9 SEO Trends in 2021 You Must Know About

When it comes to search engine optimisation, you must be clear about various upcoming SEO trends. 

Here, we are going to cover the most critical SEO trends in 2021.

Moreover, you will also find a lot of new strategies that will be working right now in the search engines. 

Say Hello to 2021, with this updated guide that will cover the most critical trends in the year. The most important SEO trends that are worth paying attention to this year are:

1 – Core Web Vitals

This is related to the experience of the users that visit your webpage. 

At present, three web core vitals are what Google considers as the most important ones. 

There will be an increase in the number of metrics to enhance users’ experience in the coming times. 

The web vitals that Google considers the most significant include:

Though web core vitals will significantly impact the Google rankings, you still need to focus on the content and users, which will remain the main factor for determining the page’s authority and ranking. 

Getting a detail about the web core vitals, you should start working on them.

Specific tools will help in optimising your web page for web core vitals. 

These include Google Search Console, Google Mobile-first Index, Page Speed Insights, Chrome Development Tools, lighthouse, Web Vitals Extension and more. 

It is Google’s mobile-first index scores that matter the most. It is crucial to get your web page out of the low URL red zone.

2 – Domain Authority or E-A-T

Conventionally, Domain Authority has been all about the links. 

However, now it is more related to Effectiveness, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. E-A-T is the new SEO Trend. 

Though E-A-T was a part of Google guidelines for a long time, it’s gaining more importance as a ranking factor than before. Google states that it wants content from reliable resources.

It means that you need an expert to write the content on your website. High expertise is significant in YMYL websites (like the ones related to medical, legal, and financial websites.

A high level of transparency is essential, and the website should be easily navigable. It should provide accessible and transparent information about the contact and a well-defined privacy policy. 

The website should have external links to the sources and a comprehensive and thorough about us page.

Google evaluates E-A-T characteristics off-site or on websites other than yours. 

It is all about getting another website to say appreciable things about you; there are methods to make other people mention you as the go-to resource. 

If you get cited or listed by reputable external websites, it will certainly boost your reputation.

Google Passage Ranking

Google has announced new semantic search technology known as passages. This feature allows Google to rank specific parts of a passage independently? 

Experts point out that this factor will have a significant effect on nearly 7% of the semantic search results.

3 – Working on Google Passage Ranking

This ranking strategy helps Google to rank specific and relevant passages instead of a page. 

So, Google is not going to size down the relevancy of the entire page.

However, Google will still evaluate the relevance of the entire page. 

Therefore, backlinks, UX signals, other page-level ranking factors from users will still apply. It also means that if a page is well optimised and organised, it has all the chances to rank. 

Passages will be the additional ranking factor in the current ranking policies. To make the most of this search engine ranking factor, you can do certain things.

Organise your content into discrete sections

Remember that Google will rank your passages and your passages semi-independently. 

We can assume that Google will look at each section of the page as a mini web page.

So, if your page is organised into dedicated sections, each of which covers a specific sub-topic, it will benefit you. 

It means organising your page into subsections is going to be a helpful practice.

You can apply it to organise it better to long-form content for your users.

However, a more focused page may beat you in such a scenario. For instance, if you have a section or a page focused on a particular topic, for example, a paleo diet. 

And someone else has an entire section dedicated to a paleo diet; Google would prefer ranking the whole page with the post on the topic over you. 

This is especially true if the page offers an excellent experience to the user than your page. However, many of us are noticing that it is changing.

Google can now construe a single piece of long-form content into 5, 10, and sometimes even 100 unique pages and each of the excellent short passage rankings in Google. It helps in generating social shares and backlinks.

4 – Optimising for Featured Snippets

Featured snippets: This has helped in doing the content climb to the top rank from ranks up to 400 when it is done correctly.

For this, one must format content for various types of snippet baits.

Snippet bait works well for

Paragraph snippets comprise 8% of the total snippets. However, if you want a list-snippet to rank, you have created a unique H2 and H3 sub-header heading.

Manually check your HTML to see if it is set up correctly. Google will help you put those subheaders in the right way and include them in a featured snippet. 

When you want to rank in table snippets, you must create a table that allows Google to pull out data easily.

6.83 % of most of the searches results have a featured snippet. 

All these featured snippets help in stealing many clicks from the number one spot. The truth is that #0 is the new #1.

To make a featured snippet, go for a step by step approach. Featured snippets get a priority-based appearance so that you can get the results that you want.

Begin by finding the right featured snippet opportunities. 

It would help if you focused on keywords you already rank for and the featured snippet keywords. 

