In this fast-growing digital world to have a well-optimized site for your business is of vital importance. SEO helps you to solve that problem and bring your business to a new, more competent level. So, what is SEO, and how it affects your brand visibility?
In brief, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) generates more organic traffic to your site and ranks it as a trustworthy brand in your field of expertise.
Is SEO dead in 2021? Surely not. It is not the same as yesterday and evolves together with google trends and updates to meet the user’s needs and ensure the best experience for them while navigating in a search engine in 2021. As Bright Edge says, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. So, we should transform our sites into such prepared ones to have the chance to be in the top results of SERP. Why being on the top or on the first page of SERP is so important? The answer is the following. Statistically, only 0,78% of the users click on the results of the SERP second page. And why not to be in zero position? This article will give you a deep insight of 2021 SEO techniques necessary to rank high and bring more repeated buyers for your brand.
Let’s have a look at another statistical feature. According to Search Engine Watch, 94% of the clicks of SERP goes to the organic results. This means that having an seo-friendly site will bring more traffic and, consequently, more customers than just having to turn to ads for the increase in sales or brand awareness. This can be the direct answer to the question: “Why is SEO important in 2021?”.
Planning your actions beforehand and always following the trends of the field will help you succeed in this continuous battle for brand dominance or top SERP results. Wondering how to get started?
These top 10 SEO trends in 2021 will undoubtedly be useful for attracting new and loyal customers to your online platform. One of our company’s leading experts speaks in detail about the biggest SEO trends you should follow in 2021 to achieve this goal.
Here the 2021 SEO checklist goes:
- Improve the Core Web Vitals.
- Work more on Mobile SEO.
- Upgrade user experience.
- Enhance Visual Search.
- Aim and reach Position Zero (Featured Snippets).
- Add more Video content.
- Gain those E-A-T factors.
- Match the content with Search Intent.
- Work on the spread of brand recognition and its reputation.
- Register your brand on GMB and update its info.
Top 10 SEO Trends You Need to Know in 2021
As it is well known, Google search aims to deliver the users the best and the most relevant results. For that, according to some stats, its algorithm changes 500-600 times in a year. In 2021 Google is going to update and evolve its algorithm so as to give priority not only to the best content and user experience oriented websites but also to more mobile-friendly and page experience-oriented sites (site’s loading speed, visual stability, interactivity). For being up-to-date and well-prepared in this constantly changing field, we offer you this very informative article about the top 10 SEO trends for 2021 written by our company’s SEO expert with 5+ years’ experience.
1. Core Web Vitals
One of the major upcoming updates announced by Google concerns so-called Core Web Vitals (page loading speed, its interactivity and how fast it stabilizes when browsing the page). Starting in May 2021, these features are going to be the leading ranking factors for a site’s organic appearance on top of search engine results. These and other essential factors such as the safe browsing, mobile-friendliness, availability of ‘https’ format of the site and a page without intrusive interstitials will ensure a good user experience and, consequently, Google is considering some kind of identifier to mark those results corresponding the above mentioned factors.
2. Mobile SEO
Statistics show that 87% of smartphone users use search engines at least once a day and they will leave your site if it is not browsed within 2-3 seconds. Whereas, if your site’s mobile version is properly optimized, they are more likely to contact a local business or make a purchase. These stats emphasize such great importance given to a site being optimized for mobile users as well. The term Mobile-First Index is becoming the baseline for the chance of the site’s ranking in SERP’s top results. Since 2018, Google has been paying more attention to the mobile-friendly version of a site while ranking it in SERP both for desktop and mobile users. In 2021 this update is going to develop more and it is more likely that Google will omit the desktop data indexing and will put an emphasis only on the data of the mobile version of the site. Thus, it is of critical importance to have a mobile version of your website and a good enough optimized one.
3. UX
Making an accent on the user experience should be an inseparable part of any SEO strategy and it will surely be one of the best SEO practices in 2021. Not taking into account the fast pace of this digital world and the changes in the user’s behavior will just kick us out of the ‘game’. Let’s talk about some facts.
75% of people’s judgment on a website’s credibility goes to its aesthetics, which should surely be designed with attractive layouts together with enhanced functionality, not leaving out the fact that bad mobile optimization annoys 48% of users.
In overall, 70% of businesses fail because of bad desktop/mobile usability. All these statistics should make us care more about the future of our online businesses, where high level user experience is one of the key factors for our success in online platform.
4. Visual Search
During the previous years, texts are giving way to visual content and our culture is already dominated by the visual. Being in its infant stage, the trend of visual search is becoming more and more widespread and nearly all the search engines and many brands have already incorporated this feature into their businesses to improve customer experience, enjoy higher conversion rate and, finally, increase their revenue.
