2021 will be a special year! We can no longer rely on what has happened in previous years. We have to be ready for dynamic changes. Pandemic has strongly influenced the development of the online sales market, and we need to keep pace with it. How do we do that? Here are tips from SEO specialists for the 2021 year!
2021 is the year to get serious about both republishing and utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology as part of the process. The amount of content you need for your site is finite in nature, so instead of always looking for new content to blog about, focus on your key content, create. a process to regularly revise it, and republish it to build an asset of your content over your time as you add more content to it. When revising your content, use tools that incorporate NLP technology to give you an estimate as to what topics top search results have and therefore what content you should focus on revising to get higher in the search results.
Neal Schaffer, Author, The Age of Influence, nealschaffer.com
In May 2021, Google is going to make core web vitals a ranking factor. These vitals are three: loading (largest contentful paint), interactivity (first input delay), and visual stability (cumulative layout shift). So make sure your website is ready for this update. Speaking about SEO for content, I’d recommend focusing on publishing research content, creating visual content assets, and publishing well-organized content hubs with keywords that will perfectly match search intent. It’s a way to traffic, backlinks, and share boost.
Lesley Vos, Content Strategist at Bid4Papers
Piggy back your way to the top:
Found a good keyword you can’t rank for? Don’t give up just yet.
Scan the top 20 results for outdated blog posts. Contact the post’s writer and offer to update the post’s content (with concrete examples of content that’s outdated). Add a link back to your site and earn twice – referral traffic to your site and a quality backlink on relevant keywords.
Elad Levy, VP Product & Marketing, Fixel
Let’s be open to new avenues of development and ways to reach your customers. If your business, no matter how big or small, has new features or functions, be sure to let your customers know! Use Facebook, Google ADS, and word of mouth marketing.
In the coming year, it’s also worth betting on micro-influencers who cover specific topics!
Andrej Csizmadia, Growth Marketer, Post Affiliate Pro
Take Time to Build Inbound Links.
A significant ranking element that can improve both conventional and local SEO is inbound connections.
Building backlinks is not an operation for plug-and-play, but you may introduce a few tried and tested approaches. Each of them is to message persons that you have a connection with in your field. Contractors, manufacturers, dealers, adjacent firms, associates, and wholesalers may involve these.
Begin by creating a list of these firms. Then, by searching for pages on their sites where you could position a contextual connection, optimize your method. From here, you will contact the companies on your list and recommend placements for the connections.
Guest posting is another way you can create contextual inbound connections. You may agree to produce content for them that involves a connection to your site if the organizations on your list have a forum.
You may also look at creating backlinks from larger places, such as Forbes, in certain instances.
Eliza Nimmich I’m the Co-Founder and COO of Tutor the People
2021 is the year of machine learning in SEO. You can hack Google’s artificial intelligence algorithm, called RankBrain, by optimizing your content for your user’s search intent.
What are your users trying to find out? Often, the most in-depth article doesn’t win. In your content, give the user the thing that they’re looking for are the top of the page, right away. Then expand on that quick answer in the rest of the article.
If your content is well optimized for search and well-written, it will keep the user engaged. And the Google algorithm will reward you accordingly.
Garit Boothe, SEO Consultant at Garit Boothe Digital
Don’t forget old school SEO tactics. Meta descriptions, title tags, they all are still relevant. Start with the basics before blowing full-steam ahead.
Guillermo Gette, Founder and CEO at Workast
When we talk about SEO strategy in 2021, we talk about high-quality backlinks. As you might already know, backlinks are especially valuable for your SEO strategy as they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. That is what makes link building is a crucial part of 2021 overall SEO strategy.
Regardless of their size, companies can always benefit from more links. The more links you have, the more authority your site will have — which translates to a positive effect on a site’s ranking position or search visibility.
To get those high-quality backlinks, you can focus on creating content that will naturally drive high-value links back to your site. Those include infographics, guest posts, or educational marketing videos.
You can approach other sites to feature your content and ask them to link back to your piece. In turn, you can do the same for them. In this case, Even just being mentioned on high-quality websites can give your brand a boost.
Andre Oentoro, CEO, Breadnbeyond
Multichannel marketing.
In 2021, we will still be facing the effects of a pandemic. Competition in the market will increase rapidly, and we must prepare for this. However, many consumers will remain online, so the biggest challenge will be to meet their demands.
So focus on developing different ways of getting to your website! The more points of contact a potential customer has, the better! It is up to the customer to choose the method that suits them best.
Sona Pisova, Content Specialist, LiveAgent
For 2021, make sure to use software to analyze the SEO performance of your content. In our case, we use Clearscope to see what terms we need to hit to fare better than our competitors. Moreover, it’s really useful to know how many times a term needs to be used in order not to overoptimize for a certain keyword.
