Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an evolving and valuable field of marketing that allows users to search for the best content on the internet. With a large number of internet users on the go, SEO thus becomes a means to cash in on the opportunity to capitalize through online marketing for many business platforms.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not dying and is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean what you know of SEO today is the same that will be implemented over the next few years. That’s why it’s important to be updated about the latest SEO trends so that you are ready for every challenge that Google throws at you and beyond.
So If you want to engage more traffic to your site and appear on top search results then here are some SEO trends you should look forth for in 2021
Core Web Vitals
Your webpage’s overall user experience is dependent on the core web vitals. With Google introducing page experience as its official ranking factor, metrics can no longer be neglected and everything from page speed, mobile-friendliness to security protocols needs to be optimized.
Additionally, businesses need to make sure that their page is accessible and comprehensible to a search engine crawler. This can only be achieved through a user-centric approach and a better user interface that allows easy browsing and smooth user interactions.
Google’s focus on Core Web Vitals ultimately shows how difficult some sites can be, therefore, improving your insights by incorporating page experience into your SEO workflow is crucial.
Doing so will improve your website performance and rankings for the upcoming algorithm update while allowing Google to access the best content on your site from everywhere.
Voice search
Thanks to technological innovations like Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa, voice search has gotten more popular. Voice search can have an influence on your digital marketing strategy and can inevitably affect your business in the longer run.
In fact, about 50% of households are predicted to have smart speakers by 2022. However, whether voice search will bring about a positive or negative outcome relies on how better adapted you are to the changing strategies.
In order to optimize your site for voice search, you should build your content around conversational and longer keywords as people tend to do better with natural-sounding phrases. Keywords that people generally use on their keyboards are entirely different from those done via voice. Since the end goal for your business is to make everything more efficient, voice search does just that.
Google’s SMITH Algorithm
The latest Google algorithm, SMITH (Siamese Multi-depth Transformer-based Hierarchical) is better than the existing BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) algorithm as its focused on understanding passages as the context of the entire document.
The SEO content strategies should always be up to date with the latest algorithms. According to Google, the SMITH algorithm has outdated BERT and has impacted the SEO hugely as it allows to understand in-depth pages with a high frequency of content. This in turn houses related topics on one site rather than landing different topics on different pages.
Mobile SEO
The mobile-first approach is what you should focus on for your website’s SEO success in 2021. The reason lies in the fact that people do most of their searching through their mobile phones and comparatively will view your websites on their mobiles rather than their desktops.
Consequently, Google treats your website’s mobile version as the primary one whereas your desktop version comes in second place. Hence optimizing your website will ensure that Google can crawl 100% of your mobile content and display the mobile version of your site to the users as the main site.
Zero Click Search
For better SERP rankings, Google has started to focus on zero-click searches. To put it quite simply, a user can find their answers directly on google through a local SEO search. Google scans your site to find the answers required by users and displays them as top search results that ultimately assist them in finding solutions with zero clicks.
To take advantage of zero-click searches, Google has introduced several cards and snippets such as paragraphs, lists, tables, etc. that can be integrated with a website for better SERP rankings.