Google’s technology of visual search, called Lens, can detect over 1 billion objects and 90,6% of the results come from the mobile-friendly sites, which once again emphasizes the necessity of having a mobile-friendly version of the website.
5. Position Zero (Featured Snippets)
The higher you rank in the SERP, the more CTR you will get. The featured snippets give you the privilege to take the major part of the SERP and, accordingly- the user’s attention, which will result in high web/mobile traffic.
According to Search Engine Journal, more than 12% of the SERP results have a featured snippet. It can be in the form of a paragraph, a list or a table and statistics show that about 80% of the P0s are in the form of a paragraph.
If one of your SEO goals for 2021 is to rank your content as a featured snippet, you should strictly follow the rules of content SEO, which will make your content suitable for a featured snippet.
6. Video content
One of the best and most effective ways to speak about your brand, the services you offer, to interact with your current and future customers is through video content. YouTube, being the second largest search engine after Google, is a great platform to promote your brand awareness.
Users are more likely to visit your site by watching video content concerning your brand, than just read an average article or see an ad of your brand. Videos grasp user’s attention and build trust between them and the brand. The reason lays in the fact that visual content creates a memorable image of your brand and very often they are worth thousands of words. Moreover, it is scientifically proved that people’s brain ‘absorbs’ more visual information than textual one. Accordingly, the greatest part of the information we memorize daily is visual.
So, another great SEO tip is not to hesitate to add more video content to your site or YouTube channel, and the result will not take long.
7. E-A-T
Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness are the three main factors which will help you rank high in YMYL (your money or your life) industry. As we know, YMYL is an acronym of how Google refers to the sites of expertise whose content could have a negative impact on someone’s quality of lifestyle or finances. The content offered by the sites giving tips and recommendations on people’s health, happiness, financial stability or improvements should be composed or written by experts in that specific topic, bring some additional information about the author of the article, in other words, shortly present the bio of the author, which, in result, will build more trust towards the article and the brand. And finally, bringing backlinks from the trustworthy and related niche will attach an additional ‘quality badge’ to that article.
8. Search intent
Whatever lies behind the user’s query when using a search engine is called search intent or user intent. Matching it with the content you provide on your site, offering the most relevant answers to what a user is looking for brings your brand to a new level of credibility and, of course, repetitive customers for your business. While suiting your content to the user’s needs, firstly you should identify your audience (age, gender, job industry, income, family status, etc.). Then comes the topic research stage. It is advised to collect relevant topics which will interest your audience and, accordingly, do keyword research for that specific topic.
Another SEO tip: every new piece of content should be a better, more informative and more useful one and not just an ordinary article on a certain topic.
9. Brand awareness and reputation
SEO plays an important role in forming the brand’s image on the world wide web. According to some research, it takes about 50 milliseconds for people to form an opinion about your website. Here we see the necessity of a fully optimized site that is simple, at the same time catchy and eloquently formed to impress the user from the very start.
Another study suggests that the consistent presentation of the brand has seen to increase the revenue up to 33%. It is more important to catch the user’s interest and credit by consistently presenting the core values that guide your business than frequently bring new products into the market.
Here are the key steps suggested by our experts that one should take to create and maintain a good brand image:
- Find and organize your branded keywords.
- Implement Local SEO in your online business strategy.
- Publish content on quality websites.
- Create a YouTube channel.
- Improve Social media presence.
We are going to speak about each step in more detail in our upcoming articles on this topic, so don’t miss them.
10. GMB
Speaking about what is trending in SEO in 2021, we can’t but mention the importance of the presence of Google My Business tool as a trending feature for every local business’s success in 2021. You can find some important things about GMB features right here.
Some recent stats show that 50% of mobile users who did a local search went to a physical store of the company within one day. This stat can be alerting for those businesses who have not registered their brand on GMB or do not have a well-optimized one.
As more and more shoppers (about 84%) read online reviews nowadays, it is of utmost importance to have a high user rating and detailed info about the business on GMB. This SEO trend is becoming more widespread in 2021 as more people tend to use the best of the opportunities and offers which surround them in this world of countless brands.
All these SEO trends will be vital for the future of your online business in 2021. Make good use of them and your investment in SEO or hard work will surely pay off. All the above mentioned facts prove that SEO is not dead in 2021 and will not be in the upcoming years, as a well-optimized site and the continuous work on it is the key to succeed in the battle to rank higher in SERP. Our company with simple and smart solutions is ready to lift your business onto the top results of search engines and ensure some impressive results and favorable outcomes from our cooperation. Start your smart business journey by contacting us right now.
About the author
Gor Karapetyan is an SEO specialist with 5+ years’ experience. He is the founder of Simple Solutions education company and the co-founder of Targeting digital marketing and development company. He provides SEO courses and trainings and helps companies register online progress.
