We all know that SEO heavily relies on technical components for driving site ranking. Also, there are a variety of new tools, metrics, and emerging technologies coming up every single day, and all of this can affect SEO algorithms to a great extent. The Google search engine algorithms are evolving all the time, and hence, it’s always interesting to experiment with newer SEO technicalities with Google.
However, the main question is, how Google’s algorithm ranks the search results? Is there any definite rule? Every year, Google comes up with new plans to place relevant content on the search results which will be helpful to the users. It does so by being really brutal as well, particularly with its SERP and BERT. Writing a content piece by stuffing it with keywords to rank higher on the search engines is no more viable. So, how can one jumpstart an online business in 2021 and rank at top of the search engines?
Don’t worry! By the end of this article, you will be able to get a clear picture of the latest SEO trends in 2021.
1) Original Content
Google always values content that is authentic and unique. If you do not have original content, no matter how well you implement SEO trends, you will find it very difficult to rank at the top of the search engines. It might sound cliché, but it’s true that content is still the king, and Google will always prefer a real piece rather than a copy. So, you must use proper titles, the right kind of keywords, subheads, and a conclusion. Try not to stuff your content with keywords. Also, make sure that you do not write an essay every single time. Keep your content short, crisp, and descriptive.
2) Strategic Use of Schema and Structured Data
Many SEO experts rely on schema and structured data frameworks for organizing everything and making sure that the crawlers are able to read, index, and serve the content of the websites to the specified searchers. However, while implementing the same, the experts should be able to achieve a few specific goals. The SEO experts are divided into two parts though. One believes in marking up all the things, and the rest believes that schema is not that important. The fact is, SEO in 2021 will need proper attribution of schema and structured data for generating rich results.
2) Introducing AI
As per the VP of Search at Google, around 15% of the search queries received on Google are totally unique. So, identifying the user persona gets difficult for Google, often. However, BERT and RankBrain have helped Google evolve further by helping it gain user perspectives better. RankBrain makes use of machine learning and hence, it better understands the user’s perspective by identifying patterns and analyzing data. Apart from this, BERT helps Google to understand the context behind a user’s search query. So, when you have BERT and RankBrain with Google now, you no more need to stuff your content with unnecessary keywords. Instead, Google will look at your content, recognize its uniqueness and rank it based on your user’s necessity.
3) Prioritizing Analytics & Reporting
We all know that the success of SEO is gradual and incremental, which usually takes at least 6 months to a year before you can see any results. But what if something goes wrong the mid-way? So, in order to mitigate the issues better, you will need to steer clear of all vanity metrics and find out a clear plan of action that can help you with improved traffic, rankings and sale. And how to do that? You will have to outline a few metrics and goals from the very beginning of every campaign and it will help you to guide your efforts toward an easier framework for chalking out a report about everything that’s happening on the way. So, you need to pay attention to analytics as well.
4) Going Mobile-Friendly
Did you know, according to several reports, around 87% of smartphone users carry out internet searches at least once a day? So, you need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. And in order to ensure that your brand is ranking higher on Google through mobile searches, you need to use identical meta tags on both desktop and mobile sites. And if you are still not sure, you can carry out a free mobile-friendly test by Google where you can assess how good your website is on a mobile and then get a mobile usability report with Google Search Console.
Wrapping it Up,
Although conventional SEO techniques like backlinking and keyword usage are still useful, depending solely on these won’t do any good to your website’s chance of ranking higher on the search engines. SEO techniques should evolve the same way as Google’s algorithms and hence, every business owner on the web, today, should be able to know the ways of using the proper SEO strategies for a better ROI.