound.org. Welcome to DMR - the Wizard of Moz - Rand Fishkin (@randfish). You can find Rand over at Moz.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W9GnB2rzb4 On this episode of Digital Marketing Radio we discuss what SEO might look like in the year 2020, with topics including: Will we still be calling it SEO in the year 2020? To me it seems that SEO is splitting into different specialisms - UX, website performance, content marketing to name a few. Will an SEO be able to do everything in 2020 or will the role become even more specialist in the future? Do you think the average small business owner be more or less concerned with SEO in the year 2020? What are the SEO strategies that work well in 2016 that won’t work so well in 2020? What do you think Google Plus might look like in 2020 and do you think that Google might have purchased Twitter or another major social network by then? How will websites and the way that we consume them change by 2020? And what about the Google SERP - what are your thoughts on how that might change? How will Google determine authoritative and relevant content in the year 2020? What user behavior metrics might Google be measuring in 2020? How might organic search results be displayed in 2020 and how will they integrate with paid search? How will AI change SEO? How do you think negative SEO might evolve? Will we get better at cross-device tracking and multi touch attribution? [Tweet ".@randfishkin says that traffic from an email list can boost organic rankings #IntegratedMarketing"] Software I couldn't live without What software do you currently use in your business that if someone took away from you, it would significantly impact your marketing success? Type Form [Online forms & surveys] Twitter Polls [Online forms & surveys] Pocket [Read articles later] Nuzzel [Find top social stories that your friends share] Culture Amp [People analytics for your company] Similar Web Pro [Website & app insights] What software don't you use, but you've heard good things about, and you've intended to try at some point in the near future? Part of my wants to say Slack, but I have used Slack quite a bit  [Messaging app] Buzz Stream [Outreach and link building] My number 1 takeaway What's the single most important step from our discussion that our listeners need to take away and implement in their businesses? If I had been listening to this as a web marketer, if I hadn't already been thinking about the idea that organic traffic could drive my rankings, I would be thinking about that very strongly. I'd be thinking about what is a way I could be driving organic traffic to pages I'm on the cusp of ranking - I'm on page 2 / I'm on page 3. I just haven't got the signals I quite need to rank. May be what I need is more organic traffic efforts. How could I get included in an email list? How could I get more social traffic? How could I get more engagement on the page? More people sharing it, more copy and paste behaviour, people emailing it to each other. I think that might be the missing link for some folks who aren't ranking for what they want to rank for.