SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is considered to be one of the most efficacious ways of bringing customers to your online website. SEO is one such factor that has been evolving constantly. Due to this, it becomes difficult to always be on top. But, if you’re able to work according to the latest SEO trends, then it will be worth all your efforts.
Google is known for making almost a hundred changes to its search algorithms every year. Any of these changes could have an impact on your search ranking. With new business coming up every day, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the audience’s attention.
Being in the topmost position of the latest SEO trends will help you meet the specific requirements that search needs to rank a particular website.
To make your business stay ahead of the competition, you also need to have an SEO strategy. The term “SEO strategy” or “search engine optimization strategy” refers to the entire process of planning, outlining, and implementing everything to enhance your search engine rankings. In simple words, It is the strategy you opt for when you want to have more organic traffic for your website.
Latest SEO Trends:
1. High-Quality Content
Several SEO trends might come and go, but one thing that will always remain the same is “content is king.” Generally, this phrase is mostly used by marketers, but there are hardly a few of them who know what it means. One thing that must be paid attention to is “EAT”—expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It matters a lot in business that fall under the category of “your money, your life” (YMYL).
According to some experts, the May 2020 Core Update from Google was closely related to the EAT update. Here, Google wanted to express that they bothered a lot more about the quality of content rather than the authority of a given domain.
How To Do It?
With so much emphasis on producing high-quality content, it is important to create a strong content marketing strategy. Here are some points to work on:
Perform Search Intent Research
When you’re planning your content, remember that search intent must be the central point of discussion. Consider looking at search terms that bring audiences to your website. Try to understand what your audiences are looking for. Now, answering those questions is an amazing way to help your audience with what they’re looking for.
Make Buyer Personas
As a business owner, you must understand your target buyer personas. With this, we mean their needs, wants, objections, and pain points. Once you properly understand them, you’ll be able to create separate content for each of them.
Recruit solid Copy and Content Writer
Before creating your content, understand the type of format your audiences like to consume. In recent times, videos have become utterly popular among everyone. But, it is also important to know the kind of videos your target audience might be looking for. There are times when they are looking for a particular case study or white papers. So, create the type of content your audience likes to consume.
Quantity and keyword density won’t work anymore
With the introduction of the new Google Search algorithm, people know that they just do not want a cut-rate content writer. So, you must hire experienced content writers that work on topics deeply (almost 2500+ words), work according to your style & tone, and understand your marketing funnel and personas. While hiring writers, look for the ones with specialization in writing for your vertical or business space.
2. User Experience
User experience is all about the users, or in simple words – People. It is essential to improve the experience for people once they reach your website or pages – UX101. As a result, Good UX is proved to have an excellent impact on the search engine rankings by taking them a bit higher. There are times when you can reach an SEO company to take your game a notch higher than your competitors.
According to the recent May 2020 Google Webmaster Central Blog post, Google Search will now point a substantial handful of UX signals into its rankings,along with Google’s new Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are nothing more than a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify important features of user experience. They get the quantifiable results but with measuring dimensions of web usability like interactivity, load time, and the stability of content as it loads.
With this latest update, Google is trying to indicate that it’s great emphasis would be on “delightful” web experiences for people. These delightful things consist of easy to use, fast loading speed, and accessibility with all devices and platforms.
How To Do It?
Suppose you get poor grades in any of the “user-centered metrics”, then it might not only diminish your UX for your website’s audiences, but also affect your search rankings. To avoid such situation, follow these things:
Avoid having any type of pop-ups on the screen
Every marketer loves lead generation, building lists, and expanding their reach. So, they love to have pop-ups on the screen. But, talking about audiences, on the other hand, they hate to see even one such pop-up. Now, Google has updated its algorithm concerning this.
Work Faster
Keep everything as fast as possible. It should be so fast that users are not able to notice it.
Mobile-Friendly over all devices and Platforms
We are talking about responsiveness on tablets, smartphones, laptops, and desktops. It also comprises the Android, iOS, and Windows operating systems.
