6 Smart SEO Trends to Follow in 2021
Devising a contemporary SEO strategy that enables you significant growth in the SERPs is going to be on the preferred list of every business in 2021. Acquiring new customers on your mobile app or website and converting sales is a never ending process. It is something that cannot be achieved in a short span of time. SEO trends have been changing significantly and hence your SEO strategies need a makeover in 2021.
For the companies that typically focus over organic practices of pushing their search engine rankings, it is important to pay attention to the key indicators we will be giving out in this article. Now, more than 28% of organic SEO procedures can convert in sales and hence it is not a great idea to avoid SEO optimization strategies. Let us now look at some of the smartest SEO trends that you can follow in 2021 to take your business to the next level.
Google’s AI based Algorithm will change the future of SEO
It has been a long time since Google launched its AI based algorithm titled RankBrain that plays a key role in determining the search engine page rankings. It is evident that Artificial Intelligence has evolved how users engage with digital content. Now, how do you optimize your SEO for the RankBrain algorithm? While the tech giant hasn’t provided more details, SEO experts feel that user experience signals are the main factors. This may include other important factors like click-through rate and overall time spent on a page. All you need to do is to fascinate and engage users with meaningful, organised and well-researched content. An efficient on-page SEO checker can provide a solid assessment of your page strength using factors like readability, backlinks, CTR etc.
Voice Search will takeover traditional Search
Thanks to enhancements like Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant, voice search technology has taken a huge leap in how people search on the internet. As technology has improved, it has gotten more advanced and popular amongst people. Actually, more than 50% of homes will have their own smart speaker by 2022. It is best to consider better keywords to optimize your voice search. You should look for longer phrases used by people in day-to-day conversations. Voice search is indeed a better option for typically longer and more genuine sounding phrases. Users tend to use short forms when they type but with voice search it is a decent sounding phrase. For instance, a user might voice search, “What are the top 15 Flutter App Development tools to look out for in 2021?” but type the words, “new Flutter trends 2021”.
Mobile Compatibility will impact Search Rankings
Google launched mobile-first indexing back in 2019 where it was established that the search engine essentially looks at the mobile version of a website. Hence, it would be the primary version instead of the usual desktop version. This change makes total sense because more than 70% internet users will access the internet by mobile devices only by 2025. You can check if your website is mobile friendly using Google’s mobile-friendly test. To ensure your web page is user-friendly, you have to make sure that Google can crawl your URLs. Hence, you must make sure that you do not have a “disallow directive” in place. Additionally, you must know that Googlebot wouldn’t load content requiring user interactions like swiping on clicking. You have to make sure that Google search engine can view this lazy-loaded content. Lastly, you must ensure that meta robot tags are the same on both mobile and desktop versions.
Content that complies by the Google EAT Principle
Google has emphasized time and again that content quality is crucial for SERP success. But how to determine what is good “quality” for Google? In that case, it is best to fall back on the EAT theory: expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. These factors help you understand if your web page has high quality content. It is extremely useful for business sectors like finance and healthcare.
There are a variety of ways where you can ensure consistent content quality. Firstly, understand your customers and put yourself in their shoes to determine what they are looking for. Secondly, map out a customer journey and look for search intent. Lastly, use this research to create compelling content that is liked by your customers.
Long Form Content is the norm
This is one of the most important and determining optimisation factors that assist websites to rank better on the search engine. According to recent reports, the long-form content ranging more than 2500 words gets significantly more traffic as compared to the content of shorter length. Moreover, you can also include more backlinks in the long form content as opposed to the content of shorter length. However, it is important to take care of content quality when writing long form content. Additionally, you will also need to conduct keyword research, semantic keywords, on-page optimisation that includes decent headings, links etc. Lastly, it is crucial that the website or blog which features this long form content has easy to share options.
Predictive Search Will Improve
Google Discover was officially launched in 2017 erupting a new type of search where you don’t even need a user query. It is one of the AI-driven tools introduced by Google. The content recommendation tool discovers users patterns over a period of time and slowly learns their habits. By doing so, Google Discover is able to recognize the kind of content which will be most liked by the user. Currently, there are more than 800 million active users on Google Discover. You do not have to do anything extra to appear on the search results. If Google automatically indexes your webpage then it will be included in Google Discover. Web content is ranked depending on algorithms about content quality and user interest. Google has not divulged many details but location history, browsing history, app usage, calendar and search history are all relevant for Discover.
Final Word
We believe SEO is only going to get more complex going forward and we have tried to simplify it for you with the list above. SEO is a lot more than just optimizing keywords and meta tags now. Appropriate SEO tools can help you build a solid marketing strategy to take your business to the next level. If you have any questions regarding SEO trends, you can contact us now to get more information.
Rajiv Patil is the founder & Managing Director of Nimblechapps, an innovative iPhone app development company. He takes a keen interest in topics related to mobile app development and mobile game development and often like to share his knowledge through informative posts on leading blogging sites.