What’s New For SEO In 2021?
By looking at the new and innovative technologies that are arising onto the scene in SEO currently and by looking at the past experiences of Google algorithm changes, we can presume what is most important for the future year 2021 so that we can plan ahead to win the race for digital marketing space on Google’s search engine. Let’s discuss the biggest SEO updates for 2021.
SEO is evolving into more than just meta tags and code for Google. Google wants to please its customers and people want more from their simple search queries now more than ever. Essentially, appeal to your customers beyond reprieve and Google will rank you higher as you are achieving its own goal through you.
What people want is real-life automation that makes their life as simple and easy as possible. This has been shown in things such as map directions being integrated into self-automated cars, an increase in occurrences of automated ordering systems, videos that show you how to do something as the first result on Google, Virtual Reality tours of real estate becoming common and many other real-life user-focused services.
Bringing The Digital World To Life
From seeing, to hearing, to actually being able to interact with items in a fully virtual realm. People want to experience it all and it’s up to you to bring as much of that as you can to them.
- Interactive Content: Keywords and content are great to focus on but they don’t drive traffic or make information easier to navigate to as much as interactive content can. Check out Google’s very own animated interactive web page called “How Search Works”. It guides you through a series of information with ease.
- Panoramic Images: Alt tags are nice but for top companies no longer will stagnant images be viable. Users want images to come to life. You can easily make 360-degree panorama images of your products for your customers with things such as Shopify apps. If you are selling services, make visualizations of your services as much as possible. People want to know what they are getting.
- Audio Ads: Sometimes people can’t view an ad but can listen. This is where audio ads come in. Google is introducing new audio capabilities in Display & Video 360 to simplify the ad creation process. This streamlines into video tours below.
- Video Tours: Why travel to experience something when you can experience it from the comfort of your own home? Cadillac has already made virtual dealerships where buying a car online is intended to mimic a visit to their dealership. You can even interact with live salesmen. Eventually, we expect VR tours for the automotive industry but 2021 is a bit ambitious for this still.
- 3D Virtual Reality: Welcome to the world of virtual 3D viewing, if you aren’t already there yet. It’s mostly fun and games now but near the end of 2021, you will start to be able to view more products in a virtual reality 3D realm before you buy them. For big-ticket items like real estate, this is already a common thing. Try creating a new perspective with Google’s new paint in 3D space tool called tilt brush.
Put A Spin On Your Search Results
Yes, you know how to do SEO in 2020, but for 2021 it’s time to put a spin on your search results. It’s time you think about the future, use more rich snippets, and focus on voice search.
- Focus On Voice Search: Voice search, based on current statistics, is going to continue to rise in popularity. If you can find it easily by voice, then why would you type the question? “Okay Google” How do I make my site optimized for voice searches? Google has all the answers.
Query LikelyUser Intent – English (US)[population of paris]Find the current population of Paris France[starbucks near me]Find the nearest Starbucks location[weather]Find weather information in the user location right now - Use Rich Snippets: Use schema markup to build data trees that the Google Crawl bot can easily understand. Doing this allows you to display eye-catching results on the top of Google’s results. These custom snippets show the most compelling results to your users.
- Predictive analytics: Stop showing past analytics and start imagining the future with Google’s very own predictive analytics. Google can now give you a “Likely 7-day” outcome by automatically determining which customer actions on your app or site might lead to a purchase. Analyze customer activity with predictive metrics by using the User Lifetime technique to identify which marketing campaign helped you acquire users with the highest Purchase Probability. With that information, you may decide to reallocate more of your marketing budget towards that high potential campaign.
Users Experience
Google is tracking more and more of your information while surfing the web. It knows where you look, where you click, how long you have been on the site, etc. Google’s job is to make the user happy with using its search engine by providing people with an answer to their queries. Essentially, if you make the user happy, Google will be happy and provide you with a better ranking. Let’s break down what users like to experience now and what they may be expecting to experience in the future.
- Answering The Query: Most important is to provide them with the answer to their query in 3 seconds or less. This is why headings are still such a big deal because they are a quick sign that you are in the right place. In the future, you should see more unique images, videos, or even small gif animations that reinforce the answer.
- Good Website Layout: People expect a website to look modern. It must be easy to navigate and lead generation items should be in a hotspot area. Check your heatmaps and spend more time watching what your users do in the future with products like Hotjar.
- Mobile Load Time: 53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes over 3 seconds to load. 5G technology is making this easier to achieve but expect users to be even more impatient in the future. For an extensive understanding of a mobile user’s needs check out page 66 of Google’s user content guide.
- Local Businesses: Google My Business is the number 1 ranking factor for local SEO and in 2021 it still will be. Google has been improving their Google My Business profile constantly and it’s hugely integrated into Google Maps. Having an easy to find map button on Google searches and your website is important for users as to when driving this makes it easy to be able to find your business location. No one wants to read directions while they drive and in most cases, this is actually illegal now.
More To The Basics
Meta tags, keyword choice, clean content, internal/external links, and everything you know about SEO is still relevant. There is just more to it now.
- Unique Web Content: Content should be unique, specific, and of a high-quality. Unique content is important but now unique images have also been shown to be a big ranking factor. Even making small changes to a cookie-cutter image can make your image unique to Google. Specific topics are good but avoid keyword stuffing with LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing). Spend more time than usual on your content. Quality is becoming more and more of a rarity in Google’s eyes as the web expands but the number of top 10 spaces stays the same.
- Quality Backlinks: Quality backlinks tend to come naturally with good content but there are some tricks for getting more links. Start by making your content easy to share on social networks. Then share them on your own social platforms. For more links, write as a guest blogger or answer questions on Quora. Be sure to link back to your site in a pertinent location.
- Search Console Insights: A new feature of Google Search Console called Search Console Insights is only in beta now but expect it to be a normal part of your SEO performance check come 2021. This allows you to better manage your content and see what content is performing well, who is linkings to it, what the queries are that are finding your content, and many more things.
Conclusion
SEO has increased in popularity this year and it has made more tools for us to utilize for 2021. SEO is evolving as Google evolves as a company. Its goal is still to please its customers but how it achieves this goal is ever-changing. If you need help keeping up with Google’s ever-changing algorithm please feel free to contact XPND Interactive about our SEO services. We would be happy to help.