3. Mobile SEO
There is nothing to be surprised about seeing mobile SEO again on the SEO trends list in 2021. It is so because each passing day, mobile phones are becoming a more and more important part of our lives.
Due to this increased usage, you must understand the type of experience your users are getting while accessing your content and also finding the answers on their respective mobile devices.
You must work on creating a mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized website. It’s good to be on your toes rather than keeping these things for later.
How To Do It?
First of all, create a website that is mobile-first and then try to make them suitable for desktop. In such cases, these types of websites shouldn’t be optimized for pace after launch.
The SEO always must be looking at the real mobile search outcomes for knowing where they’re heading to, what kind of traffic they are expecting, and last but not least, how much optimization they’ll need to truly attain success at impacting the underside line.
4. Structured Data
Structured data is another SEO trend meant to help Google in understanding the contents of a particular page. The vocabulary used by the huge search engine is called Schema.org. It is possible to change your content into codes so that they can be easily processed. Now, search engines read these codes and use it for displaying results in a peculiar and much richer way. It is quite easier to put this piece of code on your website.
This data can help your website to become a featured snippet. Being on featured snippets will help your website to get more and more attention. Now this could be a top result at position zero, an entry in the answers section like a little “Q&A menu” or how-to form on the SERP, and the Knowledge Panel on the upper right of a results page.
Recently, a featured snippet at position zero is becoming a massive issue for content structures by webmasters. Let’s take a look at one question – “How to get a featured snippet?” Now, this is a problem that you can solve on your own. All you have to do is write high-quality content, add valuable keywords, and structure your data with Schema and Open Graph code.
This answer will be the top-most answer for a specific query. For such answers, Wikipedia is considered to be the best option available. It is quite tough to win in such cases, but still, you must at least try.
How To Do It?
Foremost, work on the layout of your content. With this, we don’t want you to make any changes in your writing style, all you have to do is add some little details that will make it easier to work with audiences and Google.
For example, Initiate your blogs/ articles with the definition of terms you’ll be using in the article or the title itself. There are higher chances of Google considering this content as the most relevant short answers to users’ queries.
Secondly, Apply Schema Markup. If you wish to be noticed on SERPs, then you must use Schema markup. It is one of the best ways to get noticed. Let me explain, marked up FAQ pages have higher chances of appearing in the SERPs in the form of rich results. You can pick from various types of Schema code to make your page’s layout work for you.
5. Link Building
No matter what year it is, one top SEO trends that will always rule is none other than link building. This technique will always help you crack the first page. Remember, if you want to build quality links, then you must possess quality content.
Majorly, links are used for things as follows:
- Uncovering the new web pages.
- Ascertaining how well a page should rank on the SERPs
The search engine crawlers reach each page with the link building process. Post this, they pull out all the information from these web pages and add them to the indexes. Taking help of various algorithms, Google decides as if these pages have complete information and do they have the quality to be ranked for relevant keywords.
Link Building can be done in two ways as follows:
- Internal Link Building
- External Link Building
Internal Link Building
Internal link building is quite fast and free when compared to the external link building. With this, one can say that internal link building is an underdog method of improving the pages rankings. One of the best parts is that you have the opportunity to control everything.
External Link Building
When you want another website to link to your website, then you use external link building. When compared to internal link building, external link building is quite time-consuming and requires a lot of patience. Remember, there are no shortcuts to scoring external website links for your page.
How To Do Link Building?
- Work towards creating unique and high-quality content. Amazing content will always attract external links naturally.
- Try reaching out to various influencers in your story for mention and reviews of product and services.
- You can also get external links from people you know or work with. But no matter what, there must be relevancy there.
- Try Guest blogging, it is one of the oldest methods of link building. Here, you’ll have to write a blog/ an article for another website in your niche and publish it. You will link yourself from that article.
