Looking at next year’s top SEO trends, we find that the quality of content, local SEO practices, User Experience (UX), and semantic search are vital when developing your overall SEO strategy.
We also remark on the importance of getting ready for Google’s new page experience update and the role of optimising your mobile web version. Here are the SEO trends that you should look out for in 2021.
In 2021, Google will continue to favour high-quality content for ranking purposes. Due to this, we will find Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) as key factors for optimising your website’s ranking within the SERPs. E-A-T is used for those business sectors that are under the “your money, your life” category (YMYL).
For example, those niches would be health care and finance, as they have the power to provide accurate and reliable information to the public.
In terms of content quality creation, there are few guidelines that you can follow to ensure that your content is rich:
In terms of content quality creation, there are few guidelines that you can follow to ensure that your content is rich:
Performing local SEO practices will ensure that your business is easy to find by users, especially when performing local searches. For example, you might have a local shop and you want to find competitors around you. Some of them will appear in a box with top listings, and the organic search results will display a list with other businesses. To make the most of search engines, a golden tip here will be to add the ‘local pack’ to your business.
With local search being part of your digital marketing strategy, you will want to make sure that you are offering a detailed listing for your business. Thus, opening a Google My Business account will allow your users to have a better search experience. Some tips to make the most of your local listing:
Make the most of your GMB listing. Do not let any relevant information from your company behind: services, opening hours, address, company website, phone numbers, etc
Start building local citations. Local citations are any mention of your business’s details, such as name, phone number, and address. Those will help people discover your business online, and they are useful to rank higher for local search queries. Make sure that you build local citations on places
Promote reviews from your local customers. This is an excellent way to promote your site and make it locally popular. Work on the relationship with your customers and answer their reviews. Add the link to your site and remind them to express their feelings.
Perform local keyword research. By doing this you will find keywords and queries that customers are utilising to find services and businesses locally. Use tools such as ahrefs to discover monthly search volumes, competitors, and those long-tail keywords that are relevant for your brand.
Optimise for voice search. To do this, review your keywords and identify longer phrases that people normally use in a day-to-day conversation. Voice searches function better with those phrases that we naturally utilise.
There’s a lot to keep in mind when looking for the best way to optimise your website in 2021. The ever-changing trends require not only regular updates with high quality content but also optimising existing content and pages. Staying on top of the local SEO practices is as important as ever. With Google’s announcement to move to mobile-first indexing from March 2021, it is crucial for all businesses to optimise and render their content accordingly to achieve best results.