Do not let anyone fool you. SEO is not dead. We have compiled these articles to help you see the SEO trends for 2021. All reference article links are listed at the bottom of this post.

10 Important 2021 SEO Trends You Need to Know

^[1]So true! But there’s much more to dig into when we’re talking SEO in 2021. So what SEO strategies and tactics will work and help you dominate in the SERPs and earn more revenue in 2021? This is the question we ask every year here at Search Engine Journal. This year, I asked 42 of today’s top SEO professionals for their thoughts. Here are the top 10 trends you need to know in 2021, according to the experts.

^[2]Trends #1: BERT & User-Focused Optimization

In 2019, the launch of Google’s new BERT algorithm received a whole lot of attention. Naturally, each SEO professional needs to discover ways to optimize for BERT.

Effectively, fairly than specializing in how you can optimize for that particular algorithm, focus on user-focused optimization and the technical supply of content.

Briefly, which means reassessing user access factors to search and aligning content with that.

Take a look at the mechanics of how one thing is crawled, indexed, and served in quite a lot of completely different search settings.

With users having extra choices than ever in how they search for issues, it’ll be much more necessary for SEOs to keep in mind the basics of fresh structure and content supply.

With the incorporation of BERT this year into the ranking and featured snippets algorithm, Google has taken an enormous leap ahead into searching actually about intent matching fairly pure string matching.

Keyword research tools could even grow to be much less related to the first dataset for content creation coming from recommended queries. In 2020, the actually sensible SEOs will stand up from their desks to speak to clients to allow them to discover out what their audience actually needs from them.

Deal with how our users speak about their points, issues, and wishes at every side of the customer’s journey rather more.

Too many brands overlook or fail to appreciate what it takes to draw and impress potential clients. They need actual worth.

Identical to in a brick-and-mortar institution, clients need to know that you’re a reliable partner in what will be long-term – hopefully lifelong – relationship.

Now, greater than ever, firms should cease treating SEO as a condiment that they add to their digital technique and as an alternative deal with it as a key ingredient of their marketing strategy.

SEOs are going to should develop their skillsets to grasp the complete marketing and digital stack. It’s going to be much less about fixing SEO points and extra about fixing marketing and business points.

Trends #2: ^[3]Natural Language Generation is becoming an integral part of your workflow.

Marketing is no longer the same. Machine learning and natural language processing are natural for creativity, content writing, and general content optimization. 2020, much like the previous year, has witnessed one innovation after the other (from T5 to GPT-3 from PEGASUS to Turing-NLG) and an unprecedented level of improvements across the most daring NLP tasks such as content understanding, QAs answering, content generation, and more. Unlike simpler language generation approaches like the good ol’ Markov chains, which only work with a limited vocabulary, ML models using the transformer architecture can learn larger grammar and semantics patterns and re-apply them in entirely different contexts.

We have tirelessly worked during 2020 on the semi-automated generation of meta descriptions, story highlights (3 or 4 sentences that condense the entire article), and FAQ for hundreds of websites.

While I don’t yet expect to have TOO MANY articles completely written by machines, in 2021, we will see AI playing a crucial role in doing the following:

Trends #3: ^[4]Relevant and valuable content

If you do not produce relevant and valuable content for the buyer persona, there is no point following any SEO tips. That’s a trend that will never change.

This is because all factors analyzed by Google’s algorithm are somehow related to the user experience. And for visitors to feel satisfied after entering your website, they need to be contemplated with rich, authentic content that delivers what they were looking for.

If this does not happen, the user will press the “back” button and choose one of the many options present in the SERP.

This means that your brand will lose the chance to acquire a new client, who may even develop a negative feeling about the company.

The increase in bounce rate and the decrease in the number of satisfied users affect your brand’s general reputation and digital authority.

Therefore, to achieve and maintain good SEO results, it is imperative to create relevant and valuable content.

To do so, concentrate on developing your strategy by touching your persona’s pains, needs, and wishes. Your goal should be to meet the demands of your visitors, not just those of Google bots.

At this point, it is worth considering the production of interactive content, which attracts and retains the attention of users more easily.

Moreover, the direct interaction with their own experience increases the chances that the visitor will feel satisfied and continue browsing your site.

Trends #4: User Experience (UX)

As you saw in the last topic, user satisfaction remains extremely relevant for SEO strategy success.

However, it is important to note that such satisfaction does not depend only on qualified and relevant content. It is necessary to offer a complete experience.

Therefore, investment in user experience (UX) techniques is one of the major SEO trends for 2021.

But what does that mean?

Don Norman, the co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, created the term UX. In this video, you can watch Norman explaining the concept.

When applied in Digital Marketing, UX is related to user interaction with the brand’s channels. It needs to happen in a simple, accessible, and barrier-free way.

In other words, when accessing your website, visitors should find fast-loading pages, intuitive menus, and other elements that make their experience richer and more efficient.

From now on, all this will be taken into account, too, by Google’s algorithm. The information comes from a post in Google Webmaster Central Blog, which explains how the algorithm evaluates each page’s experience to define its ranking.

