The Face Of SEO In 2021: Trends, Forecast, Tips and Strategy

Welcome to the New Year, where there are expectations for various industries. The SEO industry is not left out. Globally, people are searching for keywords like:

• SEO 2021
• SEO strategy 2021
• SEO tips 2021
• SEO trends 2021

It is not uncommon to find several blogs discussing the latest possible trends, strategy, and tactics in SEO for 2021. Some of them even claim these expositions are the best to create interest in the online audience, probably display their expertise, and what they think. Many SEO experts carry out these SEO techniques and forecast because they believe in and follow the established principles of several SEO leaders.

Right now, SEO experts are still asking the same question: what kind of SEO tactics and strategies in 2021 will be relevant on the SERPs and turn in more revenue?

This brings us to the main discussion for today – SEO forecasts and trends for 2021. Find them below.

Featured snippets

Google’s evolution lately has seen an improvement in users’ search experience using tools like featured snippets. These are typically found right above the first organic result (popularly called ‘Position 0’) that shows up in a search.

In many of the queries typed on Google, these featured snippets will show up mainly in prepositionary searches carrying words such as should, why, is, does, and many others.

Research reveals that for a myriad of questions, featured snippets produced paragraphs, lists, and tables for queries having the preposition ‘how’, 52.2 per cent of queries produces lists.

In 2021, here’s how to move up your content for the featured snippet:

• Present the data in tables
• Write FAQs for the commonest queries
• Within your content, make use of listed and unlisted bullets
• Shorter sentences should be written
• The format of your title tags in a hierarchy
• Where necessary, put up the structured data

Think there can be primary phrases or topics without generated snippets? It won’t be easy. Should you happen to find one, then you’re in luck. You have to compete with the present snippets and from them produce high-value and informative content. Should you need an SEO agency for assistance, do contact us.

BERT and voice search

To give a contextual interpretation of words typed in a query, Google uses BERT.  This neural technique used on the network aids the natural language processing (NLP) to enable Google to draw up a good understanding of search query and produce better results.

Now that BERT has been incorporated into Google’s algorithm for ranking and featured snippet, Google has launched forward into matching search about intent rather than generating strings from search.

About 50 per cent of searches will use voice command rather than keyboard typing in 2021. When this happens, long-tail keywords will be frequently used, and searches will be mostly local.

In 2021, RankBrain and the BERT algorithm update will take over with continuity in voice queries to comprehend the natural language and process the search engine result pages (SERPs) of machine learning.

Content for website visitors, not machines

This may be quite contradictory to the above, but creating decision-driven and appealing content for your readers will have value for your business in 2021. Come to think of it, writing without considering the SEO keywords makes the writing to be centred entirely on your opinion about the topic, but BERT involves the processing of natural language which is why it pays to write as if you’re having a conversation.

Let there be a paradigm shift from writing content that focuses on just one keyword or phrase to a topic-centred conversational content with a holistic approach. Add industry research, surveys, or statistics to generate backlink from journalists and bloggers.

• Content clusters. The structure of your content should be strategically organised in clusters. Hubspot is a typical case of a content clustering website. The goal here is to have various categories of your content on specific topics linked together in a well-structured manner. Using this pattern, other topics around the same content can be connected. With a model like this in place, it becomes easy for search engines to understand the main topic better and rank the page as it should be.
• Length of content. How long should your content be? This question has been and will be asked in 2021. Most studies have proved that lengthy write-ups brings about a better ranking on the SERPs.

It would do a great deal of good when you use all your research content to write on a topic in comprehensive detail. Before realising it, a good content length will be achieved. Make an effort to touch every part of the topic you’re discussing. It is natural for you to use synonyms while writing to make points clearer for search engines and users.

• Video content. For your 2021 SEO strategy, videos should be part of your content generation. Research shows that videos have 50 times more visibility than plain text in the SERPs. Again, queries involving videos make up 62 per cent of global searches on Google. You can build video content by narrating a storyline that poses a question and explains the answer in a manner that’s interesting and focused on your audience.

