SEO Trends to Know for 2021

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) remains an effective way to drive people to your online platforms organically. SEO techniques are constantly evolving, however. So what trends should you keep on top of throughout 2021? Let’s delve deeper.

#1 Optimising for Voice Search

More than half of all smartphone users engage with voice technology on their device. In fact, stats show that 41% of adults use voice search at least once per day. It’s thought that 6.4 billion people could also use voice-activated search and assistants worldwide by 2022. So how will this impact SEO? Well optimising for voice search is becoming increasingly important. Algorithms are understanding human speech with impressive accuracy. Therefore as marketers it’s crucial to:

• Research questions people ask about your keyword or phrases and integrate these into your content.
• Divide your content into question and answer chunks to ensure it’s relevant to voice search queries and therefore likely to show in the SERPs.
• Optimise your local business listings. This is because people use voice searches to look for products and services near them.

#2 E-A-T Principles

Google has reiterated that content quality is crucial when it comes to ranking success with E-A-T principles helping to determine if a webpage is quality. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. So if you want to get your content noticed organically, it’s important to provide content that showcases your credibility.

Ways to improve your content based on E-A-T include:

• Work with high-quality content creators that are experts in their field. While it might seem easier to get a budget-friendly freelancer to do the hard graft for you, it’s actually much more beneficial to have guest blogs and posts from credible sources with a successful track record, impressive social media following and glowing profiles on platforms like LinkedIn.
• Get high-quality backlinks, mentions and shares as this will improve the authority of your content. Search engines like Google want to see what other websites think of you as this works as a vote of confidence allowing them to deliver the most relevant search engine results.
• Trustworthy content is well-written, factually accurate, up-to-date and follows through on the promises made by titles and headings. You can also improve the trustworthiness of your site by improving load times, creating easy-to-navigate menus, having credible ‘About Us’ pages and never taking someone off-site to a questionable page link.

#3 Long-Form Content

Long-form content is another SEO trend in the spotlight that can help improve rankings. This is because longer reads of 3,000+ words can achieve 3.5-times more backlinks than articles between 900 and 1,200 words. If these backlinks are credible then this will also help your SEO strategy. If you’re going for long-form, however, always:

• Maintain the quality by fact-checking and spell checking.
• Credit the author and make sure they’re qualified to have written the piece.
• With Mobile First a priority, always divide your content into easy-to-read sections that are easier to absorb via mobile.

If you’re looking for an SEO agency Kent to help optimise your platforms, contact Whitefish Marketing today. Enjoy quality SEO services Kent specifically tailored to your business.