If you are an SEO expert, you know that it’s not something you learn once. The best SEO techniques are always changing, and what was successful in the SEO world this year will more than likely not be successful in the coming years. SEO experts have weighed in on what they think will be the top SEO trends in 2021. As experts in their field, you may want to take their advice and give these tactics a try.

Similar to the rise in mobile, voice search will keep on expanding every year. Even though voice search is still another kid on the piece in the search engine space, it has, as of now, sufficiently increased energy. Thanks to a great extent, more digital assistants are entering the business sector. Voice look and digital assistants are generally new, so expect bunches of further improvements and changes to the business sector, and consumer request evolves. It radically changes the search scene. Desktop quests will cover top to bottom content, which requests a lengthier reaction. Voice search will be founded on sharp reactions for individuals moving. Basically, this implies that neighborhood SEO / search engine optimization will be progressively imperative to your crusade, keeping in mind the end goal of taking advantage of more particular search demands. Voice search is arguably the largest change to how SEO practitioners approach their strategies in several years. Even more so than standard web search, voice search prioritizes immediate, concise answers, stripping away extraneous detail to get me just the facts around the voice search query. As such, we anticipate that the increasing popularity of voice search may come to benefit sites and pages that write in brief, concise methods, giving users (or speakers!) just the information they need in a consolidated package. To optimize for voice search in SEO, we also recommend utilizing schema code to help search engines better understand your site’s pages’ content and context. Schema code is a universal language that Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others have all agreed to recognize as the single way to identify key pieces of information on a page. For example, using schema for eCommerce allows you to tag what parts of the page contain a price, color, size, shipping, and other options. This way, if a user searches for Blue Converse shoes, the search engine can immediately scan the page and find the best match for that query. Adding schema markup is relatively easy, and a good SEO can readily partner with a good developer to place it on your site in a matter of days. With the development of Siri, Alexa, and many other personal assistance voice apps, businesses and services are going to have to change the way they present their information. For these voice applications to properly distribute their information, companies will have to change their information to more answering questions/problem-solving a type of presence. This will become a bigger SEO trend as the development of these products continues to expand.

The trend I’ll be hopping onto is providing more structured HTML question and answer snippets near the top of my pages to optimize the chance my page will be the one pulled out for voice search. This is becoming increasingly important as more people use Siri, Alexa, and voice search when looking for answers to questions. This can even be used for eCommerce stores by answering questions at the top of the page such as, What is the best coat for hiking in the rain, etc.

3. Transparency and Trust

Website transparency and trust will be a theme for the next few years. Too many hidden writers and so-called experts are curating bogus content on the internet. The Google Medic update will be the beginning of the effort to crack down on low-quality and bogus websites. Trust will also be at the forefront of SEO trends. Allowing user mechanisms to solicit feedback will be critical. It will be equally important for website owners to respond to feedback to improve customer confidence.

4. User Signals

We saw strong evidence in 2018 that user signals are playing a much more important role in search rankings, and I think we will continue to see that role expand in 2021. If you build great, informative pages, keep users on your site, and don’t give them any reason to click back to the search results because they need more information, your chances of ranking high increase dramatically. We’ll be doing everything we can to improve all pages of our sites, creating the type of content that answers questions, adding even more videos, and assembly instructions, and owner’s manuals.

5. Website Optimization and Content Marketing

I believe voice-optimized websites will start to flourish as Google puts more emphasis on voice queries. So optimizing voice phrases in your content will become the new norm. Page speed, mobile optimization, and HTTPS will become even more of a ranking factor, and websites that ignore or take these issues lightly will suffer. Optimized product descriptions will still be the defining factor in your struggle to fight for organic traffic. Most eCommerce companies lack a proper content marketing strategy; aiming to become a hub for basic queries loosely related to your product can make stealing Google rich snippets very easy and rewarding.