Concentrate on the keywords that you already rank for is helpful because 99.58% of the first page ranks progress to a featured snippet. 

That is why first, you must get on the first-page ranking before you enter into the featured snippet zone.

Add the Snippet Bait: Snippet bait is a 40-60 word content block designed explicitly for ranking in the featured snippet spot. 

A diligently curated snippet shot can take your content to the next level.

You can use several types of snippet baits after formatting your content.

Snippet bait works best for paragraph snippets that comprise nearly 8% of the featured snippets.

You can also rank for list snippets by using unique sub headers for every item on the list.

Manual checking of HTML helps to evaluate if it is set up correctly. Google can pull these subheaders into your content and make them a part of the featured snippet.

Visual Search is taking on the scene very fast.

5 – The Latest Trends in Visual Search

The recent trends show that Visual Search is going to take off in 2021. People are taking to Visual Search more than ever before. 

The data shows that Pinterest gets 600 million visual searches every month. 

Google lens has already been searched for more than one billion times. 36% of American consumers are already using Visual Search. 

Visual Search is gaining popularity as it can help you to identify almost anything. 

At present, Google lens search can identify 1 billion objects already, and this data is expanding. 

Even Bing’s Visual Search works pretty well. People search using images for various purposes like directions, shopping, translation, recipes, identifying landmarks, nutritional information, and more.

Optimising for Visual Search

The different factors that you should work on to enhance your Visual Search include:

Improving mobile-friendliness: 90.65% of the Google lens searches are done with Google lens rankings. High authority pages and sites have a chance of appearing in the Google lens results.

Websites with high text content will get more results. 

It may appear contradictory, but the fact is that websites with more than 1600 words are more likely to rank higher in Google lens image search.

Do not forget to update the traditional Image SEO parameters: The traditional technical SEO image techniques like optimising filenames and alt text images will help improve SEO rankings.

6 – Leveraging the Rising Popularity of Video

This is the time when video content is getting an increased demand. Online videos are going to bring in more than 82% of the online traffic in 2021.

Hubspot states that more than 43% of the people are seeking higher online video content. 

Without making videos as a part of your digital marketing strategy, you will be losing on a significant volume of traffic that can significantly improve your SEO.

The video featured snippets: Google has highlighted video-featured snippets in its Reintroduction Snippets Report highlighting three significant ways to get your video content in featured snippets.

Organising content into discrete sections: This allows Google to use different clips from your video into the snippet.

Optimising videos for SEO strategy: The videos you upload must be optimised for the title, meta tags, and description to find out what your video is all about. Videos having a keyword in the title are more useful.

Having a transcript in the video is another way to ensure that Google and YouTube can understand every word of your video in the searches. 

Though auto transcript generated in YouTube videos is acceptable, it is not absolute. 

Therefore, consider getting an accurate 100 % transcript of your video to increase your YouTube channel content.

YouTube is the second-largest channel on the internet, and its popularity is increasing day by day. 

Create and optimise content specifically for YouTube searches to enhance your popularity. 

If you create high-quality videos, you will generate many views from the same, and many of the viewers will likely turn into website visitors and customers in due time.

Embedding video in text-based content is another way to get a significant improvement in the bounce rate.

7 – Mastering the Semantic Search Intent

It is necessary to master the semantic search intent and for various reasons. 

Google is getting better at giving the right search results that people are looking for. 

They want to create content that is an exact semantic search intent match. This is going to be a must for SEO in 2021.

It is necessary to identify each keyword’s intent. Is it to look for information or buy something? 

At times, you may require comparing product A with product B. 

The better the content matches the semantic search intent, the better the ranks you can get. 

Several times, the intent is present right in the keyword, but it may not be obvious. Many times, the intent may rank on page 3 for the content searches. 

Make sure that you optimise your old content for the semantic search intent. It is essential to improve your on-page SEO.

8 – Combating Decreasing CTRs

Organic Search is down by nearly 41.45% since 2015. The organic click-through rate is usually less at this time with users.

Google is now crowding SERP features like Ads, carousels, Answer boxes, ‘people also ask’ sections. 

This means that your results must be outstanding to give you the best results.

Make sure that you include the keyword in the URL. Ensure that you write meta descriptions for every page, and titles with emotions are more compelling and attract higher CTR.

Apart from this, it would help if you also used LSI keywords or semantic keywords to feature your content prominently.

The Takeaway on SEO Trends in 2021

Preparing well for these parameters is the best way to make the most of the latest SEO trends in 2021 and stay out of the red zone.

Moreover, it will ensure that you can make the most of the upcoming trends in the year ahead.