Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a constantly evolving practice. As it is a new decade, search engines are going to be advancing and developing in a quest to better answer search queries. This will mean you will constantly have to adapt your SEO practices to ensure you are still getting the best rankings for your website. Here are some of our predictions for 2021.
Voice Search
Voice search is getting more and more popular. With the rising popularity of voice activated technologies such as Alexa, Siri and Google assistant, people are searching queries with voice more than ever.
People type and speak very differently. This is why the best way to optimise your website’s keywords with queries that searchers may ask. For example, instead of typing “noise cancelling headphones” into Google, the searcher may ask “What are the best noise cancelling headphones?”. A good tool to find out these searches is Answer the Public. This tool allows you to provide it with a keyword and then will return a list of related queries to it.
Featured Snippets
Already a strong SEO feature, appearing in featured snippets is only going to become more important. The aim of a featured snippet is to answer a searcher’s queries straight away. With developments in voice search, websites that appear in the featured snippets will likely receive the most clicks.
Like optimsing for voice search, the best way to feature would be by answering queries relating to your keywords. It is also important that the content you are providing on your website is of high quality and correct. This will be beneficial to general rankings due to the Google BERT update prioritising well written content that is purposeful and has a clear focus.
Google My Business
This feature is a tool you can use to manage your business’ online presence across Google. GMB (Google My Business) is primarily used to aid local SEO by providing your business’ phone number, website and address.
However, GMB can be updated frequently with posts. We believe by treating the tool as a social media, it will positively effect SEO rankings. This is because it can be used to backlink your website and shows you frequently updating your site with fresh content.
Social Media
Like Google My Business, we believe a strong Social Media strategy will be crucial for SEO. In particular, we predict integrating your websites keywords into your social media will result in positive rankings.
This is because it can be used as a backlinking strategy. Focusing your social on your keywords, for example “Marketing Company Hull”, search engines will likely see your website as more relevant as your social is linked to your website. Therefore, you are more likely to rank higher in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Artificial Intelligence
No, we are not talking about sci-fi robots. We’re talking about search engines developing a mind of their own. Instead of following an algorithm that could be exploited, search engines like Google are becoming more advanced and deciding what they deem the most relevant content for a search query.
This is coming into play right now with the Google BERT update. From this update, it is said that there is no direct way to optimise for it. Instead, the focus should be on creating high quality content that will be rewarded. So instead of writing content for the search engine, focus on writing it for humans.
Videos
Videos are good for UX (user experience). With Google focusing on finding the most relevant and informative content for users, videos are brilliant for conveying information. This is because a video can show 1.8 million words of information per minute (theoretically). Because of this, we believe videos will become a massive ranking factor as it can provide so much information and will also retain user’s attention, maximising the engagement with your site.
PPC and SEO Working Together
The most obvious benefit of combining the two practices would be added exposure on SERPS. By dominating both organic and paid search results, it will guarantee optimum traffic and show your business as established in your market. By having good SEO, your PPC will rank better giving your website more impressions.
By utilizing both practices, it will also give you double the data to analyze. You can use information such as seeing which keywords are successful to improve your overall strategy.
Landing Pages
Landing pages can be used to improve SEO. They can be used to show what your website is about and provide call-to-actions. This will improve your website’s click-through rate and will likely improve session times.
