2020 is shaping up to be an interesting year, isn’t it?

There’s a lot going on across the globe right now, and the web design world isn’t immune from the twists and turns that have heretofore defined the decade. It’s always tricky to predict what the future will hold, but based on our experience, we’ve come up with a few notes. These will help give you an idea of what to expect over the coming year and which web design trends will make the biggest impact on 2020.

The public's understanding of websites, the internet, and digital marketing has come a long way over the past few years. We’re more tech-savvy than ever before—so why is there still so much confusion surrounding the world of website design?

2020 rolls off the tongue a little better than 2019, doesn’t it? It’s a sleek year marking the turn of the decade, and over the past year, we've developed some appropriately sleek new strategies to adapt to the ever-changing SEO landscape. Without further ado, here are seven top SEO strategies to carry you into the coming year.

Inbound marketing strategies are the “pull” approach that balances out the “push” tactic of most traditional outbound marketing campaigns. Inbound marketing efforts aim to use content (articles, eBooks, white papers, etc.) to provide lead generation opportunities and pull in potential customers rather than trying to push a message at consumers in hopes of creating an impactful response.

Inbound marketing relies on quality content, and the right content can act as lead generation fuel for a long time. One-time resource investments in inbound marketing tactics like a viral video or a long-form blog article can turn into some of the best lead-generating content you have to offer.

There are literally thousands of options when it comes to hiring a web design firm, and finding the right fit for your company can be time consuming and stressful. With so much competition in the marketplace, it can be difficult to know what to look for when selecting an agency partner.

Your website is one of your most valuable and visible marketing assets. While you may only care about getting your website up and running as quickly as possible, choosing the wrong partner can be a costly mistake. Web design agencies are far from being created equal. So, to help you narrow the field, here are the top 4 traits you should look for to make sure you’re partnering with a truly great web design agency.

By now you know that if you’re going to have a website for commercial purposes, it needs to be optimized. In addition to following UX guidelines so that visitors want to spend time on your site, you also need to focus on SEO. Unless you don’t care about being discovered organically, or ranking in search, you need to follow best practices like adding metadata or keyword targeting. But did you know that even the content you create needs to be developed with SEO in mind? Specifically, if you want to integrate video into your website, or leverage it for marketing purposes, it’s essential to make SEO a priority.

Voice search optimization (VSO) refers to the practice of maximizing your company’s search visibility for voice-based queries. 

There’s quite a bit of overlap with your desktop SEO strategy, but there are several key differences in typed vs. spoken queries that produce different results—and it’s crucial that you understand these differences if you want your pages to beat out your competitors’ in the SERPs.

As anyone who has ever dabbled in SEO knows, the algorithms that Google, Bing, and other search engines use to rank the listings on their search results pages are closely guarded secrets. Sure, all search engine companies provide general guidelines for maximizing your site rankings, but the specific factors that are considered, where the data for these factors comes from, and how the factors are weighted against each other are trade secrets on par with that of the Coca-Cola formula.

A picture is worth a thousand clicks. Images can bring life to your webpage, explain concepts that are difficult to write out, and pull in traffic from users with visual appetites – provided that you’re using them correctly. Almost all modern websites use images in their design. Whether that usage is sparing or splendorous, you need to put in the work to optimize your images for search engines.

In the old Western movies and TV shows, it was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. The heroes wore white hats (Exhibit A: The Lone Ranger), and the villains wore black hats. Right?

Well, not so much. It turns out that a comprehensive look at the Western film genre shows that there was actually no consistency in this regard. There were good guys wearing black and bad guys wearing white. But for some reason, we as a culture have made this literal black-and-white distinction.

So much so, in fact, that we now use the terms “white hat” and “black hat” to distinguish benevolent vs. malevolent intent in other areas. The prime example is found in cybersecurity. “Black hat” hackers are the bad guys who try to infiltrate computer systems and networks, steal data, and make life generally miserable for people. “White hat” hackers are the ones who try to find system vulnerabilities and report them so they can be patched before the black-hat hackers can exploit them.