Are you willing to learn the crucial trends to mark your presence online? Just go through this resolute dossier to find the top SEO trends in 2021.
30-second Summary:
- Technology is getting advanced at a rapid pace and so do the progress in the SEO sector. This means you have to be prepared for 2021.
- Google has already announced 2 major algorithm updates in 2021.
- You must have seen some SEO trends in the year 2020. Yes, we are talking about UX SEO and feature snippets. They are going to become even more prominent in the upcoming year.
There was a time when advertising and communication were limited to traditional methods but with the internet, things have changed a lot. These days the internet is not only an essential communication tool but a top marketing platform. Online advertising has crossed a mark of 400 billion dollars a year. This is even more than the TV ad industry.
Moreover, the global pandemic further fueled it and forced many companies to go online. So you can imagine what we can expect from SEO in the year 2021? What are the trends that are going to rule the market in 2021? What are the major changes that can impact SEO?
Well, let us discuss this all in detail.
Direct Changes to Search Engine: When it comes to SEO, it is dependent on the search engines. Here Google is the primary search engine. This means any change to Google’s algorithm or priorities will have a direct impact on SEO in 2021. This means if the industry goes slightly off the mark, there will be a billion-dollar loss. So it becomes crucial to be aware of the changes.
- Page Experience [May 2021]: Page experience is one of the prominent ranking factors on Google. The page experience is all about the feelings of visitors that they experience after visiting your web page. It is determined on the basis of a multitude of attributes from mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS, and many other things.
Although these are already ranking factors, they are more institutionalized. They work within the page experience framework.
Moreover, Google is further adding Core Web Vitals as a part of the page experience. They are going to determine the quality of the user experience. They are going to measure the loading speed, interactivity, visual stability, and much more.
Now you must be wondering what this visual stability is all about. Well, visual stability is about shifting and jumping of the layout. This is adopted by Google to provide high-quality and more engaging content. This means a website with a high page experience score is going to load faster, will be more attractive, stable, mobile-friendly, and more secure. It means it will ultimately provide users with the rich experience that they are looking for.
Grab a Place in Top Stories without AMP:
You must have seen non-AMP content struggling to find a place in the top stories features for mobile phones. Well, this new page experience ranking framework is going to make even non-AMP content appear in the top stories feature.
It is the prominent way that helps websites to drive traffic to their content from mobile. It means this factor is going to disrupt the overall rankings of a lot of websites on smartphones. This means the month of May is going to be the month of SEO specialists.
So, you are advised to remain ready for the dramatic change that is going to influence your business a lot. This is so because it is not possible to measure its real impact in advance, you can only go with calculations to get an idea.
- Mobile-First Indexing [March 2021]:
Mobile-first Indexing may seem new to you but it is not. Google has been using it for a long time. Mobile-first indexing is all about indexing the mobile version of the website initially in Google Databases instead of the desktop version. This is going to accurately gauge the amount of content on mobile sites and their relevance and that too before coming up with the results on the screen.
This was basically introduced to counter serious trouble. The thing was, a large number of people were using their smartphones to search the stuff. They were browsing the net a lot. Now when it comes to the mobile version and the desktop version, they don’t match up in the content. This is where the problem arises as Google used to index only one version and this version is the Desktop version.
Thus it causes a mismatch between the rankings on the mobile and the content that is available on these pages. Now as the usage of smartphones was increasing at an alarming rate. To counter this problem Google comes up with Mobile-first indexing.
It was a massive step for Google to switch from entirely desktop-first indexing to mobile-first indexing. So this change couldn’t be made overnight. This is the reason why Google takes its time to implement this change. It all begins with permitting webmasters to change their desktop indexing to mobile indexing. Then mobile-first was made the default option for crawling new websites.
If we talk about the final and latest updates, we are going to see it in the month of March 2021. This will be the time when Google will begin the process of mobile-first indexing as a default option for all websites. This means the indexing of your website and the content that is considered good right now is probable to change in the month of March.
It is hard to estimate to what extent it is going to bring that change. But yes you can expect some instability.
As we know Google is known for taking matters like this, seriously. This is why some basic guidelines are published in advance. This is to ensure that the transaction to mobile-first indexing will go on smoothly.
