7 SEO Tips for 2021

Getting your website ranked on the first page of Google for your niche brings many benefits. Gaining more targeted inbound traffic, will bring better conversions. It will also help to establish your brand as an expert or first choice in your local niche. Sounds interesting as a business owner right? Well, if so then take a few minutes to run through 7 SEO tips and trends we are watching into 2021:

 

1. Optimize For Voice Search

We’ve been talking about this one for a while now. Although the voice search feature of Google has been available for a few years, most websites still haven’t optimized their content to match. So, they lose potential customers because 41% of adults use voice searches every single day. Think “Hey Siri, what’s the name of this song..?” or even “Hey Google: Where’s the best Italian restaurant in town?“

You need to consider how people talk instead of only what they type. Voice searches use keywords that include questions or quick instructions. How could this be applied in your business? This also requires a great mobile website because the bulk of voice searches come from smartphones.

 

2. Improve User Experience

User experience is basically how easily a visitor can browse a website and find exactly what they’re looking for. Anything that harms that users experience can decrease your search rankings. You need to take care of the technical parts of your business website. This applies across all devices too regardless of the visitors tech gadget of choice. For example, you can improve website speed, layout & design, page content, calls to action, etc. 

There are some plugins that claim to “optimize” parts of your website in a few seconds. But in this regard, you really do get what you pay for and some problems require more technical work. So on this one, hiring a proven expert with references would be the smarter move.

 

3. Use Video as a Marketing Tool

How long have we been hearing the mantra of just how big video is right now? Well, it’s true that many people would rather watch video clips on a subject than read even a short article or news post. What does that really say about our high-speed consumption of information, not to mention attention span?

So to combat this, you can begin turning some blog posts into short videos. Then, you can publish them on YouTube and share them x-platform onto social media. Videos can get organic traffic from YouTube that is another big search engine. You can also embed these videos into some of your web pages and increase their on-page SEO (social media optimization). 

 

4. Optimize Your Content For Featured Snippets

Feature snippets highlight parts of website content directly on the search page. They appear above the organic search results and get most of the traffic. They can be lists, tables, and questions. The best way to optimize for featured snippets is to provide these lists and questions in your content. Don’t just let the search engine guess, provide custom snippets of key information including CTA’s (call-to-action).

 

5. Increase User Engagement

Google has metrics or analytics that estimate user engagement, like bounce rates or the average time users stay on your site. Increased engagement means more happy visitors. To Google, this means a more relevant search result than others and in turn rewards this in rankings. You can increase this relevancy by creating better content, improving readability, staying current or trending with your content and adding great visuals. Comments and social shares are two extra signs of excellent user engagement.

 

6. 6. Add Numbers In Titles

Numbers in titles tend to get the attention of internet users. Attention span again here: visitors often spare the time to read “3 quick XYZ hacks” but prefer to scroll right on past “15 in-depth, researched tips for XYZ…” It is what it is.  To help mitigate this, you can try creating listicle articles or add potential results. Here are two quick examples:

• 8 Ways to Get 6-Pack Abs Fast
• How To Build 6-Pack Abs in 30 days

If you get more clicks than other results on the search page, Google will rank you higher. Adding numbers in the title is the best way to get these clicks.

 

7. Increase Internal Links

Internal links connect two pages of the same website – think of them as breadcrumbs connecting Hansel and Gretel. Granted, that tale was a little hairy for them but you get my point! Incidentally, yes we did just include a wikipedia link to that fairytale ( see what we did there? -lol )  Anyways, adding more quality internal links can increase your search rankings. They can also increase engagement (time on website) and show the important pages or conerstones of your website. 

Websites with plenty of internal links tend to rank higher in search engines and get more traffic. All joking aside, Wikipedia remains an excellent example of such a website with a top notch internal linking.  try applying this very same methodology to some of your older posts and website content?

 

Conclusion

These are just 7 SEO tips and trends we are watching that can often help boost search rankings when done correctly. Many of them just require small improvements in your existing pages, like adding numbers in a few titles and internal links on your content. Creating videos or improving user experience requires more effort or resources, but they bring long lasting benefits.

We often get asked if there are things the business owner shouldn’t try themselves. Is it possible to negatively impact a websites seo results accidentally and the answer is a resounding yes. If you’re not sure we would strongly recommend checking in first with a good seo expert in your local area. A little extra prep now can really go a long way in avoiding costly mistakes later.

TL;DR – Ok, there’s really only 7 summarized points above but for those in a mega-rush, the tl;dr drills down to focus on voice, ux, video, snippets, user engagement, numbers & links. Not sure what some of those are? Then scroll back up and read the full article!

Thanks so much for reading !

[*Image credit: Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting (from IMDB — © 1997 Miramax Pictures- all rights reserved] <– Still a great movie if you haven’t seen it in a while?

 

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