Search engine optimization (SEO) is an effective way for attracting prospective clients to your website. All you need to o is to use it correctly. According to data, there are approximately 3.5B searches on Google daily and only 0.78% of people click on the websites on the second page. This means the #1 result in Google’s organic search result takes an average CTR of 31.7%. What do these stats reveal?
To produce organic traffic, you need to rank your website on page one of the SERP. At this point, you are going to need SEO. We all know that SEO is evolving day by day. In this blog, I am going to cover 10 important trends you can follow in 2021 for SEO success.
Top SEO trends of 2021 are:
- Core Web Vitals
- Keyword research
- Google’s BERT
- Voice search
- Video marketing
- Fresh ad Unique content
- Featured snippets
- Artificial intelligence
- Influencer SEO
- EAT & branded SEO
I will explain each trend to my readers.
SEO trends to leverage in 2021
As we discussed above, to rank higher on SERP or maintain current rankings, you need to keep updating your SEO strategy by Google, as its algorithm evolves. Let’s check out the breakdown of the most significant SEO and Google trends and strategies that you should prioritize for 2021.
Core Web Vitals as a Google ranking factor
In May 2020, Google declared three new metrics, called Core Web Vitals. These metrics will be used to measure user experience which includes Loading, Interactivity, and Visual Stability. These metrics are related to page speed. So, you need to keep an eye on the things like how fast does the page load, how soon does it get interactive, and how stable is it while loading.
Core Web Vitals is going to be considered in Google’s ranking factors in May 2021. It indicated that you need to pay close attention to them to appear on the first page. In simple words, if there are two pages with equally good and relative content, user experience metrics are going to help search engine bots to choose which one should be ranked higher. More business SEO strategies are.
Also Read: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR THE YEAR 2021
Keyword research will become more important
Do you know that approximately 50% of searches are zero-click searches? It is true and it signifies that more than half of the Google searchers (appx. 175 billion searches per month) end up without clicking anywhere. It happens because of rich results in the SERP. It includes Google business listings and Featured Snippets with answers. With the help of these things, most of the users can get the results they need without even clicking anywhere on SERP.
How to find the right keywords?
- Start finding long-tail and targeted keywords for your website. You don’t need a lot of high skills to get these keywords. Google Search Console is your gold mine. On the google search console, you will find all the keywords related to your business.
- Try to understand the user’s intent. Always analyze the SERP for a keyword before picking it. If the intent is genuine, even a low-volume keyword will generate thousands of dollars for you every month.
This is the reason you should do deep keyword research with patience. Always search the keywords that can rank on google easily.
Google’s BERT for intent matches
Google’s BERT algorithm (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) employs machine learning (ML). Furthermore, it also uses natural language processing (NLP) to properly understand searches. It gives google an idea about what users are searching for. You would be surprised to know that this algorithm works in more than 70 languages.
With the help of Google’s BERT update, Google search engine bots have grown much more “conversational,”. Furthermore, Google’s algorithm can now understand the intention of the searcher. Now Google can simply understand things like the human brain.
It also means that websites with content-intent mismatches are going to be negatively impacted. Doesn’t matter how detailed or high-quality that long-form content is, if it’s not satisfying the audience’s intent, BERT is going to ignore your website and will rank another content piece that will be satisfying the intent for the given inquiry.
Also, note that Google BERT is not an algorithmic penalty. It’s a section of the Google search engine that is going to filter out the most appropriate. relevant and useful content to users by interpreting search inquiries and content like humans. It will not de-rank or penalize any websites but it will just support the websites that will show the best results to users. Showing the best results to the users is the only thing that Google always strives to do.
If your content doesn’t have what users are looking for, it’s not BERT-friendly. In this case, you won’t be able to rank for that keyword for a longer period. Hence publishing valuable content on your website can help you to satisfy the users and rank your website higher.
Also Read: TOP 10 SEO TRENDS IN 2021
How to optimize for Google’s BERT
Search intent is what people are searching for when they enter a specific keyword into a Google search. Are they searching for an answer to a question or a list of options? Do they want to learn something or do they want to buy something by reading their online reviews? Various intent can be there that users bring to the Google search bar. Hence it’s important to ensure your content and the keyword intent match.
E.g if somebody is searching “seo” as a keyword on Google, means they want to know about SEO. On the other hand if somebody is typing “seo services” as a keyword in the google search box it means the user is looking for somebody for “seo services.” You can say that the keyword “seo” is an informational keyword on the other hand “seo services” is a commercial keyword.
