5 Important SEO Trends In 2021 (& How to Factor Them Into Your Strategy)

The SEO landscape is continually evolving. With every new update to the Google algorithm, the game changes. To help marketers to keep pace, we’ve compiled a list of the 5 most important SEO trends in 2021.

The trends below will help you to stay up to date with SEO best practices for the year ahead. Take note of them and incorporate them into your SEO strategy to give your content the best possible chance of ranking this year.

Ready? Let’s get started!

1. Core web vitals are now an SEO priority

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably seen this coming for a while now. Google’s never made any secret of the fact that speed matters. They first announced that site speed was a desktop ranking factor way back in 2010, but SEOs have largely downplayed its importance—until now.

Marketers can no longer afford to ignore the importance of page loading times in 2021. Google has been placing more emphasis on so-called ‘page experience metrics’ like speed in recent years and they introduced Core Web Vitals as a crucial ranking factor at the start of this year. 

This means that factors like speed, mobile-friendliness, security, and image optimization all now seriously impact your ranking potential. As little as a fraction of a second difference in page loading times could mean the difference between ranking in position 1 and position 3.

How to factor core web vitals into your strategy

Marketers need to make sure they’re incorporating page experience into their SEO workflow or risk falling behind their competitors. 

You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check how quickly your pages are loading on all devices and, if you find you’re falling short of the mark, take steps to optimize your existing pages.

Some easy ways to improve page loading times are:

  • Optimize and compress your images (make sure file sizes are as small as possible)
  • Minify your code
  • Use browser caching tools
  • Use ‘Lazy Loading’ to defer offscreen image loading

2. Keywords are taking a backseat

Google’s algorithm gets smarter and smarter with every core update—and it’s getting very good at understanding search intent. 

Ever since the rollout of Google’s BERT algorithm at the end of 2019, Google has been using machine learning and natural language processing to understand the intent behind the searches, and the topical context behind search intent.

What does this mean? It means that Google doesn’t care as much about exact-match keywords as it used to and that it now favours topic-based results instead. 

Even if your page is more well-optimized around a specific keyword compared to your competitors, if their page better answers their search query and has more topical authority, they can still outrank you.

How to adjust your strategy

Keyword research should still be used to inform your strategy, but it should no longer be the focus of it. Don’t get hung up on optimizing your content around a specific keyword. Instead, optimize it around a topic as a whole. 

You might want to consider shifting your site architecture towards a topic-cluster model (i.e. clusters of content that cover areas of a topic are linked to a central pillar page that offers a broad overview of the topic). This helps search engines like Google to understand the semantic relationship between your page content and helps boost your topical authority.

3. Long-form content continues to dominate the SERPs

One clear trend we’ve seen over recent years is the shift towards longer content. Google prefers content that covers a topic in-depth over ‘thin’ content. As a result, pages with longer word counts tend to perform better in the SERPs.

Not so long ago, the average blog post was around 500 words. By 2016, the average word count of a page-1 result was 1,890 words. In 2021, that figure is even higher – around 2,000 – 2,500 words seems to be the sweet spot.

How to factor long-form content into your strategy

The upshot of this seems pretty clear: publish longer content. However, it’s not quite that simple. You see, it’s not the word count per se that matters, but rather how deeply you cover a topic.

Writing 10,000 words of irrelevant fluff to answer a query that could be answered in 500 words isn’t going to score you any ranking points with Google. The idea is to write enough to cover the topic fully, completely, and as in-depth as possible while staying on topic.

4. Voice search is growing

These days, it seems like almost every household has some sort of smart home speaker, whether that’s Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. In fact, 55% of households are predicted to own a smart speaker by next year.

As a result of this consumer shift towards smart speakers, voice search technology is growing more popular. You can bet a big chunk of your target audience will be searching for content via voice search this year, so it’s crucial to factor that into your strategy

How to adapt your strategy for voice search

Voice search queries tend to be longer and use more conversational language than text searches.

 For example, where a person might usually type something like ‘best dog food labrador’ into Google, they’d probably ask ‘what is the best dog food for a labrador?’ instead when searching by voice.

You can adapt your strategy by publishing content that targets these highly-specific, conversational, long-tail search queries. 

5. Featured snippets are becoming more prominent

In case you didn’t already know, featured snippets are the boxes that appear in position 0 at the top of the SERPs, just before the organic results. They pull information out of webpages and make it visible at the top of the page to immediately provide a brief answer to the searcher’s query.

Snippets are nothing new—they were rolled out initially in 2017—but they’ve been growing more prevalent every year. In 2021, snippets show up for a ton of search queries, so it’s important to factor them into your strategy.

How to factor featured snippets into your strategy

Here’s the thing: not everybody loves snippets. 

Some marketers think they’re a good thing as they command a lot of real estate in t
he SERPs. And if you can get your content featured in them, you can jump ahead of your competitors and shoot straight to the top of the page.

On the other hand, they can also negatively impact your click-through rate. By pulling information from your webpage and displaying it on the results page, searchers can get answers to their queries without clicking through. 

If you’d already be ranking in position 1 without the snippet, it might make sense in some cases to use the data-nosnippet tag to block Google from featuring information on your page in the snippet, thus boosting your CTR.

In other cases, such as where you’re not already ranking on page 1, getting featured in the snippets might be beneficial. In this case, you might want to optimize your content for featured snippets, such as by answering question-based queries very succinctly within the content.

Final thoughts

There you have it, 5 SEO trends to inform your strategy in 2021. Hopefully, this has given you some useful insight that’ll help you to jump ahead of your competitors this year.

Good luck!