Petra Odak, Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals
Best SEO tip would be do not completely focus on dofollow links. From my research from 2 years till the latest algorithm update. I’ve done research on competitors thoroughly and got to the conclusion that percentage of nofollow and dofollow links doesn’t have a direct impact on DA,DR, trust flow and citation flow percentage.
Next tip is to focus on user generated content more. Creating your own content, optimizing it, creating backlinks, promoting the content takes a lot of money, labor and time. Instead create a strategy where the influencers come to you and create content for you. You just have to attract the right kind of influencers(Relevant to the niche!)
Before jumping to any offpage optimizations, make your website SEO friendly. Still 70% sites doesn’t follow this rule. Correct the base and everything will flow on
Jyothi Tulasi, SEO Outreach Specialist, smartkarrot.com
Building quality backlinks in tandem with strong keyword research will be the way to rank your page higher in 2021.
Keerthi Rangan, Content Marketing Strategist, Adaface
In the coming year, we should focus on providing a transparent and straightforward online purchasing process. Convenient payment methods, responsiveness, or functional layout of the website are all factors. Taking care of every detail of our website will certainly be of great importance.
Above all, our website should be Mobile Friendly. More and more people are using their phones while shopping. We should adjust our website to this way of shopping and making payments.
Gaetano Caruana, CEO, Early Parrot
Contrary to conventional wisdom, content will not be king for SEO in 2021. While it’s certainly important, those who succeed in SEO will think about usability. Google will value more sites that drive the most engagement. Those sites that focus on bounce rate by improving page speed, and by making their content more visual and interesting will find that they succeed. Put user experience first to succeed in 2021.
Neal Taparia, Co-founder, Solitaired
Prepare your website for the big core Google Algorithm update in May 2021. Focus on improving the core web vitals, mobile friendliness, security, and other things. Check out this guide to know more – https://builtvisible.com/googles-page-experience-update-and-core-web-vitals-everything-you-need-to-know/
Vikas Kalwani, SEO Specialist at uSERP, vikaskalwani.com
Technical page optimization has gained increasing importance, especially as Google announced their prioritization of UX and Web Vitals for 2021. This means marketers must maintain a close relationship with webmasters, collaborating on how to best increase website speed and functionality. It will also be important to keep a tab on Google Analytics and Search Console metrics like bounce rate, CTR, etc.
The success of in-depth case-studies and step-by-step guides in 2020 also points towards opportunities for content marketing in 2021. This type of content, often backed by statistics and specific stories, is generally more optimized for search engines due to higher average word counts and the number of backlinks. Marketers should strive to offer extensive examples along with unique insights to engage readers and demonstrate authority. Case-studies and guides are a natural outlet for this goal. If the company is relatively private and does not desire to share its own experience as examples, marketers can instead field ideas from platforms like HARO or discussion boards like Reddit and Indie Hackers (with the consent of users)
Isabelle Wisco, Marketing & Growth Analyst, Lido
SEOs so often forget about long tail keywords which are a great fit in terms of conversion for your customer base but have a low volume. For example let’s take the keyword “alternative to cision” with a keyword volume of 30 per month. You might look at it and say this is too low of volume to go after this keyword. But think about the types of people searching a keyword like this. It’s customers who are dissatisfied with Cision as a product, these are idea customers for something like JustReachOut.io which is a competitor. Since these customers are dissatisfied they are prime targets for converting to a customer. Will this search volume grow in next 3 months? 6 months? You need to think long term. If the answer is yes – you should focus on this keyword, it might not be a crazy ROI right away but with time you’ll see more relevant traffic and higher conversion on a keyword like this.
Dmitry Dragilev, Owner, SmallBizTools Blog
- SEO + UX = SXO is a trend that merges classic SEO efforts with the enhanced functionality of the website and user experience. Every aspect of an online presence should be user-oriented, e.g., each page should achieve set goals while not hindering the experience of the user. This means no pop-ups, forced registrations, and so on. Behavioural aspects that affect SEO that are equally important: conversion, bounce rate, page per session ratio, user-friendly menus, easy navigation, tables of contents and mobile-friendly interfaces.
- Longer, engaging content that answers search intent is the way to go! At the same time, mobile-friendly features are a priority. Furthermore, all educational materials, tutorials, explanations, detailed FAQs should be adapted to increase chances of being included in Google Direct Answers.
- Content creators should also remember about their current customer base and propose them with viable materials. Basically, it is important to put the client perspective first and deliver valuable content. As usual, personas will help you to create more closely target videos, articles, podcasts and online events. But be aware that your creations shouldn’t rely on keyword volume metrics alone.
Maja Wiśniewska, Marketing Manager, SMSAPI
Get your offer to the customer online.