6. Technical SEO
After knowing the SEO basics, people always avoid the technical aspects of a website. Well, these things may look small and unimportant, but remember these small points might harm the health of your website. So, try to give your website a fresh look with UI/UX. While designing your website, always think upon the structure of your website.
With these passing years, Search engines have developed a lot for providing high-quality content to the audiences. They also give importance to your website, like is it UI/UX friendly or not.
If you’re well versed with SEO, then you might know that today it has shifted from just ranking content for a few queries. It is utterly important for search engines to provide searchers with a user-friendly page.
While talking about technical SEO and UX, you must never forget about website speed and page speed. Google has been focusing a lot on site speed due to the new chrome “slow warning badges”, and the pace stories in Google Search Console.
How To Do Technical SEO?
Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly
Now, Google has initiated the process of mobile-first indexing. It is utterly essential to make your website mobile-friendly with an lightning fast loading speed.
Keep a Check on Security
Google has made it compulsory for every website to have a SSL certificate for attracting higher organic search rankings on SERPs.
Don’t forget to optimize your Content
No matter how amazing your content is, but it will not get enough credit. To gain value for your content, you’ll have to optimize the page on various keywords and attract higher rankings. While you’re optimizing your content, don’t forget title tags, focused keywords, and Meta descriptions.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is essential for letting Google’s crawlers and bots look around various divisions of your website. These divisions refer to the pages to be indexed and the ones not to be indexed.
7. Google My Business Is Essential for Local SEO
Talking about location-based search, it is all about an individual living in New York searching for “Hair Salon.” At this point in time, they are looking for limited results that are in the near geographic area. The search experience might have felt simple to audiences, but actually, there goes a lot of data, content, and optimization on the search engine side.
Local search is loved by everyone, more than a billion people make use of Google Maps every month. Not only that Almost 5 million applications and websites use Google Maps Platform core products every week.
Due to this reason, Google keeps introducing new features for businesses. These features consist of new service posts,product options, and direct-to-customer messaging. Their main motto is to make it easier for people to search for things like Hours, Numbers, Company Website, Menus, Services, and Review & Ratings. All of this information can be found in a single app which is Google My Business listing.
How to optimize Google My Business?
Foremost, you must sign up, claim your business, and then lastly verify it with the help of Google My Business service. This process might take some weeks until you get the final verification through the mail.
Now that your location is established and also verified, you can take a tour of your Google My Business Listing. Last but not least, you can optimize every feature of the listing. Luckily, Google has made this process quite instinctive and uncomplicated. Once you log in, you’ll get an alert message to your profile “completeness.” Besides this, have a proper plan to complete any outstanding information that is still pending like hours, phone number, location, etc.
Suppose, you have a physical location for your business, then you must add local search to your digital marketing strategy. Not only that, but you must ensure that your Google My Business listing is complete and has all the information and is being updated regularly. To help you with this listing, you can take help of a Local SEO company. They know the tips and tricks better than you.
Once you have completed your listing, it is the time to be active by taking advantage of new features of this platform. You can do several things like:
- Share various regular business posts for announcements of new events, products.
- Give answers of FAQs regarding your products or services.
- Using Google My Business website builder for making a site.
- Adding weekly photos that are relevant to your customer base and business. All of3 these photos could be of your brand new menu items or location.
8. Voice Search
With the innovation of artificial intelligence and chatbots in the main sphere, voice search has now become the latest SEO trend. There are some real life examples like Google assistant, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Cortana.
With this technology, user experience has seen new dawn. With the increase in smartphone users, voice searches have seen an unimaginable growth in the past years. According to research, the number of households owning smart speakers will be 55% by 2022.
How To Do It?
- All you have to do is On your Android phone or tablet and Open the Google app.
- At the bottom, tap more settings, Voice.
- Under “Hey Google,” tap Voice Match, Now Turn on Hey Google.
- Talking about optimization, foremost contemplate your keywords and pick out the long-term phrases used by the audiences in real life.
- Make use of natural language in your content and put in brief answers there. Remember, your main aim is to satisfy your audience’s voice search query.
