The marketing landscape is changing every year, and marketers must reconstruct their marketing strategies to remain effective.

When it comes to SEO, it also changed in many ways during the last decade. New technologies like artificial intelligence, voice assistants, and mobile experiences played a huge role in evolving SEO tools and tactics.

During the new decade, more and more changes will happen, making it complicated for marketers worldwide to keep up to date. To help you overcome some of these fears, here are some of the trends regarding SEO that will help you stay ahead of the game and take action before it’s too late.

User Experience is Essential

The coronavirus period made it clear that human interactions are fragile and that brands must focus more on providing the best possible experience.

One of the most significant SEO changes for the upcoming year is the Page Experience Update, which will take place at some point in 2021. With this update, user experience becomes an SEO ranking signal.

Page experience consists of several Google search ranking factors which already exist:

• The Page Speed Update
• The mobile-friendly update
• The HTTPS ranking boost
• The safe browsing penalty
• the intrusive interstitials penalty

There are also some refinements concerning usability and speed that Google calls Core Web Vitals.

• page load speed
• the page’s responsiveness
• interactivity

This update emphasizes Google’s commitment to focusing on high-quality links in its search results. The better the web page’s user experience, the more likely it receives weight from the search algorithm.

What can you do about that?

• Improve the loading speed of your pages
• Reduce the bounce rate
• Analyze your design and eliminate bad pages

Content Quality

Many strategies will come and go in 2021, but “content is king,” as many marketers manifest. We have to understand that EAT still matters.

If you don’t know what EAT stands for, I got your back. Google wants to rank content based on expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google concentrates a lot on providing the best value possible and prefers the quality of content rather than a domain’s authority.

Coronavirus is a massive topic of interest in the last couple of months, which is also depicted in the search trends. When it comes to urgent questions, people need to know that they can have the right answer as soon as possible.

Do you understand where this is going?

As a brand, you need to produce as much value as possible by providing authoritative content written or created by experts. To put it simply, it’s time to understand the information that people are looking for and upgrade your content marketing strategy for 2021.

Here are some tips for implementing in the next piece of content:

• Create buyer personas. As a business, it is essential to understand your audience. Figure out their behavior, pain points, and what they need to tailor your content. Living in a fast-paced world that bombards your potential customers every day, you need to make sure that you are there to offer them what they need as a brand.

• Test the format of your content. Video marketing is becoming huge. From a business standpoint, it would be prudent to add this kind of content to your arsenal. But, video content can be plenty of options. Which one will be the most effective to implement in your content marketing strategy? Having all the data from your buyer personas research, try to find what type of content they will like most. Maybe it is vlogging or a tutorial about a service or product. It can be a course about starting as a beginner, working your way up, or going live steam explaining your work behind the scenes.
• Test and create the type of content that your potential customers want to consume.
• Hire experts to do the work. Quality is better than quantity as 2021 approaches. Keyword density isn’t working as it used to be as well as producing incredible amounts of thin content. Google needs more, and you need to adapt to the new changes. Invest in experienced writers that can produce long-form content (2500+ words) while also understand your brand’s tone and style and all of your marketing efforts.

Local SEO

During Coronavirus, there were a lot of changes in the marketing landscape.

Optimizing your online presence to attract more local customers became one of the priorities. Local SEO refers to this exact process and will have a massive potential for your brand’s growth in 2021.

People want to help local businesses thrive again, so you have to put your company in a position of strength. Every month there are more than a billion people that use Google maps to find out local companies to fulfill their needs.

To better prepare your business for this kind of traffic, you need to take care of some things first.

Ensure that your Google My Business is updated and has all the necessary information regarding the location, telephones, and open hours.

Complete every field with explicit content so that the search engines can have a deeper understanding of your brand on an ongoing basis. Engagement and activity on a Google My Business listing are essential when it comes to ranking.

There are more chances that your brand will show up in local searches if you follow this simple tip above.

Google wants to make sure that people won’t have any problem finding services, addresses, phone numbers, reviews, etc. so all of these elements can be found in Google My Business listing.

So, what you have to do to be on the right track for local SEO?

• Sign up to Google My Business
• Claim your business
• Verify through Google my Business service (can take a couple of weeks)

Once your location is established:

• Optimize all the necessary information

Once your list is complete, step up your game with these tips:

• Add weekly photos relevant to your business.
• Add user-generated content from your happy customer base.
• Answer FAQs.
• Create a site using the website builder from Google My Business.
• Announce new products or events, sharing regular posts.

Voice Search

Technology made it clear that voice search will transform the kind of content we produce and the SEO tactics behind that.

Google has reconstructed search results pages to help users find what they want, mainly in Answer Boxes and Featured Snippets. This was possible with AI and the BERT algorithm, which helps search engines understand the natural language like humans (introduced in late 2019).

During the pandemic, voice search has increased drastically as people spend more time at home. To bridge this gap, Google is working on providing the right information to users who depend on smart home devices to get their answers.

How can you prepare your SEO tactics for voice search in 2021?

Use tools to help you with your keyword research and understand which of your existing content can be upgraded to answer short answers to your audience’s questions.

When your team creates a new piece of content, it is crucial to consider voice search, which means try to answer questions like how-to, when, where, why, what, etc. Take advantage of digital tools or marketing experts to see where your content is ranking for short answers like Featured Snippets.

The Takeaway

With 2021 approaching, your marketing team needs to have a solid foundation of all the strategies we discussed above. Some are more crucial than others, but the competition doesn’t leave room for errors and shortcuts.

As a brand, make it your job to be up to date with every possible weapon on the market to provide the most potential value. Keep in mind that Google focuses on delivering the best possible content for your users.

So, it’s good to have optimized content for search engines, but the human element will help you get ahead of the competition. Focus on humans and let SEO help you towards this goal.

Let me know which of these tactics will you implement first in your next campaign? See you in the comments section.

Author

Alex is a content writer at Moosend. He leaped faith in the digital marketing world from an architecture background and has never looked back. You will find him traveling in places around the world in his free time. Find out more on LinkedIn.