12 SEO Trends That You Need To Know In 2021
Search Engine Optimization consists of an effective method to draw consumers to your online platform. Staying on top of the Manchester SEO game is hard because it is constantly changing. About 70% to 80% of users stress more on organic results and ignore all the paid listings. Also, over 28% of the searches convert, following in a purchase.
A high-ranking SEO performance needs attention to multiple metrics, including traffic, social shares, and backlinks. We will be listing out the 12 SEO trends for 2021. We will provide all the timely and relevant search engine optimization trends for strategizing your SEO.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the procedure of enhancing both the quantity and quality of site traffic to an optimised website by web designers in Manchester. SEO tends to target unpaid traffic instead of paid or direct traffic. The unpaid traffic might stem from various searches such as image search, news search, video search, academic search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
SEO performance takes place because a site will garner more visitors from the search engines once the sites rank higher within the SERP or search engine results page. Here, potential visitors can be converted into customers.
12 SEO Trends In 2021
Here are the 12 SEO trends that you need to be aware of in 2021:
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence or AI does play a huge role in SEO. It changes the way you interact with the content present online. Here a notable mention would be the AI algorithm of Google. RankBrain, which is an algorithm that plays a significant role in the ranking factors of Google for SERPs results. RankBrain tends to improve over time, making artificial intelligence a top SEO trend to look out for.
The signals of user experience act as the main determinant in optimizing your SEO for the RankBrain. It includes from time spent on a page to the click-through rates. You need to capture and engage the readers using useful and well-organized content.
Voice Search
Voice search technology is coming a long way, especially with newer innovations such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. The popularity of these technologies is increasing; it is expected by 2022 for 55% of the households to own a smart speaker. For voice search optimization, you should consider your keywords. Try identifying longer phrases, which people mostly use in everyday dialogue. Remember that voice searches perform better with phrases that are longer and natural-sounding.
Smartphone Friendliness
Google introduced the mobile-first indexing in 2019. It means the search engine looks mainly at the website of a mobile version. It considers this the main version rather than the PC version. The change seems logical because it is expected for over 73% of active internet users to gain access of the internet only through smartphones by 2025. Start ensuring that Google can easily crawl your URLs to make sure that your page is fully user-friendly.
You need to avoid having a disallow directive in your position. Also, remember that Googlebot doesn’t load content needing user interactions such as swiping and clicking. You need to make sure that Google sees the lazy-loaded content. Also, utilising the same tags for meta robots on the mobile and desktop sites are a necessity.
Content
Content quality is extremely important to Google for ranking success. You have to refer to the EAT principle for fully understanding the quality meaning here. EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This particular principle is relevant and useful in business niches that fall under finance and health care. For creating quality website content, you need to follow a few steps here –
First is creating buyer personas that allow you to understand the type of content that your client values. Secondly, conducting search intent research that assists you in mapping out the customer’s journey. Thirdly, utilize this information for creating content that suits the user’s preferred format.
Long-Form Content
Long reads that go up to 3000+ words receive 3x more traffic and also 4x more shares. Plus, they also get 3.5x more backlinks than articles with average length words between 901-1200. You must focus on long-form content to achieve higher search rankings. But your content should also possess quality because the main objective here is to offer users shareable information for keeping them engaged. You can do so by breaking up your content into different sections with subheadings like H2 and H3.
It will make your content more scannable to the viewer, especially for people using mobile sites. You also need to start linking your content to relevant and authoritative sources that possess a solid authority score. And lastly, ensure that your content is easily shareable. Proceed to add obvious sharing links both at the headline as well as the conclusion. In this way, the readers can quickly click for a share.
Featured Snippets
Fret not; you won’t necessarily have to generate exclusive long-term content for climbing the Google rankings. The featured snippets came out in the year 2017, and it acts as a shortcut for obtaining prominence in Google. Featured snippets are quite brief. Whenever you are typing something in Google, it is normal for you to start noticing a box present at the SERPs top right above the results, which you call a snippet. You will receive a coveted spot on the top results page by securing a featured snippet because snippets tend to steal significant traffic from your rivals.