Besides that various keywords can be multi-intent keywords. Let us take an example of the keyword “seo expert”. It can be a person who is searching for an SEO expert to hire or it can be a person who wants to become an SEO expert.
You should always search a keyword on Google before writing content for it! This strategy will benefit you in understanding the intent of a keyword. In this way, you can be sure it will work before spending the time to write the content.
Generate original content
We all know that content plays a significant role in SEO and ranking. Nobody can deny the fact that trustworthy content is essential for businesses more than branding. All you need is to write the unique content and put it on your website.
Would you buy a dress with the same color and design twice? Never! The same thing happens in SEO. Every day a lot of alike content on identical topics gets indexed on Google. If you will write content very similar to already published content why would any search engine rank your website? So, write unique.
Voice search in SEO
Research says that 27% of internet users use voice search to find out the answers to their queries. Besides that, you should also know that a lot of voice searches are long-tail keywords and very specific. People are looking for specific answers while using voice search. You must note the fact that voice search optimization is growing every day and it is expected to grow in 2021 as well. So don’t ignore voice search optimization for your website.
Artificial intelligence
No wonders! AI is changing the world and the SEO and marketing industry is not devoid of it. AI provides personalization and efficiency to the users.
How AI helps with SEO strategies?
It’s not easy to learn the search engine algorithms and then create strategies accordingly. SEO specialists can indeed help with such strategies but the use of AI and machine learning can change the game. It brings more efficiency and power to your SEO game.
Various companies like HubSpot, Frase, and MarketMuse provide AI-based solutions. These solutions can help businesses with their SEO aims.
Video marketing in SEO
Do you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google? It has a user base of over 1 billion users. If you are not active on YouTube, it’s the peak time to get started.
Now you must be thinking that how to optimize the video content? Start with optimizing the name of your video channel, add a perfect and catchy description. However, I will never advise you to overload the description with keywords.
Adding keywords to your description is important to buy don’t over-optimize it. To optimizing your YouTube videos, use YouTube’s autocomplete feature.
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are also known as or Position Zero. They appear at the top of SERP in a rectangular box.
These snippets not only useful for the users but also advantageous for websites. A person can’t select the content shown in the Featured Snippet for any given search. It is done by the Google bot.
There is no exact way of getting your website in the Featured Snippets however digital marketers and SEO specialists use some strategies like answering a specific question and framing the answer in bullet points.
How to get your website in snippets?
- Answer a specific question
- Framing the answer in bullet points
Be specific
Influencer SEO
Influencers are individuals with millions of followers on social media. The best thing about them is that their followers can become your customers if you will do influence marketing.
These influencers win the trust of the people that can be your potential audience. If they support your brand, the ROI can be tremendous. This is the reason that 89% of marketers accept that the ROI from influencer marketing is better than other marketing techniques.
Apart from the above-mentioned fact, you should be quite specific while picking the influencers to promote your SEO strategy. Not every influencer can boost your brand. You need to select the ones with the right audience.
How does influencer marketing impact SEO?
It like the process of Link building. You all must agree on the fact that backlinks are an important ranking factor. But not all kinds of backlinks are good for your business, right? You want to link your website with high-quality backlinks. Influencers marketing works in the same manner. With the help of influencers, you can get higher-quality traffic for your website.
Brand visibility & engagement
Influencers are aware of the fact that what their audience likes or dislikes. Hence they create content related to your brand that connects to their audience too. Influencers create content that is unique, valuable, and helpful.
Search engines love viral content. Whenever an influencer shares a post and it gets viral search engines like to rank the mentioned web page higher in the SERPs.
Social media traffic
No doubt in the fact that viral content help to generate a huge social media engagement.
EAT & branded SEO
Google favors quality content. Along with that, you should know that “quality” doesn’t work alone. You should follow EAT rule, which is expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Leverage these SEO trends to drive traffic in 2021
To summarise, these SEO trends you must follow 2021. While writing the content for your website or while doing SEO, Keep these trends in your mind.
- Read about Core Web Vitals
- Follow Google’s BERT
- Do a deep Keyword research
- Write Original Content
- Add Voice search
- Use Artificial intelligence
- Start Video marketing
- Use Featured snippets
- Adopt Influencer SEO
- Branded SEO