61% of B2B marketers stated that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other marketing initiative. With this statistical evidence, we assure you that SEO, i.e., Search Engine Optimization is here to stay and evolving by leaps and bounds. Search Engine Optimization being a process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines, predominantly Google search; we are here to nod our heads with the understanding of the latest SEO trends in 2021.
While people being the pivot of the Digital Marketing field, Google takes special care that the users return to Google the next time they have to search for something. Hence Google routes the traffic to a website via Search engine results pages (SERP) which are customized results based on a wide range of factors, such as the user’s physical location, browsing history, and social settings.
Therefore a huge shout-out to the content creators to stay authentic, prioritize quality over quantity, be user-friendly and valuable enough for the traffic to be glued to your website.
Again living by the quote: Of the people, for the people and by the people’ Google is about to launch an algorithm, Page Experience, which includes the following factors:
Core Web Vitals: Sounds intimidating right?! It's not something we were unfamiliar with, just encapsulated in a more modern and vital case. The latest trend focuses on three aspects of the user experience—loading, interactivity, and visual stability that includes the following metrics:
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance in which a web page should load within 2.5 seconds.
• First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity and gives a margin of 100 milliseconds or less for the users to interact with the content.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability and to minimize the unexpected layout shifts, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.
Mobile-friendly SEO: Mobile being handy and easier to use rather than the basic desktop, designing websites to be mobile friendly ensures that your pages perform well on all devices. Haste if you have still not shifted your content from Desktop-only sites to mobile-only as John Mueller affirmed that desktop-only sites will be removed from Google’s index in March 2021.
Safe-Browsing: With a ‘Safety first’ badge, pages or sites affected by a security issue can appear with a warning label in search results or an interstitial warning page in the browser when a user tries to visit them. So, try fixing the issues if you encounter them and secure your site with HTTPS before it gets too late!
AI, initially deemed infamous by most of the tech giants and authors, has finally penetrated into SEO too. According to Google, its most recent major search update, the inclusion of the BERT algorithm, which is a transformer-based machine learning technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training, will help it better understand the intent behind users’ search queries, resulting in more relevant results. Sounds daunting! but relax, you just have to be relevant, focussed on user intent, and publish logical, meaningful content in a natural language.
Is your content voice-friendly? Is it optimized enough to serve a voice-search query? According to data, voice search revenue will more than quadruple from 2017 to 2022 from just 2 billion to 40 billion dollars. If still not, then you must step in to incorporate voice-friendly search terms and Local Search results strategy to stand above par.
With 76% of consumers trusting online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations and Google being an unpredictable search engine, coming up with new trends each year, you really need to be on top of your SEO game!
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