SEO in 2021 can be transformational for you if you choose to go with the trends. It is no secret that those who stick to best SEO practices or avail the best SEO packages will rank well on the SERPs. 

2020 was the year of unprecedented changes that resulted in a plummeting economy. But as vigilant owners, our job is to make the best of the worse – and that’s what we did! 

While we couldn’t accelerate our sales due to precautionary lockdowns and curfews, we leveraged the digital channels to help us achieve our targets and maintain the business cycle. 

SEO trends in 2021 is a result of changing customer preferences due to a black swan event like COVID-19. Online ordering and increasing digital dependency have made it clear that our customers’ demands have reached an inflection point and are ready to take a new curve. 

Through this blog, let’s look at five unmissable SEO trends of 2021 that can work wonders for your website. 

5 SEO Trends In 2021 For Any Website

1) Importance Of E-A-T (Domain Authority 2.0)

E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google prefers content based on these parameters to ensure that a user only receives relevant and meaningful content. According to the recent guidelines, Google considers E-A-T one of the most important factors when considering Page Quality Rating. 

To ace this parameter, you must begin from the basics. Be it the healthcare industry or finance – your first step is to create a buyers’ persona. It is a faux person that contains all the characteristics of your ideal customer. Using the persona, you can identify your potential customer’s search intent and then create a content strategy with appropriate keywords. 

Optimizing E-A-T can work wonders for your website because users are now looking for expert quality content to clear their dilemma. String words together will not be well-ranked and might now fetch you the desired result. In fact, most SEO packages now have E-A-T optimization as a separate service. 

2) Acing Search Intent 

If you don’t know what your customers are searching for, your SEO strategy is incomplete. Search intent is the process of identifying what your customers are looking for and then creating content accordingly. 

In retrospect, SEO professionals only considered the primary keyword for content creation. Ignoring secondary keywords and LSI can harm your ranking because users think differently. Google’s LSI is an excellent way of identifying search intent and incorporating such keywords in your content. 

Today, Google isn’t just looking for a string of words to be present in your content. It dissects the reason behind the placement of the keyword and tries to index it accordingly. The sole reason for such bifurcation is that different users have different search intents.

For example; If a user enters “sports shoes,” they could be looking to buy a pair or gather more information about sports shoes or shoe outlets around them. Google places multiple results based on majority clicks and ranks the websites. 

3) Importance Of Local SEO 

Local SEO is a concentrated way of performing SEO precisely to capture local niches. More often than not, when a user enters a search query, they’re looking for a local business to address their requirement. 

More often than not, we look at the bigger picture and forget to focus on smaller things like GMB listing and location-specific keywords. 

Since the pandemic, most businesses have gone digital, Local SEO will play a significant role in SERPs ranking and business growth. After introducing zero-click search and local packs, Google will pay a lot of importance to businesses with Local SEO strategies.

In simple terms, the idea is to avoid long research and achieve quicker solutions. With zero-clicks and a local pack, the user can quickly decide without having to navigate away from the SERPs. 

4) Repurposing Long-Form Content

Writing expert quality content that imposes authority and invokes trust will get you that coveted SEO score and ranking. Blogs of 2000+ words work better with the crawlers than those that fall between 901 and 1200 words. In fact, content with 3000+ words gets 3.5 times more traffic and backlinks. 

So, when you add such dire efforts in creating content, why must you let it remain in one form? Repurposing your content in multiple content-forms will help you achieve a better SEO score and rank. 

In 2021, strategically repurposing your content will help you distribute content on multiple channels and get the desired backlinks. So this year, you must focus more on creating quality content than creating more content. 

5) Optimize Featured Snippets 

Snippets are a great way of luring users to your website by showing images, FAQ(s), or just a few lines right on the SERPs.

Including these snippets can help your website get more traffic, and users can make decisions even without having to navigate to the website. 

Featured Snippets have received 8.6% of the CTR compared to other organic posts that flash right beneath it. 

The year 2021 is the year of featured snippets, and by leveraging this, you can ensure significant traffic. 

Concluding Thoughts

2021 is the year of trying new things in SEO and ensuring that your website keeps up with the changing trends and preferences. We’ve highlighted five significant trends that SEO professionals must consider and incorporate in their strategy through the blog. Every SEO packages today must include these checkpoints to ensure that the website ranks productively on the SERPs.