2021 SEO Trends: Rocket Your Rankings This Year!

You know very well what you need to do to get strong results in search engines: Discovering their constantly updated requirements and making optimizations for your site within the framework of these.

How so? Does SEO demand actions that change every year?

Actually, yes, they do. Googlebots’ features that are renewed every year, getting smarter, and finding new methods to increase the user experience (UX) show renewed routes to the websites. So, SEO in 2021 will be a very exciting adventure for us.

What will be the trends of SEO work in 2021? What should be considered in order not to waste time, money, and energy on outdated SEO works? What can a strong SEO strategy for your website offer this year?

We talked about all these issues in detail with the Screpy experts. What we have learned will excite you too. Let’s take a look at what will happen together!

Do you want to increase your website traffic?

Try for free to boost your website traffic!

Register Now

Announced Changes in 2021 SEO

Following the latest developments announced by Google for 2021 may allow your company to earn thousands of dollars or to increase the sales volume of your e-commerce site online.

Hey, when it comes to search engines, doesn’t Google come to mind first? Let’s first talk about the changes that were directly announced by Google.

Page Experience Tells Us Something New

Google is strengthening a ranking factor, whose effects you can see strongly from May 2021: page experience signals. The experience a user has on any page of your website depends on many factors. We’ve already mentioned this in numerous UX articles:

1. For example, users want to be safe while browsing your website. This makes HTTPS certification a powerful security actor.
2. Safe browsing allows users to navigate your site at different ages and environments with a higher experience score.
3. Mobile compatibility is that users who experience your site on mobile devices with different screen sizes and resolutions can see the same view. At the same time, a mobile-friendly website should be able to achieve the same page opening speed they have on a PC, perhaps much higher, on mobile devices.

We seem to hear what you say: Hey, these aren’t new anyway! Google was already paying a lot of attention to all this.

Yes, but now these come together and turn it into the concept of “Page Experience“, which is announced as a corporate ranking factor. And hey, very soon, Google plans to add all of these to Core Web Vitals with a single name, “Page Experience”. So what else will this metric measure?

In fact, some sub metrics previously included in Google Pagespeed Insights will also be measured under Page Experience. For example;

1. Google’s LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) metric will be used to measure loading speed.
2. FID (First Input Delay) metric will be used to measure interactivity level.
3. The CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) metric will be used to measure the visual stability level.

So we basically figured out what to do, right? Now, instead of evaluating the user’s experience on the page separately, such as speed or design, we will consider it as a whole and aim to improve it.

Why does Page Experience matter?

The announcement of Page Experience as a new vital by Google could greatly affect mobile rankings. Because these new changes will primarily affect non-AMP contents. This update, which has the power to reshape the content and websites that appear in the “Top Stories” feature of mobile devices, seems to be really talked about in 2021. We are excited!

You Have No Way to Escape from Mobile-first Indexing!

The mobile-first indexing algorithm, which was announced for the first time on July 1 of 2019, and has been developed rapidly since the first day, will be implemented in 2021 to cover all websites. This application, which covers especially new websites but did not cover most of the sites established before 2019, can seriously affect your rankings this year.

Mobile-first indexing gives us an important clue about the crawling and indexing behavior of search engine bots. Remember, in the past, in the eyes of search engines, the first version of your website was the desktop version. The mobile version was considered as a dependent alternative. So much so that Google has encouraged mobile versions of sites to have mdot URL start in order to maximize user experience in the past.

But hey, a lot has really changed since those days! Mobile-first indexing nowadays means that your mobile version takes priority when your website is crawled by Googlebots in the web world. Therefore, the following issues are now much more important than before:

1. Is your website design suitable for use on mobile devices? For example, even for “Fat fingers”?
2. Does your website open fast enough on mobile devices? Hey, you now know very well that this is a variable that is closely related not only to speed but also to user experience, conversion rates, and bounce rate!
3. Is the content quality as strong as on a desktop? Does resolution, CLS rate, title, caption, view of images as a whole make users happy?
4. Is your URL suitable for mobile-first indexing? As we said before, now the mdot era is completely over, folks!

Why does mobile-first indexing matter?

Mobile-first indexing means that Google saying to you exactly that: ” hey, we care more about the experience you offer mobile users than before.” In fact, this is the way of saying ”what is primarily important to us’”. So we learn something important about the 2021 SEO trends: SEO in 2021 will host studies that focus heavily on mobile experience optimizations. Create a quick plan for these studies.

Hey, you don’t want to be late!

We don’t want you to feel like you’re missing something as your rankings drop quickly.

New Approaches to SEO in 2021

We’ve listed the announced changes, they consist of two basic things. So, what are the 2021 trends of SEO that are not considered as announced developments but are closely related to our SEO processes?

It’s time to give a little tip: now the user is more important to us than before.

User Intent Becomes the Key Point!

We have said before that technical SEO is very important and your site cannot achieve anything without the necessary technical optimizations. OK, that’s right. However, in 2021 SEO trends, it is possible to say that not technical SEO, but SEO based on understanding the user intent and providing what the user expects will be more popular.

Britney Muller is an SEO Consultant and Data Science Student. We know him, and his recent statements tell us something important:

Now, instead of sticking to traditional SEO metrics, we need to broaden our perspective to better understand SERPs and what users encounter for their search purposes. Underlining that users search more consciously in order not to get lost in the infinite information field of Google, Muller said that we should reach this awareness and match the right information with the right keywords. What’s more, it’s not just our keyword selection, it’s our rich content for those words!

Featured Snippeds, The New Star of SERP

We really talked about featured snippets in 2020. Content optimizations for both microdata use and featured snippets have become quite popular. This popularity will continue to increase in 2021. Taking your place in Featured snippets can earn you high CTR in 2021.

In fact, let’s give you a very interesting statistic: The CTR rates obtained by websites that appear in the top positions in organic results are calculated as approximately 19.6 percent. Sites that do not have a significant value in SERP rankings have increased to featured snippets and achieved a CTR rate of 8.6 percent. This is indeed a striking number: Almost half of the CTR achieved in organic ranking results.

So it’s definitely time to add microdata to your strategy. Because powerful featured snippets have the power to steal serious clicks even from the top organic results. You may try to have a look at the Google Schemas to get to know microdata.

Test Your Website Issues

You can quickly analyze your site

Analyze!

You May Also Like

• Take Your Rank Higher: What Can Mobile-First Indexing Do?
• Featured Snippets: How To Optimize Your Content for Them?
• 7 Content Marketing Trends to Watch in 2021
• Call Them Back! 5 Reasons Why People Are Leaving Your Website
• Speed Index