- Initiate usage of long-tail keywords and also practice writing long-form content. Majority of voice search queries are found to be longer than typed ones.
- If you wish to rank on “near me” searches, then you must start adding correct addresses or locations to your local listings along with the correct structured data.
9. Zero-click Search Results
Generally, people make use of search engines to find local products and services. Suppose, they might be looking for a local salon. Due to this reason, Local SEO is utterly important and by each passing day, it’s also developing. This development is taking place in parts due to the increase of zero-click searches results.
The term zero-click search refers to a situation where the audience’s queries are answered with the SERP itself. Due to this, users don’t click on any of the following ranking results. One of the major reasons behind the rise of zero-click search results is the increase of featured snippets.
For example, search for “coronavirus” and look at the SERP. You’ll get a handful of information on the left side like symptoms, statistics, and testing. Besides this, you’ll also get the latest local and national news relating to the same. With this, it’s quite clear that Google is set on to provide authoritative information around a sensitive and serious topic.
What you should do about zero-click search results?
Currently, Google is trying its best to put search traffic on various Google entities like Google Search, Google My Business, and YouTube. One of the best examples is the YouTube video carousel. The Google algorithm is favouring YouTube videos for this area on SERP, but as and when users click on it, they go to other Google assets. (YouTube)
Another good news is that you can now optimize and also rank your content for both zero-click search results and related Google channels. You must work towards creating well-optimized videos. Next, keep updating the Google My Business listing (All locations). Look out for your new structured data markup, which Google releases regularly.
Always remember, while you’re ranking for zero-click search results, it will help your SEO, the overall performance, experience, and its design. Contemplate about optimizing your website and content for keywords that bring you qualified traffic and conversions.
10. Video Optimization
If you search Google for any query, the first thing you’ll see right away on the SERP is a video carousel. It was back in 2018 when Google introduced video carousels to SERPs. Post that, the only things that have been gaining attraction are videos. Haven’t all of us believed the fact of YouTube being the second largest search engine in the world. YouTube is also an asset of Google.
If you’re still confused about videos being one of the SEO trends in the upcoming years, here are some recent statistics.
- Almost 85% of business owners use video as one of their marketing tools.
- 92% of marketers regard video an important part of their marketing strategy
- Videos are capable of convincing a handful of 84% of people to buy something.
- After getting a product or service, 96% of people have watched an explainer video about the same.
These statistics make it quite clear that there is an utterly high demand for video content. In recent years, people find it better to watch a quick video rather than reading a long blog or article. One of the best things about video, they are quick, mobile-friendly, and helpful in multi-tasking.
Now, the Google algorithm has also started evolving accordingly. The place where people get to engage with videos is on – Search engines.
How to do Video Optimization?
With such an increase in the popularity of videos, there comes another aspect of SEO in 2021. This shift in demand for videos by both search engines and people means that it’s time for you to start planning and creating video content and then optimize these videos for better views, visibility,and website traffic.
Here we bring you some steps for video optimization:
Have a specific goal in your mind
Before designing your video, always think about the type of emotion you would like to evoke, know your targeted personas, the action you await from your audiences once they see it.
Prepare a proper Call To Action
To make your leads follow, have a proper Call To Action.
An amazing CTA must have:
- A direct prompt from the video’s host
- A series of YouTube notations that points towards different resources
- Provide a short link at the end of video directing viewers to a landing page
Provide important information for SEO
SEO can be utterly tricky sometimes due to the frequent algorithm updates from Google. It will become easier to make videos more search-friendly by focusing on these three things:
Transcripts, Keywords and Description, Multi-platform video promotion.
Conclusion
With the list above, you might have understood the complexities of SEO. The times when just optimizing keywords and meta titles would work, have gone. Today, you’ll have to work according to the latest SEO trends. These trends consist of voice control and video SEO.
Even the metrics have been changing constantly, due to which it is becoming utterly impossible to hold a topmost place in the rankings.
