After a year of unexpected events, what can we expect from SEO for 2021? Which trends will be the most important? Here are the 4 SEO trends that we think are most relevant to share with our partners:

1. SEO strategy focused on the user and their search intent

The cornerstone of a good SEO strategy will continue to be putting yourself in the user’s shoes and asking yourself whether your content really has value for them, whether the brand is trustworthy and whether the website has good usability.

This is not a new trend, but every year consumer behavior changes and your SEO strategy needs to keep up with it. With Google focusing more on satisfying the user’s search intent, it becomes more important for any marketer to learn what they are searching for. Attention needs to be paid both to the response time of your pages and to providing the most searched content types and formats, be it video, article, podcast, PDF, etc.

This is the time for brands to forget a bit about themselves and cater to visitors with content that caters to them, not just text that talks about their products or the company. It is also important not to create any difficulties for users to find your content (e.g. not using forced pop-ups, forcing registrations, etc.).

Update the keywords on your pages using an SEO analysis platform or even by analyzing the first few Google results when performing a search – what are the first few pages of the search doing to rank well? After all, google is already showing which results meet the users’ intentions, according to its algorithm. It is also important to constantly analyze the most searched search terms within your site, aggregating this data to make a content map.

2. Follow Google’s updates

When Google updates its algorithm, it makes SEO professionals adapt so that they can maintain the organic ranking of their sites. And in 2020, some changes were announced for 2021.

Reinforcing what we have already discussed, about the greater importance for user experience, with the BERT update, the algorithm will give even more importance to the UX (User Experience) of the sites. It will be necessary to correct possible errors that were not previously detected by Google. It is necessary to pay even more attention to issues such as page loading speed, mobile version of the sites, HTTPS security protocol, image optimization, among other factors.

The set of these page experience metrics becomes even more important with the introduction of Core Web Vitals, which goes into effect in 2021.

Give your users a pleasant experience and Google will do the same for you.

3. Mobile Versions

As you can see, the SEO trends for 2021 are interconnected. Ensuring a good browsing experience on your site on mobile devices will be one of the key points for achieving good organic rankings in 2021.

There is no longer any point in just meeting the minimum SEO requirements for mobile, while the focus is on desktop. Despite the exponential increase in internet use through mobile devices, Google was prioritizing, until 2020, the indexing of desktop pages, which was generating a mismatch in rankings. As of March 2021, Google will prioritize cell phones before desktop versions. This is why, for some SEO experts, Google will be practically ignoring the desktop versions of our sites, given the size of the new importance of the mobile versions, which will define the rankings.

4. More Automation

Today we are already able to automate several SEO tasks, and in 2021, the trend is to have even more possibilities for automations. This is mostly in internal functions, with industry-leading tools launching features to implement changes to websites. This is the dynamism in day-to-day work that every team wants, freeing up SEO tasks and focusing on additional strategies to improve website performance.

Conclusion

It is necessary to be always up to date to be competitive in SEO, since every year Google presents more than 3600 small changes in its algorithms. In 2021, it will no longer work just to focus on the network of backlinks for the site that, until then, was already optimized for SEO. Focus on the user! We also know that reading an article about SEO trends for 2021 is not enough. Count on partners who will help you redirect your site’s SEO strategy with the new Google indexing guidelines, as is the case of Agência Vision Comunicação, and be prepared to meet the demands for your product/service that will arrive organically.