6. Website Speed

Usually, when reading ‘the SEO best practices’, people expect to find something extraordinary creative. And when there are tons of useful ideas to optimize for SEO, some major features tend to be underestimated; one of them is the website speed. Looking at this from a user experience perspective, are you going to wait for a website to load? Of course, not! You’ll find other sites (which might be your competitor) and get the information you were looking for. That’s why I strongly believe that when it comes to website optimization and SEO best practices, one needs to start from the very beginning and pay attention to things that might seem to be less important at first sight, but they are not in the long run. So, only after going through all the basics of site optimization should you focus on other stuff. Just to be clear, I’m not saying there is some sort of ranking system. It’s important to understand that, first of all. A user has to find your site (where keyword research, meta tags optimization, etc., come into the picture). Thereafter, your main task should be to keep the visitors on your website – where your site speed becomes critical. Another factor that you should consider is mobile optimization. This is important since the number of search queries that are done via mobile devices is constantly growing, and it’s super important to meet this user need.

7. Video Content Optimization

However, when speaking about other tactics that will work great, I can’t but mention video content optimization. I think that the different types of content production will lead to some adaptations in search engine algorithms. For instance, video content will be crawled directly instead of that we have now – crawling only the traditional text content that surrounds the video.

8. Accelerated Mobile Pages

With Google’s mobile-first index update in March 2018 and later the mobile speed update in July 2018, it is clear that Google is prioritizing the mobile version for content and ranking – which makes sense if more than 50% of the world’s searches are done on a mobile device. Local results are more likely with mobile searches. Users want faster results without having to click through to another page, and image results and videos often appear higher in mobile searches. As such, identifying keywords for mobile searches, understanding your users’ intent, and what micro-moment Google thinks the user is in (discovery, research, purchase moments, to name a few) are important first steps to optimizing for mobile. Using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) where possible will help improve user experience as Google continues to emphasize page speed across devices and Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool to make sure your content reads easily and plays smoothly across mobile devices.

9. Mobile-Friendly Pages

People are always searching for products and businesses through their smartphones in their local area while on the go, and this will continue to be popular. Mobile friendly, responsive sites achieve higher rankings in Google search, mostly while searching on a mobile device. For many businesses and their customers, mobile-friendly sites are much faster, easier, and more affordable. This will continue to become an even bigger SEO trend as smartphones continue to evolve.

10. Local SEO

Local SEO marketing has become more popular. As businesses begin to grow and add several locations, local SEO helps customers find your business in their area. With mobile-friendly sites evolving as well, local SEO will hope those looking for stores in their area while searching on the go. Businesses can increase their local SEO by listing themselves on Google My Business, Google Maps, yellow pages, and review sites such as Yelp, and professional associations/directories.

11. Providing Value to the User

Backlinks used to be everything. But like keyword stuffing in the early days of SEO, Google is bound to realize that like other manipulating schemes, backlinks are easily manipulated. Methods like paying for backlinks, exchanging backlinks, and manipulating backlinks via personal blogs cause Google to realize there are other, better metrics that measure the strength and popularity of a site. Enter Bounce rate, Time on Page, and Click-Through Rate. These metrics show Google a website truly delivers value to the user. If a user stays on a website, that tells Google the website truly was helpful to a visitor. The audience engagement strategy to go after is to provide actual value to the user. This is done by publishing genuinely amazing content and solving the user’s problems to seek help with browsing the internet.

12. Know Your Target Audience

The ever-increasing frequency of updates from Google ensures newer trends in SEO. Moreover, the emergence of mobile as the device of choice for browsing the internet has also revamped the rules of the game to a great extent. As mobile search results increase their say in SEO, the page speed and the responsiveness of the website will play a vital role in the year 2021. For an eCommerce Portal, optimizing its content for Search engines is essential. While several SEO tips can be helpful, the most important of them is to create and use the content that buzzes with your target audience. All online businesses need to create content that is original and support it through meticulous practices such as meta-tagging. Furthermore, with voice recognition algorithms getting better, enabling the users to take to Voice Search, the websites would have to comply with new rules for conversational queries to be on top of SERPs.

What’s better than ranking #1? Ranking in a featured snippet. By appearing at the top of the results page, a featured snippet satisfies the user’s desire to answer quickly and efficiently. The majority of featured snippets are pulled from the content that occupies the top five positions on the results page, but that doesn’t mean the top spot is out of reach for a newer or less authoritative website. My top tips for ranking in a featured snippet include focusing on creating content that answers specific questions, using bulleted or numbered lists to break up content logically, and featuring high-quality images and videos with relevant metadata attached. Earning social shares and backlinks will also help to cement your content’s quality and relevance.

