Let’s get straight to the point.
You’re here to learn about SEO trends for 2021.
And we’re here to get you just that.
In this blog post we’re listing some of the most important SEO trends that you should be following to rank in Google search results.
If you’re really serious about climbing the SERP, follow all of these ten tips:
1. Focus On Search Intent
Search intent has become a hot topic in the SEO world. It’s probably one of the most logical and result-oriented SEO trends experts have come across.
Even though it’s not a new concept, the shift towards user intent has increased over the years. It’s a simple strategy though – know your audience better, understand their behavior and intention while using the web.
Once you know who your audience are, what their intentions are, how they’re behaving on the web, you’ll be able to get their attention, and hence rank higher on search results.
2. Mobile Friendliness
Mobile friendliness is going to have a major impact on your search engine. Given how the majority of web users access websites via their mobile device, it makes perfect sense if you align your SEO strategies for mobile-first segment.
To make sure your website is mobile-friendly, you can take Google’s free mobile-friendly test. You should design the whole website (menu, CTA’s, ads, and all other content) by keeping the mobile users in mind.
3. Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals will now be known as a key ranking factor. In May 2020, Google announced these new metrics that focus on measuring the user experience such as page loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
All these three metrics determine the overall experience of a user when they visit a website. They focus on how fast a web page loads, how stable the page is while loading, and how soon it gets interactive.
In other words, google is favoring websites that are providing better user experience to their visitors. Hence, if you want to get higher SERP rankings, make sure to provide the best of the on-page experience to visitors.
4. Voice Search
Since Google assistant, Alexa, and Apple’s Siri are getting smarter than ever, webmasters should now focus on voice search optimization as well. To optimize for voice search, you should consider keywords and phrases that are used on a regular basis.
Hence, make sure to identify such keywords. Google recommends identifying longer phrases because voice search works better with longer, more natural sounding phrases.
5. Featured Snippets
Featured snippets were first rolled in 2017, and since then, they’ve gained prominence in Google. These snippets show a chunk of information, often shown as a brief bullet-point content, Q&As, and as a how-to guide. There are also rich snippets, star-based review, images, and product prices that can be shown through these snippets.
According to SEO experts, scoring a featured snippet for your blog posts is a great way of climbing to the first page of search results. Furthermore, snippets can also help you steal significant traffic from your competitors.
6. Long-Form Content
According to SEO experts, long reads of 3000 words or more get three times for traffic. The long-form content also helps one achieve more backlinks as compared to articles of average length.
So, from this year onwards, you should focus on creating long-form content. But that doesn’t mean your content should be less on quality. Put simply, Google is focusing on both quantity and quality. So, if you want to be on the good books, make sure you check both these.
7. Image Optimization
Image search is evolving, and Google is repeatedly insisting on the proper optimization and marking of images, so it makes sense that image optimization is part of their long-term plan.
Hence, if the images on your site are not optimized, make sure you do it now. Best practice is using relevant, high-quality images, and ensuring that they are customized with alt-text. Many web owners are still not labelling their images with relevant keywords, and hence the crawlers don’t classify the images.
Another important practice for image optimization is adding images to the site map. When you add images to site maps, they are easier to crawl.
8. Data and Analytics
Analytics and reporting give you a great insight on audience’s behavior. Using data science, you can create targeted messages, campaign, and better serve your audience. Analytics can further help you check page loading times, identify URLs getting crawled, response errors, and identify referral sources.
So, if you want to remain ahead in rankings, make sure to add data and analytics as an important part of your SEO strategy.
9. Video Marketing
Considering how people prefer watching a video over reading long web pages, Google is favoring video marketing. So, if you haven’t included this video content in your SEO strategy, it’s high time to get started.
It’s best to start with optimizing each video with keywords and proper description. But make sure that you don’t fluff the description with keywords.
10. High-Quality, Skimmable Content
Quality is something Google will never compromise with. But there’s another important metric you need to check – Skimmable content. When you’re creating, make sure it’s attention grabbing and it’s easy to read.
If a web page is of 3000 words, there’s a hard chance someone will read it thoroughly. Visitors click open an article to find a solution, and they want to do it quickly. So, the best way is to give the solution to them through shorter paragraphs, quality content, and Skimmable content.
11. Publish Research Content
People love data. When you hook them up with survey data, statistics, on an industry study, they’ll surely link and share your content. So, publish research content with relevant statistics. You might think that it requires a lot more work than posting an article or case study. But if done right, the extra effort is totally worth it.
In Closing
SEO is getting more complex and advanced than before. The days of simple keywords optimization are long gone. With these SEO trends, you need to think of everything from image optimization to data science.