- You should make sure that your website’s content is visible to Google crawlers and bots.
- Do not forget to fill out the relevant meta tags on both desktop and mobile.
The version of landing Pages:
- Enable lazy loading. This will ensure that your mobile website will load rapidly.
- Avoid blocking any relevant mobile-specific URLs in the robots.txt file.
- You should at least have identical primary content on both versions. Although it is difficult to have identical content, this is going to help you a lot.
- Do not forget to check the alt tag of both image and video embeds.
SEO Trends:
It is good to have wider SEO trends in 2021. This is so because specific updates to the algorithm are different things. But you must have some prior information about some wider trends. These trends should be in the sector that is going to make a change in how actually we engage with SEO how Search Engine Optimization is important for business websites. Some of the trends that we are talking about are already present. The only difference is, they are accelerating now. There are even some that are new.
- Voice Search: Voice search is something that has revolutionized the way searches were made earlier. It is becoming more and more prominent. Haven’t you heard of Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and so on? You must be using them. Isn’t it?
If we go with the data, voice search revenue is going to rise up to 40 billion dollars by 2022. This means traditional SEO trends in 2021 can expect huge challenges in the upcoming months. But you can also use it in your favor. All you need to do is to use a different approach to capitalize on this emerging SEO arena. This is so because in voice searches, earning that first position is more crucial as compared to the traditional text searches.
- Featured Snippets and Microdata: Google is going to bring more featured snippets. to its homepage. It doesn’t matter whether it’s about recipes or news or tutorial, you are going to get all. The basic purpose of these snippets is to aid in searching. This means you are going to get faster search results. This will also help in keeping traffic on Google’s website.
This also provides websites with an opportunity to be featured. This means more traffic to the website.
We are not saying that being featured means you are going to get exponential growth in the traffic. But as data from Ahrefs shows that there is the significant importance of the same. If we talk about the averages, then being featured means you are going to get around 8.6% CTR. On the other hand, this CTR rises to 19.6% of the traffic for top natural results.
This figure is extremely impressive. It shows the power of the featured snippet that steals a substantial amount of clicks and that too from the top position. But one thing that you are required to take care of is, to monitor your ranking and readjust your snippet. It also includes the process of optimization for more clicks.
- Non-textual content: You must have seen the internet saturated with blogs and landing pages. This is making it difficult to rank for noteworthy keywords with decent traffic. This is the reason why SEO agencies from around the world are trying to expand their reach. They are diversifying the content that they are producing and publishing.
On the other hand, when it comes to engagement and rankings, the role of infographics comes into play. But the promising frontier that is going to pay in 2021 seems to be Videos. It doesn’t matter whether they are uploaded on YouTube or are embedded in your website. You are going to get more traffic from YouTube views that are less saturated than Google’s traditional search engine.
Moreover, YouTube generates more than $15 billion for Google each year. So it is that platform which you can’t ignore.
There are also some video snippets on SERPs that you can only rank for through the video content. Here you need to know that these video snippets are prominent on search queries that begin with “how-to”, in the case of tutorials and other educational content.
- UX SEO:
This is the era where SEO is an intricate subject. It is an amalgamation of expertise from different fields. It doesn’t matter whether it’s marketing, software engineering, creative writing, and so on. All are equally important to get the desired results. But the recent trend that is gaining significant attention is the UX SEO framework.
UX SEO is all about optimization of the user experience of a website that is basically done to increase engagement and conversion rate. This thing matters a lot because it is not only about attracting regular visitors but their engagement is the factor that is going to drive sales. When it comes to UX SEO, it is going to provide you with the framework that will aid you in achieving all this.
Conclusion:
You must know that Google made more than 3600 changes to its algorithms on a yearly basis. Moreover, this volatile sector is accompanied by new trends that only a few were able to predict. It means you need to be with the latest updates on a continuous basis. Reading articles on the trends alone is not going to pay. This is going to be a tough task to win the market competition. You must know what experts are telling you about the upcoming trends. You must have pre-planning to counter the change if it takes place in the future. This is going to help you a lot with SEO strategies that will bring the desired results.
