Some of the best SEO trends ever experienced took place during 2021, which is a year that followed a pure dependence on technology.
How did companies work to rank near the top of search engines, what items were put in place to improve SEO during this past year, what is available for your company to use to improve your ranking on SERPs? Let’s take a look at some of the trends that rank up near the top, and then you can figure out whether or not you want to add some of these processes to your online strategies.
Page Load Speed –The Basis of Core Web Vitals
For the entire year, Google has used Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor for web pages. This metric measures three things which all relate to how fast pages load for users to read and use. The three things that are measured are Loading, Interactivity, and VisualStability. While relatively straightforward in what they are called and what’s expected of them, it’s easy to understand why these items are important. Most users will not wait long for a page to load and will turn to another website if the page isn’t easy to use and interact with.
Mobile SEO –More Important than Ever Before
With very few exceptions, businesses and individuals use mobile devices throughout the day to stay informed, conduct business, and interact with others. This simple fact means that Mobile SEO is extremely important and an item that’s being measured on web pages more than ever. Every website must have a mobile format, and some have turned to focusing on mobile-first rather than providing a desktop format. Mobile SEO is now one of the most important SEO trends of 2021 and will continue to be important going forward.
Google’s BERT –Superior Usefulness During Searches
BERT is a new part of the Google coding, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which is a confusing name. While calling something BERT might bring about thoughts of Sesame Street, the simple fact is this item is a huge trend and has aided users all year long. This feature uses advanced machine learning and natural language processes to understand the intent behind the searches. This means using SEO practices in web pages is more important than ever to help BERT assist users in finding the right web pages.
Video SEO –Added Elements to the Structure
Google has added the benefits of Seek Markup and Clip Markup to help videos support the Key Moments feature in YouTube. This improves the search aspect of the video and could bring users to the video to stay on it longer when they know the video contains the information desired. Creators will have to mark up the videos to ensure users can easily see clips of the most important information in the video. This is one of the newest SEO trends in 2021 and will be a huge part of the focus for SEO strategies in 2022.
User Experience –A Critical Component
We know that page load speed goes into the user experience, but the metric of user experience measures how long a user spends on a page, whether or not they use any of the internal or external links, and if that experience leads to a conversion. The user experience has become one of the top metrics used by Google and is much more important to the algorithm than keyword density, meta tags, and other traditional SEO topics. When a web page offers an excellent user experience, the rankings are much higher than others.
Keyword Research –Not Trending, Just Important
Keyword research is trending upward when it comes to its importance. How can this be with such a focus on the user experience aspect of SEO? As one of the oldest and most important SEO trends, the addition of more enhancements to search engines in 2021 has led to the need for better keyword research than ever before. Many searches don’t even get typed out completely because of the predictive text, featured snippets, and related questions sections that you find on the search engine pages. Continued focus on keywords is important to ensure that pages are found and rank near the top.
Voice Search –You Use It; Web Pages Need to Integrate it
How many times do you hit the microphone button and tell your mobile device what you want to search for? Sure, sometimes the system doesn’t quite understand you, and it will type out words you didn’t say, but your voice search is an important part of your interaction with search engines. This trend has certainly grown this year and will likely continue to be used. Of course, some of us simply have to shout, “Hey Alexa” or “Hey Google,” and we get the results we’re looking for from voice search.
Google My Business –One of the Most Valuable Tools
If you’re searching for a business in your area, you want to have everything you need as part of the result. When this business is a restaurant, you want the hours, location, phone number, menu, and website right at your fingertips. The development and use of Google My Business have allowed search results to be more complete and accurate. Certainly, this is one of the best SEO trends of 2021, and it will continue to be an integral part of searching for information.
Original Content –Still Extremely Important
Businesses with unique products have an advantage in creating original content, while others that offer the same or similar services and products need to have various ways to highlight that content and offer their items. Search engines are looking for content that is new and hasn’t been published. The content can cover topics and items that have been discussed previously but needs to have an original take on that content. It’s important for web pages to be unique and different. This isn’t necessarily a trend, but it’s something that’s been scrutinized by search engines more than before, pushing copycat pages down the rankings.
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