Trends #5: Mobile SEO

If you’ve been following SEO trends from previous years, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that mobile SEO was among them. Not by chance.

Since 2019, Google has been analyzing the mobile pages of websites as primary versions, leaving the desktop versions secondary.

Therefore, Mobile SEO is key to your strategy’s success and becomes even more relevant in 2021. This is because the number of people who access the internet from smartphones does not stop growing.

The stats prove it: throughout 2020, the number of searches conducted from mobile devices surpassed those performed on desktops.

Moreover, according to a World Advertising Research Center (WARC) study, the future will be even more mobile. The expectation is that, by 2025, approximately three-quarters of the world will use just their smartphones to access the internet.

The mobile searching experience needs to be as satisfying as it is on computers.

Therefore, marketers should be concerned with optimizing all their content and settings for this environment. Otherwise, your pages may be punished and lose ranking positions.

Trends #6: ^[5]Provide relevant data which your audience wants

According to recent Google Algorithm Updates, it has been found that keyword usage or stuffing in the content will not bring good conversion and rankings. Presently, it has been noted that the search engine giant is looking to deliver the right message to the right audience.

For generating content that’s relevant to your users and free from keyword stuffing, follow these tips:

• Identify your audience and then generate your content. This will help you in keeping your content natural and ideal for your visitors.
• Add keywords at prime SEO spots, such as meta descriptions, meta titles, alt tags, etc.
• Break the monotony of your keywords by adding long-tail keywords. Optimal content has a good mixture of short-tail and long-tail keywords.
• Break the monotony of your keywords by adding long-tail keywords. Optimal content has a good mixture of short-tail and long-tail keywords.

Trends #7: Loading Speed of the pages

• The first impression is the last.
• Thus, instead of hampering your customers’ mood with slow loading web pages, try to optimize your loading speeds.
• Take the help of PageSpeed Insights by Google Developers to know your current page speed score and start making improvements.
• In PageSpeed Insights, have a look at the following metrics to get an in-depth idea of your mobile page speed:

First Contentful Paint

First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures how long it takes your browser to render the first piece of DOM(Data Object Model) content after a visitor navigates to your page. This includes images, SVGs, etc.

First Meaningful Paint

First, Meaningful Paint (FMP) measures when the page’s primary content is visible to the user. It basically registers the time when the content within the iFrame is visible.

Speed Index

Speed Index measures how quickly the content is visually displayed to your users during page loading.

First CPU Idle

The time taken by a page to become minimal interactive for the user is measured as First CPU Idle.

A page is considered minimally interactive when:

• Most of the UI elements are interactive on the screen.
• The page responds to most user inputs in a reasonable amount of time.

Trends #8: Time To Interactive

Time To Interactive (TTI) measures the time taken by a page to become fully interactive. A page is considered fully interactive if:

• It displays useful content as measured by FCP.
• The page responds to user actions within 50 milliseconds.
• Event handlers are registered for most of the page elements

Trends #9: ^[6]Rich content for the snippet

If you want your content to come in the first position, you need to note some of the points. This can only be possible if you set a definite pattern which the Search Engine follows:

• Monitor the relevancy of the heading matching with the content and SEO Title
• Set up the Structure Data with the proper standard
• Keep yourself aware of the latest Google updates
• Proper keywords usage
• Good meta description
• Include your brand in the SEO title
• Follow the Search Engines Guidelines

Trends #10: ^[7]Customer Analytics, Retention & Lifetime Value

SEO used to be (mostly) about driving traffic. But SEO has evolved into much more.

As Miracle Inameti-Archibong, Head of SEO, Erudite, noted, in 2021, “You will be pushed more and more to make the traffic you have to work harder to close the gaps in revenue and demonstrate ROI.”

So, in 2021, data on behavioral analytics will become the hottest commodity.

“With Google evolving faster and faster to give instant satisfaction, taking responsibility beyond visits, as well as marrying up UX, conversion, and revenue have become even more important,” Inameti-Archibong said. “Keyword volume will take a back seat, and it will be more behavioral analytics – what your customer is doing, how they are doing it, and how we can get them to do more of it quicker – and reverse engineering that to the content you produce.”

Conclusion:

Do not forget SEO; you need your website to rank organically, so you need SEO! If you get stuck and need help with your SEO strategy, please call hughesagency.ca today.

Article compiled by hughesagency.ca.

Article reference links:

1. https://responsema.org/2020/12/23/10-important-2021-seo-trends-you-need-to-know/ ↑
2. https://www.techguruseo.com/10-biggest-2021-seo-trends-you-need-to-know/ ↑
3. https://wordlift.io/blog/en/seo-trends/ ↑
4. https://en.rockcontent.com/blog/seo-trends/ ↑
5. https://makewebbetter.com/blog/google-seo-trends-rank-higher-your-site/ ↑
6. https://makewebbetter.com/blog/google-seo-trends-rank-higher-your-site/ ↑
7. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-important-2021-seo-trends-you-need-to-know/389395/ ↑