In 2021, as before, the focus is on user experience and usability. Websites are “for people”, not “for robots”. No matter how trivial it sounds, but when developing, optimizing, and promoting a website in 2021, first of all, you should think about the user. It is the user who determines whether the site is useful to him or not, it is the user who decides whether you take occupy high positions in search results, it is the user who decides whether to buy/order or leave.
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Quality content
Quality content, like in 2020, is the main ranking factor that we put in the first place. The better the content, the higher the user engagement and the number of returns to the site, as well as the lower the bounce rate. This path is certainly long and very difficult, but in relation to all the efforts made will be rewarded.
Google and other search engines do not like badly written content and will not rank your site highly, despite a lot of organic keywords and phrases you add to your text.
It is not so important how many keywords and key phrases you have and their correlation to the length of the content on the page. The important is the information presented to visitors. Search engines find content that is read to the end and/or shared. As for keywords, their number should be just moderate, without excessive spam. However, do not forget search queries in texts where it is appropriate to use this particular query.
Conversion is more important than traffic
A large number of visits and views are certainly good indicators. However, the effectiveness of a site is not always determined by the number of visitors. While increasing the traffic, it is necessary to remember about the targeted traffic.
Let’s imagine that your site has a million visitors per month. If this was your goal, then congratulations – you are on the right way. But if your goal is to sell a product/service, and only 0.5% of the audience are interested in it, then this already looks like fiasco.
A website with lower but targeted traffic can have much more sales than, for example, any blog with a million people. But this is already luck and an indicator of the quality of the resource.
By analyzing this SEO trend, we recommend that you choose the right website development tactics. If you sell products or provide services, then focus on conversions, not traffic. Based on this, you can build a reliable optimization strategy, choose the right sites for promotion, choose the right keywords and, as a result, sell more goods and services.
E‑A-T: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness
The content that is created for the site should be created by an expert in the niche: a medical article – by a doctor, a page about education – by a teacher, instructions for assembling a PC – by an engineer.
Why is it important to adhere to the EAT principle?
Google is committed to ensuring that users receive relevant, reliable, and expert information upon request. Expert content should be written by professionals who understand the subject, and not by amateur copywriters.
Factors that contribute to an increase in the site’s EAT level:
- completed “about us” page, add all information about your company’s activities, history and mission;
- positive reviews on the site itself, with the ability to leave reviews with an assessment;
- positive reviews and high ratings on third-party resources;
- backlinks from authoritative sources that users trust;
- documents confirming the quality of activities and everything else that will help the user to ensure the quality
- the goods and services received the credibility and reliability of the information they receive.
Local search
During the pandemic, local SEO lost positions somewhat, as people were at home and could buy online and order services without being tied to their location. However, this does not mean that Google has stopped considering local data in search results for user requests. On the contrary, the search network is introducing new data filtering systems and customizing capabilities and restrictions for different types of businesses.
We recommend that you take the time to your Google My Business account and analyze its performance. Don’t forget to track your competitors and work with reviews, especially negative ones. And most importantly, improve the quality of your service.
User experience
User Experience (UX) is how you perceive the product, it does not matter if it is a website, an application, a smartphone or any other physical object that you use. What emotions a particular product evokes – joy or negativity, the satisfaction that the product fully meets your expectations, or it annoys you because it looks different or does not work at all.
In other words, user experience is the impressions and emotions obtained as a result of using a particular product. This factor became especially relevant in SEO after the massive transition of users to mobile devices.
Mobile version of the site
Being mobile-friendly became important for everyone, especially after Google released the Mobile-Friendly Update algorithm.
Being mobile-friendly has become a must for all sites that want to be at the top of not only Google but also other search engines.
This is very important as more and more people of all ages choose to be online from their smartphones. Sites that remain optimized only for the desktop version will lose their traffic. We recommend (if you have not done so already) as soon as possible to check the readiness of the resource by 2021 from the point of view of mobile devices and fix all problems.
Voice search
According to Google statistics, 27% of users use voice search on their mobile devices. Yes, so this is not surprising. Searching for information using your voice is very convenient, as it allows you to find data while driving in the absence of free time or, much more often, the most common laziness. And this trend will only grow.
One of the best ways to get additional traffic and not lose your existing audience is to optimize your content for voice search.
There are several options for how you can implement this:
- use in headings, subheadings, and the beginning of paragraphs queries that include the words “what”, “where”, “when”, “how”, etc
- bring local SEO to the fore;
- improve the speed of the website, both as a whole, and each page separately.
Conclusion
And so, after describing to you the key SEO trends of 2020, as well as the trends in SEO for 2021, we can see that the key trends have remained unchanged:
- make sites that are convenient for people, not for robots;
- make quality content;
- speed up the site;
- increase your expertise and user confidence.
Stick to these simple and seemingly even trivial tips, and your site, your products/services, your company will always be of interest to users, and, consequently, to search engines.