SEO Trends to Follow for 2021

SEO Trends to Follow for 2021

Search Engine Optimization is the most sustainable and practicable way to claim and establish your online visibility. For most people, SEO is a relentless practice of cracking algorithms and applying hard-fetched formulas and uncertain tactics to seek higher search ranks against a gruesome competition across the online space.

Well, in a way that’s true! But if you know the ropes of it and keep up with the latest trends, things get more visible, actionable, and achievable. The constantly evolving facets and traits of SEO, require you to know what’s going on and how you can use it to extract the best results.

And you have to do this as it is worth the effort. As with this attempt, you are going to get a top position on organic search listings that grab high-intent user queries. This gets you high-quality leads that have great chances of conversion without any paid promotions. This is a powerful and enduring method of lead generation and the only reliable way to sustain in the long run.

So, there’s no point that you should not consider going with SEO to promote and grow your business online. And when you do this you better do it keeping close with the latest developments happening in the sphere.

Doing this, you need to track, measure, and analyze different metrics and performance numbers. While making them respond to the need of the time and relevant to the latest trends.

So, with everything around mostly remaining static, you only need to incessantly chase the latest trends.

And here is the answer to the question of how to do it for the year 2021. Furnished in these 10 trending ways!

1. Artificial Intelligence is Going to Drive the Change

AI is changing the way people interact with online content. Responding to these trends well in time, Google has regularly rolled out updates to comply with AI-based content interactions. A few years back, the search technology giant came up with the algorithm called RankBrain that was the first big step towards combining the mechanism of query processing and searches with Artificial Intelligence.

Since then, this has grown continuously to serve the advanced need for search communication that is more contextually driven. And this attempts at making the process of online searchers ever more easy, responsive, and accurate.

AI-based searches are going to change the future of online searches going with the ever-prominent device-based technologies and other inventive originations like Natural Language Processing and BERT technique for machine learning.

All this clearly suggests that AI should be in your plans if you want to make the most of SEO from here.

2. Voice Search will Change the Game

The voice-based innovations like Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa have been quite effective in their ways of enabling touch-free device communication. And over the years of continuous research, development, and learning, these technologies have grown to serve advanced search capabilities that offer greater choices of mobility and contactless communication. This is only going to get bigger from here and this requires you to optimize for voice searches more than ever now. To do this effectively, you need to work on natural-sounding conversational phrases and identify ways to insert your keywords into those vocally driven sentences.

For example, when a user is search-typing ‘Trending women’s fashion 2021’ they tend to voice-search it going with a fuller non-abbreviated sentence like ‘What’s the trending fashion for women in 2021?’.

If you want to go where the trends are moving, consider picking up the voice search technology.

3. Google EAT Principle will be a Decisive Factor in Achieving Higher Ranks

Google has always emphasized the criticality of quality content for success in rankings. But quality is a vague and subjective term in itself. And it’s not that easy to ensure quality if you do not have enough quantifiable objectives and performance yardsticks to measure.

For everyone’s good, the content quality parameters have been expounded into three key criteria of measurement that together form a principle defined by equitable quality measures. This is referred to as the EAT principle that focuses on the factors of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness to authenticate and validate search rankings.

This principle will be predominantly deciding the quality of your content in 2021. So, you now require to emphasize these factors while planning and creating your content more than ever. Your communication here should be serving your users with expert information that offers some unique and applicable value.

It should be conducive to the idea of factual, topical, and statistical authority and should score high on accuracy with dependable and valid resources backing the content sufficiently.

This principle should be your going-ahead agenda to claim higher organic rankings that are built on quality scores.

4. Mobile-Friendliness is Going to Impact Search Rankings

Google rolled out an important update in 2019 that started considering the mobile rendition of a website as the primary version for search indexing.
This is denoted as mobile-first indexing.

With this, it is quite evident that most of the internet users will be hitting searches through mobile devices. So, only those businesses that optimize their website for mobile devices and get mobile-friendly will be gaining better search positions and get visible to more users. And this is going to considerably impact their reach across the search networks.

To make sure you get the best results from this, you should go for Google’s mobile-friendly test and assure that every aspect of it is met and served plausibly.

Here, you should be checking with console reports, look into the compliance scores, and check with the activity pointers to ensure that search results are best responding and serving mobile queries.

Be mobile-first and mobile-friendly. That’s the only wise way forward.

5. Featured Snippets will Achieve Higher Search Prominence

As you already know about featured snippets, these tiny pieces of featured content get you significant visibility on searches going beyond the competition of listing results. So, you will have less dependency on longer and elaborative posts to get results.

These snippets on the top of the SERPs placed above the organic listing gets you to have more prominent visibility with well-drafted content that shows a chunk of information compactly reduced into a crisp title, description, and service link to your page.

This may further include topical images, customer ratings, product prices, and other extended texts, created focusing on keyword-based search queries that are targeted to reach high-intent users looking for services, products, or utility offered by you.