14. Review Score

Google’s August update, often referred to as the Medic or YMYL update shows just how serious Google is about recognizing a website’s trust and authority. That’s why I think that one of the big trends for 2021 is that reviews will become a much stronger ranking signal for eCommerce and businesses. Google is clearly looking for ways to establish whether real customers also recommend the websites it favors. One of the easiest ways to do this is by analyzing the data made available by the many independent review websites in existence. In 2021, I believe that no amount of links or good content will be able to make up for a large portion of negative ratings a business receives, so business owners need to be thinking about how to improve their service in 2021 as well as how to get happy customers to leave their positive reviews.

15. Flat Site Structure

It’s becoming increasingly important for websites to find the perfect balance of complexity and simplicity, especially considering the methods search engines are using to spider sites. A flat site structure means managing content, running countless page crawls, and creating an overall user-friendly experience. Likewise, a flat site structure enables visitors to find any page on your website with the fewest amount of clicks. However, it takes some serious SEO agility to format your site architecture properly. We found that the easiest way to flatten our site was to promote lower pages through internal links.

We will be looking to employ focused backlink work through 2021. As a men’s fashion brand, it makes total sense to work with men’s fashion bloggers and gain natural backlinks, which drive the right type of traffic to our eCommerce store and builds domain authority resulting in a higher search engine ranking. In 2021 don’t get backlinks for the sake of gaining a backlink; make sure they’re relevant and serve a purpose.

17. Micro-moments

Although we are not an online retailer, we recommend that eCommerce businesses at least employ voice search optimization based on our findings. This is because if you want to catch your customers online (which is all the time nowadays), then the best time would be in their micro-moments. Micro-moments are instances when consumers need things instantly, and they go online to search for them. Like a birthday gift, a gadget for fixing something, or how to do a certain task. That’s when you can cache their attention by coming up on top of the voice search pages because they are too busy to type.

18. LSI Keywords

LSI keywords have been increasing more prominence. In 2021, they are just going to end up well-known and regular. LSI is an indexing and recovery strategy that uses a numerical formula to distinguish patterns in any given content section. LSI keywords add context and intention to your post. These are important keywords that should be utilized alongside your primary keywords. Web crawlers like to see LSI keywords in a blog entry. LSI discovers equivalent words for keywords. LSI (otherwise called co-event) can enhance your pursuit rankings when you Google comprehend the theme you’re expounding on and that it is so important to the search query.

19. Rich Answers

Rich Answers are Google’s latest strategy for cutting through the repetitiveness of customers looking through a summary of indexed lists to find the most suitable site to satisfy their proper inquiry. Google performs this by exhibiting a single site’s snippets at the top point of the result page, which they accept to give the best response to the question. Sites containing special or restrictive content could advantage extraordinarily from rich answers, which normally incorporate links to their data source. It is one all the more paths for quality content makers to make accomplishments in SEO/search engine optimization battles.

20. Well Optimized Landing Pages

Having a lot of very much streamlined landing pages is an incredible method for creating leads. A CTA lead era structure that augments opportunities. SEO will be about putting the effort in and not be attempting to get fast fixes or simple movement. For each landing page you have, upgrade it for SEO/search engine optimization and guarantee your web plan and content works in a pair to convey a quality affair.

21. App Store Optimization (ASO)

The rise of mobile has brought about a more noteworthy number of organizations delivering applications, consequently making a requirement for application store improvement (ASO), keeping in mind the end goal to go up against one another. Additionally required are more specialized profound connecting parts of application administration, whereby application pages will appear in search lists. Initially, applications are filed on the App Store and Google Play, not on Google search. This made it significantly more entangled for Google to streamline its inquiry capacities – advertisers will need to advance on both application stores rather than just on Google natural. Through App Index, applications are presently filed on Google search. The pursuit positioning of applications falls under the App Pack or Deep Link class. Organizations hoping to catch portable clients need to create and advertise applications in like manner to take prospects straight to their authority applications – avoiding a visit to the site. 2021 won’t be the year of innovations, however essentially the season of innovative advancement of advances and strategies, which as of now indicated great potential before.

Top 20 SEO Trends for 2021 to Rank Your Website - 40