2021 SEO Trends Every Business Owner Should Consider

As a business owner, search engine optimization plays a vital role in attracting consumers to your website. SEO can help grow your website’s online visibility on the search engine results page, thus bringing more organic traffic to your website.

As the world of technology is always evolving, so is SEO. And it can get pretty competitive, especially if you’re a business owner. Let’s take a look at the value of SEO plus some of the trends that we may see in 2021.

The Value Of SEO

SEO is a crucial component in creating online visibility. It holds a lot of value when creating online content. When used strategically, SEO can help businesses drive organic traffic, optimize user experience and increase revenue. Here are four trends to consider in 2021:

Mobile Website Optimization Will Continue To Be Important

Back in 2019, Google introduced mobile-first indexing. This means that instead of looking primarily at a desktop version of a site for indexing and ranking, Google considers the mobile version. This makes sense given the fact that today around 2 billion people access the internet only using their smartphones. By 2025, we may see nearly three quarters of internet users accessing the web solely via mobile.

So when considering SEO trends, a really good place to start is by optimizing the mobile version of your website. Make sure you have a user-friendly page and that Google can crawl all of your pages.

Long-Form Content Will Continue To Rank Higher

There’s a lot of bad and misleading content on the internet these days. As a business owner and someone who’s marketing on the internet, consider the content that you’re creating. For SEO purposes, long-form content that is quality-driven and that aims to keep people engaged will typically rank higher in search engine results, and will likely continue to do so in 2021.

Other things to consider when creating long-form content are how it visually looks to your readers and what they’re getting out of it. Make sure that the text is broken up into sections using headings and subheadings and that it’s scannable. Also consider linking to other relevant and authoritative sources.

Local SEO Will Play A Key Role In SEO Strategies

Oftentimes, people use search engines to search for quality local goods and services. Because of this, one of the SEO trends we will likely see on the rise in 2021 is local SEO playing a key role in SEO strategies. From what I’ve observed, this is partly due to zero-click searches.

A zero-click search is when a user’s query is addressed in the featured snippet of a search result. Have you ever noticed that when you search for something on Google that there’s a box that usually contains the answer you’re looking for up at the top of the SERP? That’s a featured snippet. When this happens, the user doesn’t have to click on the link to visit the actual website, and this results in a zero-click search. And many of these zero-click searches are likely local searches. Consider that 46% of all Google searches are related to finding local information, and one study found that 49% of all Google searches are zero-click.

SEO professionals often focus on ranking for high-traffic keywords rather than serving the search engine bots with well-written pillar content. As a small-business owner, it may be more beneficial to aim to get snippets that address honest questions or concerns for the consumer. Featured snippets are a good way to get on the first SERP. Likewise, they are also an effective way to direct traffic to your platform instead of your competitors’.

At our agency, for example, we have noticed that consumers often ask how to get more followers on TikTok or how to use TikTok to generate more sales. We saw this opportunity and created pages that addressed those questions. As a result, we got a featured snippet, and our local website traffic increased by 40% in 2020.

To encourage Google to reward your site by delivering a snippet, make sure that your site content is structured correctly, and factor in keywords that are relevant along with question-based queries.

Voice Searches Will Impact Search Engine Results

The power of voice recognition has come a long way. And as voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant have gotten increasingly better, they’ve also gotten more popular. According to a study done by Juniper Research, voice assistants will likely be used in roughly 55% of U.S. households by 2022.

Because of this, we’re starting to see voice searches affect search engine results. So when thinking about your SEO, consider selecting words or phrases that people use in their everyday lives as keywords. When people type, they tend to abbreviate words and phrases more compared to when they vocalize them.

Final Thoughts

As we progress as a society, things are only going to get more and more complex. And as business owners, we have to constantly stay in the loop of the ever-changing world of technology, which includes SEO trends.

There are so many opportunities to increase your online presence. That said, there’s no better time than 2021 to learn everything you can about SEO and what it can do for your business.