Introduction
Pages that rank well on the Google SERPs rankings can provide enormous organic reach to your website, thereby attracting potential customers for your business. For achieving these leads, it is essential to perform SEO on your website as per the search engine’s algorithm ranking criteria.
Then again, this criterion is not permanent. Google tends to change it from time to time to make the user experience more straightforward and efficient. Besides ensuring that your content fits the algorithm, you also need to provide value to your visitors. For all this, you must stay up-to-date with the prevalent and upcoming SEO trends.
Irrespective of whether you own a million-dollar business or a small startup, SEO is vital for your business’s website. With this in mind, we present you with the top eight trending SEO techniques to look out for in 2021.
1. Optimize Your Content for Voice Search
Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google assistant are an excellent example of how voice search technology improves our lives. Over the years, this technology is becoming increasingly popular. If you believe the report, by the end of 2022, 55% of households will own a smart speaker.
Since people use this to search their queries, it is crucial to optimize your content for voice search. You can do this by considering the keywords you use. Make sure that they are long-tail and sound natural. For example, a person may search “kratom online?” but they may type – “best kratom products 2021.”
2. Semantically Related Keywords Are Important Too
The days when SEO professionals only focused on primary keywords are far gone. Secondary keywords that form the basis of semantic search and intent optimization are just as important. So, instead of using a string of words, make sure your content fulfills a user’s search intent. Create content that focuses on answering your user’s queries rather than focusing solely on keywords.
3. Make Sure Your Content Meets the Google EAT Principle
Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness – Ensure that your content has all to rank higher in the searches. The EAT factors will determine if your page has useful and quality content for the visitors. For this, it must have links to reputable sites. These may be the ones with “.edu” and “.gov” URLs. Further, to know the content your visitors will value, you need to have a clear picture of your business’s buyer persona.
4. Local Search Listings Should Be A Part of Your SEO Strategy
When planning an SEO strategy for your business, considering your global audience is a wise choice. However, local SEO is essential too. It will help those people discover you who are looking for neighborhood services. For this, start with creating a “Google My Business” page. Also, ensure to have a strong backlink profile for it.
5. An Effective SEO Strategy Needs You to Create Video Content
If you are not creating video content for your business, you may be doing it all wrong. With over a billion people using YouTube, now is the right time to make a small video to promote your products. If you go by the Cisco Annual Internet Report, a video can surpass all other content forms. For this, you must also know how to optimize it. Start with optimizing your channel name and its description. Also, make sure to add keywords to it.
6. Add Value to Your Website with Long-Form Content
Did you know long reads get far more traffic and shares than the short ones? Therefore, start focusing on long-form content, and if you do it the right way, you are sure to achieve higher search rankings. Ensure that this content should have useful and shareable information. Also, it must keep your users engaged.
7. Do Not Forget Image Optimization to Rank in Google Searches
You may know that images can connect your potential clients to your products. If you do not optimize these, your website may take more time to load, leading the users to abandon it. It can drastically increase your bounce rate and affect the conversions. Therefore, always make it a point to customize the file name to be relevant to your content. Also, do not forget to use alt tags that will help crawlers to classify these images.
8. Artificial Intelligence Plays A Significant Role in SEO
As per experts, Google’s AI algorithm – RankBrain, has a significant impact on search engine results page (SERPs) results. It is further improving with time and making AI a top SEO trend to watch out for. While there are no set rules to optimize your SEO for RankBrain, factors like time spent on the page and click-through rate are essential.
Conclusion
As Google’s algorithm criteria change frequently, SEO is only getting more complicated. The above list of the SEO trends you need to look out for only confirms it. With these, you have to rise over merely optimizing keywords and meta titles. Only then you can stay on top of your place in the rankings. Follow these latest trends, keep an eye out for the new ones, get the right SEO tools, and you are sure to plan your SEO strategy smartly.