While you work out options for featured snippets, you should try to bring out answers to questions that your prospects may be interested in. Here, you should be tying up these questions with relevant industry keywords and search phrases built to serve your services and offerings. Doing this well, you will be able to achieve greater online search value and prominence, and owing to its practical feasibility this will be on top of SEO trends in 2021.

You got to try snippets. Or else you will lose its efficacy to your competitor!

6. Predictive search is going to get smarter

In 2017, Google Discover was introduced and it drastically changed the way a user searches for results on the internet. This search technology predicts the search intent of the user based on their prior user behavior through AI-spotted action events and ML traced response patterns.

This saves the search data for certain user activity on a browser and does query mapping and behavior analysis to throw auto-recommendations. This also offers results based on your browsing behavior and activity and this gets you suggestions that are served by a built-in AI/ML mechanism which is getting stronger and sharper with time.

You do not have to do anything to register your web for Google Discovery. If your pages are indexed you will be automatically served with the tool. While there are no specific factors suggested as such, details from location data, browsing history, applications used, search and navigation behavior, calendars, and notes have been reported to have impacted predictive searches.

Predictive search will only get stronger from here and you should always include it as a part of your SEO strategy at a greater and fuller capacity.

7. Semantically Related Keywords will Find More Importance

2021 seems to be a year that is working more on the humanized aspects of searching. More efforts are being made on bringing a more semantically relevant choice of keywords in place. With this, you need to bring in the variation of keywords keeping in mind the latency and context of queries. Here, the searcher’s intent takes the center stage and semantic searches would be striking big.

So, just as you plan your primary keywords that are more directly and focally aligned with your business offerings, you need to work on semantically relevant secondary keywords as much intensely.

Here, you can take help with different semantic search tools to identify and establish such keywords. These tools even allow you to set your range and priority with keyword selection and can help you with creating the variants of key phrases you are targeting.

A good example of a semantic keyword can be taken from here:

If you are into selling cooking equipment and your primary keyword is ‘microwave oven’ your semantic keywords should ideally be ‘oven bowl set’, ‘heat-proof cookware’, ‘modern cooking techniques’.

So, as you can see there’s no keyword that is picking up the word ‘microwave’, but these are all closely related to the user requirements who intend to own and use a microwave oven.

It’s time when you should get semantic with your keyword approach!

8. Long-Form Content will be as Effective as Ever

According to research reports, more words will continue to grant you more power to appear high on searches. Here you should be considering elaborative and well-explained articles (that may run over 3000 words or so) that clearly establishes a fact and builds an exhaustively detailed story around a topic that proves to be of some significant value for the targeted users.

Sharing research-based insights or informative details about something in a well-narrated and sorted format of write-up that includes a detailed and interactive presentation of information is going to fetch you more love of search engines.

Here, as you include in-line images, stats, graphs, infographics, and videos with your content you are more likely to get a high authority score for your content. And putting these elongated blog pieces on high DA sites with a backlink to your site can get you higher search authority.

Long articles with detailed topic coverage will continue to get you higher search engine value and that’s what you should do more in 2021.

9. Videos will be a Part of an Effective Search Strategy

With video-based content and OTT platforms growing at an incessant pace, you can expect videos to rule the realm of online content. It is going to exceed every form of content that is present online and going to be a part of every content-based promotion plan moving forward.

This is the time when you should start considering video content to be a part of your SEO strategy. And this should include getting ready with your business vlog or YouTube channel. Or you can simply transform and repurpose your content in the form of interactive videos that are already there on your profile.
Doing this, keep your video descriptions and promotional excerpts stuffed with necessary keywords. While you post or circulate them across different platforms, tag them properly, and follow the best SEO practices suggested by experts.

Videos will totally turn around your game with searches in 2021.

10. Image Optimization will Get all The More Important

With the changing pattern and choices of user searches and growing requirements for image searches, the need for image optimization has become a crucial part of your SEO strategy. In the future, images would have a greater role to play in searches. It will be no more limited to just picturizing products but will also be integrated with product selling and offers.

With this, you can expect image optimization to be a priority of your SEO plan in 2021. So, you need to optimize your images on the website picking up high-quality relevant content for imageries with alt tags and text structuring on sitemaps to help search bots crawl the images and index them to appear on search result pages.

As images are going to take a more prominent place in searches, you need to have a proper plan in place for image optimization.

Final Words

As suggested by experts, these are the most dominating SEO trends that will be changing the way it should be approached and executed to get you results in 2021 and further. You need to take a look into these practices and relate it with your idea of online search promotions.

Follow these trends and get them working with your mode of business and the trait of the offering. Read through the sentiments and practices that people are going through and the habits and choices they have developed over time to act and respond to the search events.

Doing a balancing act of imbibing these trends and implementing this right in your situation will be your way of finding success with SEO in 2021. Do it well!

PS: Try to get in touch with experts providing SEO services to help you achieve this right. Connect with ESage Digital for more information on this topic and to find help around it.

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