SEO Trend 2021: 8 trends to watch this year

 Those who deal with SEO know this well: it is a subject in constant evolution, in which it is essential to always be up to date with the updates of Google's algorithms.

Having a site that is well-positioned and easily navigable by users is essential in any marketing strategy: of all users who surf the web, 70-80% focus on organic results while ignoring paid ones. Of these, only a very small percentage get to see the results from the third page onwards.

Over the years, search engines have increasingly refined their crawling and ranking tools, which means that in an SEO strategy, there are more and more elements that acquire relevance at the level of indexing.

In 2021 we will see the surge of some trends that have already been underway for some years, starting with the implementations of AI tools and voice assistants, which always bring the search criteria on Google closer to natural language.

Let's see all the SEO 2021 trends on which you will have to build your strategy next year.

1. RankBrain

At the end of 2015, Google launched RankBrain, the algorithm that replaced Pagerank, intending to improve the quality of search results that the engine associates with a particular query.

Since then, this artificial intelligence has changed the way users interact with the web, also changing the ranking factors that make search results relevant in the SERP, rather than others.

Rankbrain is based on a machine learning system, created for "teaching yourself", without having to be programmed by someone, and able to create links between words and sentences.

For your SEO strategy to be effective, make sure the site is well optimized for Rankbrain. How can this happen? Making the user's browsing experience flawless. In other words, you need to make the site crawler readable, the content well organized, pay attention to file size, and minimize page load times.

2. Voice search

According to forecasts, by 2022 more than 55% of households will own a smart speaker. In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the use of voice assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant.

Voice search technology is not only changing how users find information on the web, it is also becoming increasingly relevant to brands that sell their products and services online.

Optimizing your content for voice search ensures better site traceability, whether the query is typed or spoken aloud. But what are the tips to follow to optimize the site for voice assistants? The first is certainly to prefer long phrases to keywords. This is because when the user types the query in the search engine bar, he uses keywords such as "Ultimate grilled Reuben sandwich recipe"; but if he turns to the voice assistant, he will use longer and more natural-sounding phrases, such as: "How do you prepare ultimate grilled Reuben sandwich?"

3. Mobile-first indexing

To date, it is estimated that by 2025 over 70% of users will browse the web by accessing exclusively from mobile devices. For this, Google continues to implement mobile-first indexing, which essentially means that the search engine is increasingly emphasizing the mobile version of the site.

If the pages of your site are not optimized correctly for mobile devices, this can be extremely penalizing, because your site may not appear right among the results in SERP.

It is very important to pay attention to lazy-loading contents, that is to say, all those contents that are not loaded when the page is launched, but require interaction by the user (click or scrolling): if they are not optimized correctly, Googlebot will not be able to play this content and your site's page will only be half loaded.

4. Long content

According to a report by the State of Content Marketing, text content of 1,000 words or more gets three times more feedback and shares and about 3.5 times more backlinks.

For website traffic to increase, the website must not only be authoritative on the topic but also create content that is engaging and easy to share and users must remain engaged over time.

To make it easier for the search engine to crawl the content, it is good practice to divide the article into sections and use H2 and H3, which are very important especially for mobile crawling, and make sure that the backlinks point to authoritative and relevant sources.

5. Featured Snippets

The Featured Snippet, or snippet in the foreground, are those that appear at the top of Google search results, on the other organic results, and underpaid ads. Unlike other snippets, they are larger and often include an image as well.

The purpose of the presented snippets is to quickly answer the search query, so that the user does not have to click on one of the results, but can get to know the searched information directly from the SERP.

If Google displays your website in one or more queries, there will be a significant increase in the traffic generated by your website. Also, another advantage of this snippet that shouldn't be underestimated is stealing traffic from competitors.

From 2021, Google will give even more importance to featured snippets: therefore, when creating the snippet, always look for relevant keywords, without neglecting also related searches, which are important to understand what people are looking for when they arrive on your page.

6. Video

Content in video format will outperform all others in terms of use and, recently, it has also been included by Google in featured snippets.

To date, Youtube is the most visited site in the world, with 33 billion visits per month. So, if your SEO strategy doesn't include video content, 2021 will be the year to start.

To optimize your videos, organize them into sections and optimize the content using titles, descriptions, and tags. Very useful for indexing purposes, also insert a transcript of the spoken word.

The keywords you use in indexing your videos are fundamental: if you are optimizing a video for YouTube, for example, it can be of great help to type the topic of your videos in the search bar and look at the results returned by the platform. This will make it much easier to understand the search intent of the people who will be looking at your content.

7. Pictures

The search for visual content on Google continues to evolve more and more: if the images on your site are not optimized correctly, you should fix it as soon as possible.

Correct indexing will not only allow you to rank high in the search results on Google Images but will also allow you to implement the overall visibility and optimization of your site.

In addition to using images relevant to the content of the page, the use of alt tags is very important, through which the crawler of the search engine will catalog the images and associate them to a certain category.

8. Related Keywords

Unlike what many think, it is not only the main keywords that are important but also the related ones.

This is because semantic SEO and Search Intent optimization becomes more and more important.

Therefore, it is good to have clear the context of the query, to provide increasingly relevant information to search engines, through primary and secondary keywords, semantically related to each other. In other words: don't focus on single keywords, but optimize your content for groups of topics.