Top SEO Trends In 2021
Search engine optimisation (SEO) has been evolving with each passing year. The global pandemic has highly affected every industry, including the internet. SEO has witnessed great changes over the past few years. In this article, we will explore the expected SEO trends in 2021.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been playing a vital role in SEO for a while now, and it will have the same importance in 2021 as well. For example, the RankBrain algorithm, which was released a few years ago by Google, has immense importance when it comes to Google’s ranking factors for search engine results pages (SERPs) results.
Greg Corrado, the one who developed the RankBrain algorithm indicated that it will improve with time. This improvement with time will keep AI as a top SEO trend to follow for 2021.
SEO experts suggest working on factors like click-through rate, backlinks, readability, and on-page SEO to optimise your website as per this algorithm.
Voice Search
With the innovations like Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa, voice search technology has got a whole new dimension. People are preferring voice search options over traditional methods.
Voice search optimisation will be a top trend for SEO in 2021. The expert will have to work more on voice search keywords. It will include the Identification of longer phrases that people use in everyday conversation. Voice searches perform better with longer and more natural-sounding phrasing. That's why people usually speak more words while voice search as compared to writing fewer words in traditional search.
Mobile-Friendliness
By 2025, nearly 73% of the total internet users will access the internet via mobile devices. Keeping this in mind, Google rolled out mobile-first indexing, which means that the search engine looks primarily at the mobile version of a website rather than the desktop version. This shows how much the Mobile-Friendliness will be impactful for the year 2021 and so on.
You have to make the UI of your website more responsive to ensure that Google can crawl your URLs. For this purpose, make sure you don’t have a “disallow directive” in place. Alongside this, you also need to use the same meta robots tags on the desktop and mobile sites as well.
Content according to Google EAT Principle
Content quality has its critical value for ranking success as per Google. But what does “quality” mean to Google? Well, it's pretty straight forward, just refers to the EAT principle: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These factors help in determining the content quality of any web page.
There are a couple of ways to ensure quality content. First, you need to understand what type of content and content format your users want. Second, create content that fits the format that your users prefer, with the help of search intended research. Apart from this, always use the appropriate top-level domain according to your niche.
Long-Form Content for Improved SERPs
According to various reports, long write-ups of 3,000-plus words get three times more traffic and 3.5 times more backlinks than articles of an average word count of 901 to 1,200 words. These staggering figures compel the website owners to put more long-form content to achieve higher search rankings. However, as discussed in the previous point, quality content is equally important. Breaking your content into multiple precise headings and subheadings can help you out in this regard.
You can use a combination that suits you best for your SEO needs.
