Your SEO (or search engine optimisation) ranking has always been important, otherwise, digital marketing agencies wouldn’t exist. The trends associated with SEO, however, change all the time.
The holiday period has come and gone, and a new year is always a good time to review your SEO practices — past and present — to see what is working and what isn’t. It’s also the perfect chance to implement some new SEO trends into your marketing strategy.
Below are 7 SEO trends that are as important as ever to to apply to your SEO in 2021.
1. Some of the Old Still Applies
Identifying your audience persona is still key to gaining the most from your content. From there, you can hone in on what this person would expect from your brand and how it communicates.
This is also going to help you plan social media and blog content, and also understand who you can ask for feedback when it’s needed.
2. Keep It Personal
User experience (UX) is becoming more of a staple in 2021, but it can be pretty easy for your brand to stay up-to-date on this trend. How users engage with websites changes over time and what engaged users 2 years ago may not now.
Google employs many metrics that track user engagement and navigation or your site’s UX. To keep things personal, you need to track how users surf your website and then tweak from there if needed.
So, if your bounce rate has become increasingly higher over the last few months, that’s going to affect your overall SEO. Tracking visitors’ navigation allows you to see where and when people are exiting your website so that you can adjust things and move from there.
The biggest factors that you should focus on when making any adjustments are page speed, menu design, mobile responsiveness, and even your URL structure. Think of your website as a map and ensure that it’s guiding users exactly where you want it to go.
3. Focus on User and Search Intent
User and search intent is another thing that has always mattered but is always changing — it also plays directly back into keeping things personal.
So, if you’re writing and creating for your target audience, then it should be easy to figure out what it is they’re looking up, or what they’re interested in. If you don’t know, then doing a bit of research on user and search intent can skyrocket your rankings.
The thing is, Google already tells you what people are most likely searching for. All you have to do notice is pay closer attention to search results. This in itself can give you a leg up in curating your content for the people that are consuming it in the way they want to consume it.
5. Mobile Matters
Optimising for mobile is still one of the most important things you can do for your website. Google rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2019, and it’s only become more important since then.
If your website loads slowly, people are going to click out. If your images take forever to show up, nobody is going to pay attention. If the website is hard to scroll through on a phone, then you aren’t going to get much — if any — traffic at all.
By 2025, more than 73% of internet users are expected to be mobile, and you’re going to have to catch up if you want to keep up.
What content and how you deliver that content on a mobile will likely differ to the desktop version. It is important to understand the difference in how users use mobile to search for products compared to desktop and delivering an experience that engages and converts them.
5. Long-Form Content Is Catching On
Long-form content is actually proving to rank better over content that is under 1,000 words. This is because longer-form content is more likely to have quality backlinks, which contribute greatly to a page’s overall search engine ranking.
This can mean a setback when it comes to production times since it can take a longer time to produce, but quality content that ranks well is worth any amount of time or money that you can afford to put in.
Instead of focusing on the number of articles you write in 2021, focus on the quality of them.
6. Place Video on Your List
Cisco has projected video to surpass every medium of consumption. Not only that, but the quality is expected to be better.
Luckily, a lot of newer smartphones are capable of shooting in 4K. So you don’t need a fancy DSLR or mirrorless camera to get started with producing video content. Video quality isn’t even the most important part of your video — audio is.
While the image quality is important, you’re still more likely to have someone click out of your video for poor audio quality. If you’re wanting to invest in something for your video production, get an external microphone.
Video testimonials, reviews, information about products and services or even about the company all help user engagement and make a website experience more engaging. The longer somebody is engaged the more likely they are to convert.
7. Links are going nowhere
This should probably be number 1, not number 7 on this list but the importance of link building for SEO is as important in 2021 as it was 10 years ago.
Even though link building has been around for what feels like forever it is still mis-understood and mis-used by a lot of clients and even SEO agencies.
Understanding who the competition are, who they have linking to them explains why they are ranking where they are and give us a clear idea how many of what quality links we need to be building to outrank them.
Focus on These SEO Trends in 2021
Now that you’ve learned about the SEO trends being carried into 2021, it’s time to implement them into your website. Placing a special focus on SEO this year has the potential to skyrocket your Google rankings, and leads along with it!
If you’re ready for an SEO makeover, contact me today to have a chat.