Search Engine Optimization or SEO is probably one of the most steady and invaluable marketing channels that every business owner can use. In fact, SEO techniques gained newfound importance during the pandemic because most businesses had to switch their sales channels online.
That is why digital marketers and business owners are making efforts at growing their SEO to attract more organic traffic. But they should also stay up to date with the latest Google updates for 2021 and beyond to achieve consistent results. So irrespective of whether you have an SEO-optimized website or not, you should not ignore these top SEO trends.
According to Google’s announcement last year, the page experience and Core Web Vitals will be effective from May 2021. If you are still unaware of these updates, you should check Google Search Central Blog for further details. The gist of this update is that Google will officially start considering your website loading speed as a ranking factor by evaluating three key metrics:
The Core Web Vitals has set certain benchmarks for these key metrics that you must meet to boost ranking signals. Some experts at Google have also mentioned that people will see badges on result pages for fast websites, which will urge them to click on those links. Also, make sure that you check the Core Web Vitals for your mobile websites and content.
Local SEO efforts have historically proven to have more efficacy and driving traffic to a website. So if your business is reliant on local customers, you should concentrate on local search optimization for your company.
Google has made some changes that play vital roles in local searches, such as more local news, featured snippets, and local three-pack. Most featured snippets showed by Google are for local companies, which is why some experts have started calling it the ‘local pack’ these days. Even if you do not have a retail store, you should still create a Google My Business account and keep it updated as much as possible.
We understand that staying on top of the current local SEO trends can be difficult, especially if you have other business aspects that need your attention. If that is the case, we would advise you to hire a local SEO expert or agency. There are several advantages of hiring a local company over an international one.
For example, if your business is based in Toronto, hiring an SEO expert in Toronto will get you better results. They will know what local SEO tactics will work best for your industry. They will also have a list of local links and directories from Toronto to help you build citations for your business. Local SEO professionals will also have a list of local keywords that work best in Toronto.
Search intent should be your priority when you are creating new content for your website. You should check a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) analyzer when you use any SEO tool to create content. The SERP analyzer will give you the best results that will match user intent for a keyword on Google. It will allow you to understand what type of content you need to create to meet your target user’s query on search engines.
Google is constantly making efforts to recognize what the user is looking for to rank the posts on the result pages. So if you want your content to rank higher, you need to understand your target user’s search intent and create your content accordingly.
Prioritizing search intent is not only beneficial to rank your website higher, but it also increases conversion rates. Your SEO efforts would be futile if you get millions of visitors without any monetization. Therefore you need to ensure that when your target audience lands on lower-funnel pages, they continue along the sales funnel till the end.
But keep in mind that your sales tactics should not be too pushy for informational search results, as the audience would not be ready for a sales pitch. Instead, use the information on user intent by page type to guide your target audience to the next step in the sales funnel.
There was a time when SEO was all about focusing on keywords and their placement in the content. But the latest Google updates have made it clear that business leaders and digital marketers need to focus on what is good for the users. You should realize that even Google has competitors like Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex.
Even though Google holds the majority of the market share in most of the world, it also needs to keep the users happy so it does not lose the top position. That is why Google will always prioritize content that is beneficial for the users and rank them higher on the search engine results pages.
Even the latest Google updates have made it abundantly clear that their algorithms give more weightage to content quality than keywords or links these days.
Staying on top of current SEO trends is crucial, especially with the ever-changing landscape of Google algorithms. We hope that you find these trends useful to optimize your content for increased website traffic and higher conversions. You can also contact local SEO professionals to learn more about such other trends.