By using YouTube or your web server, you can host a video. If you host on your website, there’ll be need for a video player to be installed. In addition to video schema markup, there are other parameters to look out for when hosting a video. At DubSEO, we can help you with this. For a better understanding by search engines, include a video transcript in your post.

YouTube SEO is a different ball game as videos can show up in Google Discover, Google Images, video search results, and Google search results. For YouTube optimisation, read up information on other blog posts.

• FAQ pages. SEO for 2021 should include FAQ pages when creating content. In May 2019, Google announced that FAQs would get new search results in Google Search and Assistant. This is specially done for pages where you find a list of commonly asked questions and answers on a specific topic. So, when this aspect is covered in your content, Google improves its result display straight on the Search and Assistant.
• Google passage.  Your page passages will be ranked exclusively with the Google passage update of 2020. Google now views every section of your page. This is why we advise each page section discusses a particular subtopic. Here’s a brief on how to achieve this:
• Include keywords applicable in subtopics
• Make your sentences shorter
• Structure your heading tags according to a hierarchy

Technical SEO and UX

The term technical SEO connotes the optimisation of your website infrastructure devoid of web content and promos such that search engines can crawl over and index them. Every best practice available for technical SEO should be utilised to increase your website ranking and create more revenue in 2021. A brief rundown of what technical SEO constitutes are as follows:

• Setting a chosen domain
• Navigation and site structure
• SSL and HTTPS
• CDN optimisation
• Increase website speed
• URL structure optimisation
• HTML optimisation
• Optimisation for mobile
• Structured data markup
• Canonical URLs
• Breadcrumbs
• Robots.txt
• 404-page optimisation
• Accelerated mobile pages
• Pagination and multilingual websites
• Optimisation of XML sitemaps

Search engines can have a better read of your website with technical SEO. As for UX, it is aimed at your web audience. These two work to make the user experience the best. But the relationship between the UX and technical SEO is very close; the difference.

What makes up user experience (UX) is a faster page loading speed, ease of navigation, and quick response to user actions. To achieve these, Javascript-based framework is most applicable; however, they’re different by getting crawled by search engine spiders. For better performance, we need server-side rendering or pre-rendering services to crawl over pages plus important elements that make up the page.

SEO for mobile and AMP

Since people type queries on Google-compatible mobile phones, optimising for mobile is key. It depends on you either setting up your mobile website via dynamic serving, different URLs, or owning a responsive design. Any of these methods have benefits and drawbacks.

By 2021 and beyond, mobile SEO will dominate the world.

Following the mobile-first index, your mobile version’s web pages will be crawled over by Google, and your position on the SERPs will be dependent on the structure of your mobile pages and content. Here, owning a professional mobile page should be top of mind. Your ranking in mobile and desktop results will be less if your mobile page loading speed is poor. Based on Google’s recommendation, your mobile site should take less than a second to load.

Making mobile SEO an important part of SEO strategy in many companies will see an improvement in 2021. The main focus will be on websites for transactions designed with several functions depending on actions carried out by users.

The following tips can help you optimise for a mobile site in 2021:

• Increase mobile loading speed
• Organise your content which can be easily read on a phone
• For video and animated content, make use of HTML5
• Employ smaller header images
• Configure ‘Viewport Content’ Tag
• Your tab bar should carry social sharing buttons
• Negative spacing should be used between buttons, design components and text

The core web vitals

Google Search Console launched the core web vitals in 2020. This report displays the performance of your pages on the basis of real-life usage data, often known as field data.

3 metrics make up the report: CLS, FID, and LCP.

See the measurements of these metrics below

	Good	Requires a boost	Poor
CLS	<=0.1	<=0.25	>0.25
FID	<=100ms	<=300ms	>300ms
LCP	<=2.5s	<=4s	>4s

For mobile SEO, tablets are classified exclusively by Google and do not include mobiles. According to Google, mobile devices are basically smartphones.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. These are streamlined versions of mobile pages made to have faster-loading speed on mobile devices. The speed of AMP is 4 times faster than non-AMP.

Again, websites that will be used for only content (no transaction), the AMP is relevant. Since AMP has faster-loading speed, its mobile ranking will be very high. The major objective of having AMP is to increase the value of site speed and ease of reading. With lazy loading of images, AMP is developed. This means that images will only load when you scroll. Again, Google server has a fully loaded cache of AMP for quick display of content.