The featured snippets tend to display a ton of information, which usually comes in brief bullet-point, Q&A, and how-to guides. You will also come across rich snippets such as images, product prices, similar information bits, and star-based reviews. You need to focus and stress on relevant keywords and question-type queries for creating snippets. Featured snippets are becoming more prominent this year.
Predictive Search
Google Discover came into fruition in 2017. This Google AI-Driven Tool is a new search type that doesn’t need a user query. The content recommendation tool helps identify behavioral patterns of a user over time and slowly learns this habit. Discover will help identify accurate content using this information for creating an interest in the user. There are currently over 800 million users on Google Discover.
You don’t have to perform anything special or specific for appearing. It will be included once Google starts indexing your page. The ranking of content is going to depend on algorithms inspecting user interest and content quality. Even though Google isn’t communicating any precise factors, location history, search history, browsing history, home + work locations, app usage, and calendars are all relevant.
Video Inclusion
Online video marketing is becoming increasingly popular every day. YouTube is a testament to that, with over 1 billion active users. According to Cisco, we know that video is going to surpass every content form when it comes to consumption. You need to ensure the optimization of your video description and channel name. Your description shouldn’t be crammed with all the keywords but make sure to offer an overview of what your channel is really about in the friendliest way.
If you are optimizing for YouTube, then begin typing in your video’s topic and see what will pop up within the search field. You will come across a list of the suggested keywords, giving you a clue of what most users are looking for on YouTube.
Image Optimization
There is drastic evolution with visual image searches. People are starting to use images for purchasing products, garnering information, etc. The proper use of image optimization is one of Google’s long-term plans. Start optimizing all the images on your website. Begin using relevant images of top-quality.
Also, ensure that you label the photo files and customize the file’s name to make it more content relevant on the corresponding page. Start using alt tags for classifying images, which crawlers mostly use. Also, start adding images to the map of your website, where it is easier to crawl.
Semantically Related Keywords
Primary keywords are important but secondary keywords deserve equal importance. Intent optimization and semantic search tend to garner more prominence concerning the future. Google is starting to analyze query content and also discern the search intent of a user. Google is looking for further relevant information and not just a string of words like before.
Start creating content that answers the target audience’s questions for truly addressing the semantic search. Ensure that you start optimizing content for the topic clusters rather than stressing only on keywords. Also, utilize structured data whenever it is logical and write for people and not bots.
Local Search Listings
Many people utilize search engines for locating localized services and products. The people just might be looking for a local store or restaurant. Local SEO is crucial and constantly evolving. The evolution arises because of the increasing zero-click searches. Here, certain SEO marketers are dubbing it as the new normal. The user receives answers for its queries through the SERPs themselves in a 0-Click search.
They avoid clicking on any ranking results. Featured snippets are responsible for the increasing rise of 0-click searches. The majority of the 0-Click searches consist of local searches, which display the SERP results in what they dub as a local pack. You can get your business inside the local pack by creating a page on “Google My Business.” Ensure that you have a strong backlink profile.
Data and Analytics
Data science allows you to understand customers, visualize campaigns, and make targeted messages. And analytics helps you verify the URLs getting crawled, identifying referral sources, checking loading times of page, bouncing rates, indexing redirects, and response errors. It is also possible to utilize data science for identifying pages, which you don’t want crawlers pinpointing and indexing uncommon traffic sources like potential spamming websites.
It will eat away all of your credibility. You can capture all the information by using the SEO industry analysis tools like the SEMrush SEO Toolkit. This technology will help you rank tracking, technical SEO, competitive research, link building, on-page SEO, etc. It will address all the issues and improve the presence of your website.
Conclusion
SEO is constantly evolving and getting complicated by the minute. But the number of benefits that are at stake by correctly using it makes up for everything. Metrics are always changing, and you need to clinch the top spot in the rankings. So, you must educate yourself on the current SEO trends to keep up with everything. Study and put these trends that we listed above into use to strategize your SEO marketing tactics.