As an online marketing agency Manchester, SEO is our bread and butter, after all, it is the most effective way to attract customers to your website – if it is used correctly!
SEO is constantly changing and evolving, just look at how often Google announces it has updated its algorithm. It is worth our efforts to stay on top of these changes though, as research has shown that up to 80% of searchers focus exclusively on organic results, and ignore paid listings that appear above them. On top of this, around 28% of these searchers convert into paying customers – which is always a good thing – especially this year!
Here at SEO MCR, digital marketing agency Manchester, our Search Engine Optimisation service is one of our most popular – thanks in no small part to our experienced team. They work hard to keep track of all of the relevant metrics for you, including backlinks, social shares, and traffic to name just three!
This guide will give you a brief overview of the search engine optimisation trends we are expecting to see in 2021, which may affect our SEO strategy for your business:
Trend One: Artificial Intelligence will play a bigger role
Artificial Intelligence is already affecting how we interact with online content, and so Google’s Ai Algorithm – known as RankBrain – is definitely something worth keeping an eye on. RankBrain has a unique ability to learn, which means that it will only improve with time.
How do we optimise your website content for RankBrain? While Google hasn’t shared the exact details of how RankBrain works, we can determine that user experience is becoming more and more important to them. So, we know that we need to work on captivating and engaging your website audience with useful and well-organised content that not only increases your click through rate (CTR) but also the amount of time visitors spends on site as well.
Trend Two: Ranking content that fulfils the EAT principle higher
EAT is a Google principle that refers to Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and is how the score content quality for ranking success. Understanding EAT as a principle and applying it to your content is particularly critical in “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) sectors such as health care and finance.
Ensuring you only post quality content on your site involves not only knowing your buyers well so that you can create the kind of content they value, but also backing up any claims you make with facts and statistics, as well as linking to reputable sites (such as .gov and .edu).
Trend Three: Using long-form content to help improve the SERPs
Gone are the days when you could just post a 500-word blog every month and sit back – research has shown that posts of 3000 words or more not only achieve three times more traffic and four times more shares but also 3.5 times more backlinks than articles of around 900 to 1200 words.
Content posted on your site therefore needs to be long-form – as long as you can maintain the quality. Every post you share should aim to inform your website visitors of information which keeps them engaged and which they want to share.
Trend Four: You need to understand Data and Analytics to remain ahead in rankings
Data science allows us to understand your customers better, therefore letting us create targeted messages and visualise campaigns better as well. Analytics can help us to look at which pages of your website are getting the most traffic, which pages customers are bouncing off your site on, which pages are too slow, and so on. The two can work together to inform us not only where we are succeeding, but also where we are failing and what needs more attention.
Trend Five: Featured snippets will become even more prominent
If you read trend three above and have started panicking about having to write lots of long posts, don’t worry too much. Targeting featured snippets is another way to achieve prominence in the rankings – and they tend to be very brief! Google draws information for featured snippets from chunks of information on your sites, such as FAQs, How-to Guides, and Bullet Points. To help get your content into a featured snippet, then, you should focus on creating content around question-based queries and their relevant keywords.
Trend Six: Image optimisation will become even more important
Image search has also evolved dramatically over the past few years, from just being things we could look at things that help us to purchase products and obtain more information. Image optimisation is definitely part of Google’s long-term plan, as they have been insisting that images have been properly marked up and optimised for a long time.
Trend Seven: Local search listings will be included in ALL SEO strategies
When people think of the internet, they tend to think of it on a global scale, but actually, most people use it to find things that are close to them. Local SEO is evolving and is becoming more important all the time. Google My Business needs to be an important part of every SEO strategy, therefore, to ensure every business is making the most of their opportunity to get into Google’s local pack.
Trend Eight: Predictive Search will improve
As well as RankBrain, Google has another AI tool called ‘Discover’. This content recommendation tool identifies patterns in user behaviour over time, learns these habits, and uses it to identify which potential content will most likely be of interest to them.
As you can see, SEO is getting more and more complex as Google uses more and more tools to help it to understand what users are searching for, in a bid to deliver them the most relevant content for their search. Metrics are constantly changing, and it is vital to have the right support in order to stay at the top of the rankings.
Here at SEO MCR, we can offer you all of the online services you need to stand out online. We can help you with SEO, PPC, Web Development and have even been named as one of the leading social media agency Manchester too.