Local SEO

The increase in the number of searches with the phrase ‘near me’, local SEO is becoming highly important. By 2021, the local SEO industry will see a dramatic advancement.

Research has shown that local intent is present in 46 per cent of general queries.

It has become essential for many businesses to take care of local needs. The increase in the demand for local providers has become a window of fresh opportunities for many business brands.

Local SEO is made up of 3 primary elements:

• Proximity. This has to do with the nearness of your business to the online searcher. There is need for a physical store to be listed on Google My Business where your target audience is located. Often, you may not be able to do this; Google selects some businesses following their reputation online. In a case like this, you can outline all the areas your services can reach as much as possible.
• Relevance. Do your product and services match the search queries? On Google My Business listings, a full description of what you’re offering be it service or product should be provided. List each service and product in different categories, adding a brief description while targeting a few long-tail keywords.
• Reputation. What are your customers’ views concerning your services and products? Local SEO will be subject to reviews in 2021. So, a higher number of positive reviews will increase your ranking on the local search result. Responding to reviews as they come is also a good practice. Should it be a positive review, appreciate your clients with ‘thanks’. Should it be a negative review, find out what the problem is and get it sorted. Should they get satisfied with the fixing, request they change their review on your business listing to reflect the solution provided.

It is also important to include the name, address, phone number of your business, local reviews, citations, and syndication on local directories, supporting content, and social business pages.

Branding, backlink, and influencers

The general classification of SEO is On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO. For off-page SEO, the foremost core thing is backlink. There have been questions about the relevance of backlinks in SEO strategy for 2021.

It will absolutely be relevant, but there will be an alteration in defining a quality backlink. This means that in 2021, quality backlinks will be gained from natural backlinking from the publication of high-value content. This adjustment is tending towards the topic-focused strategy required to gain backlinks.

Again, in 2021, branding components and influencers will be very important in your SEO strategy. Lately, influencer marketing has been making waves and has proven to be valuable. Both branding and influencer marketing work together to get promoted on several publications and real people also talk about your brand.

Influencers generate backlinks, while brandings bring about brand mentions. The advantage of brand mention, which is what happens when users mention your business or brand name but do not link back to your site is that your ranking will go high on Google.

Google YMYL and E-A-T

In 2015, Google released a guideline for search quality evaluator, which provided insight into what is considered a great or poor quality website following Google’s opinion.

After uploading their handbook on search quality raters guidelines in 2019, E-A-T and YMYL became important for SEO.

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. It’s a type of content that can jeopardise readers’ happiness, safety, well-being, health, or finances should it be presented with deceit or wrongly. This implies that people’s lives will be impacted should you create a YMYL page with false information.

There isn’t any doubt that this content is highly regarded by Google so, ensure you get professionals to write your YMYL pages. Some of the topics covered in YMYL as defined by Google include Health and safety, Finance, Shopping, News and Current Events, Civic, government and law, etc.

E-A-T is an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This follows Google’s effort to keep searchers safe from low-quality content that could disturb their peace and well-being. Google’s mechanism for evaluating this content will scrutinise both the website E-A-T and content creator’s E-A-T.

Right now, Google wants to evaluate the authoritativeness of an author, particularly on a YMYL page basis. What does this mean for you? There’s need to create an author’s E-A-T together with that of the website. You can get this done by using the boxes for the author’s blog posts and linking them to their social profiles. Author schema markup is another element to be used. This is an organised data markup that informs Google about the author – creating the ease of connecting the author to any other authority signals.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter what business you’re into; SEO is very important. In 2021, there will be a continuous similarity in SEO trends as search engines focus on delivering the right content to search query to satisfy the user. Should this be your line of thought, then you are not wrong.

The ball is in your court. Would you choose to concentrate on local SEO,  technical SEO, or rather manage your content creation process as the first big thing?

Need a London SEO agency for more information? Feel free to speak to us, and together we will make your SEO strategy as functional as possible. It pays to have a site, whether mobile or regular that works very professionally.