What does this mean? Adapting your marketing efforts, including SEO, to the new form of search and customer demands.
A second good tip for the new year will be to develop marketing funnels, webinars, and sales processes well. Let’s focus on turning our strengths into value for our audience. We can also monetize our knowledge!
Andrzej Bieda, CMO, Landingi
Stop jumping through tons of hoops to get others to link to you or get someone to promote your articles. If someone is making it hard to work with them forget them and move on, it’s usually not worth your time. Go after opportunities where people you reach out to are responsive and want to work with you. Example: If you apply to write for a publication and you do not hear back, don’t follow up and pester them, there is a reason they didn’t get back to you, save your energy and move on to a different publication.
Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Growth Marketing at Nextiva
Like every year before it, it’s going to be equally important to focus on generating quality back links to your site to build your domain authority.
A couple of ways you can do this:
Look for guest posting/back-link exchange channels in Slack or groups on different social networks.
Submit quotes to article request on HARO (help a reporter out) or Qwoted
Datis Mohsenipour | Director of Marketing | heyorca.com
Invest in SEO marketing tools. If you are equipped with the right tools for SEO, you will enhance the user experience and have great success in your strategies’ performance.
Irina Weber, Content Strategist at SE Ranking
Utilize all on-page opportunities to maximize SEO benefits: Maximizing all on-page elements of your article is key for increasing ranking probability. Include primary and secondary keywords in the title, H2 and H3 headers. Include a relevant keyword as image alt text in all pictures. Make sure the primary keyword is in the title and meta description. You may also use Add Text To Image solutions. Integrate 2-4 relevant internal links throughout the article to signal relevancy. Use the primary keyword in your URL (i.e., www.yourwebsite.com/blog/primary-keyword). By strategically including the right keywords in the right places, Google will be able to interpret your content more clearly and it will increase your likelihood of ranking.
Anastasiya Klopova, Visme
Relaunch your content.
We’re so focused on creating new content, that we may often forget our best content may already exist on our website.
The first thing you need to do is to make sure you’re cleaning up and supervising old content regularly.
Start by looking at your old hits. Which one of them can be relaunched with little updating? Which ones are still relevant? How can you improve your audience’s reaction this time around?
You can often see quick and large gains in views just by making sure you’re relaunching your best content as soon as people forget about it.
Then, look into content that had the potential of being great, but wasn’t. Perform a post-mortem to figure out why that content wasn’t great. Did it miss the mark? Did it get overthrown by better results? Is it just a matter of some SEO issues?
Once you figure out what went wrong, update your content and relaunch it.
Make sure you’re doing one relaunch audit per year to rescue content and reach the most amount of viewers.
Will Cannon, CEO at Signaturely
Optimize for voice search.
Although voice search isn’t currently a part of Google’s algorithm, it is definitely affecting more and more the kind of results given to the user. And it’s not enough to follow SEO practices and hope for the best; voice searches often show different results to users than if they were typing their queries.
With Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant becoming more and more intelligent, users are embracing them more and more. And, although now they’re mostly used for quick searches, we can only expect users to keep expanding the topics they ask their AI to find for them.
Start by making sure your content is scannable and easy to read. Use shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs. Then, just like with SEO, focus on long-tail keywords and work your way down.
Finally, since voice search is all about short and quick answers, make sure you’re answering all of your users’ questions with a well-made FAQ page and a comprehensive knowledge base.
James Davis, Head of Marketing at Messagely
Good quality content.
Users are demanding more and more, and our efforts should focus on providing them with the most quality content possible. This will also relieve the burden on customer service departments. 2021 will be the year of self-service, and we need to help customers find the content they can use themselves.
Lukas Mehnert, CMO, Smartlook
It’s all about subheadings.
SEO isn’t just about fulfilling a query’s intent, it’s about how you fulfill it.
Nowadays it isn’t as important to repeat your keyword in your subheadings as it used to be. This frees up your precious subheading space to fill it up with better content.
To start, make sure your website supports long-tail keyword phrases. Instead of repeating your keywords on the subheadings, look at the subheadings as a natural extension of that keyword. How do they relate to it? How can they help the audience scan the content?
By looking into your subheadings and how well they interact with your main keyword, you’re not only improving them for SEO, you’re making sure to avoid all kinds of fluff and tangents, which, again, is a great thing in SEO.
So, what if your subheadings don’t fit in your article? Should you delete them forever? Not necessarily! Recycle them into their own content, and make sure you link them back to the article to get traffic flowing.
Lisa Dietrich, Founder at Let’s be crazy
Business life will continue to be online. Therefore, it is worth thinking about complimenting your activities with online events, webinars, and the sharing of valuable content and knowledge.
Another important tip is to loosen up your decision-making processes and react quickly to emerging changes and problems. It is difficult to create long-term strategies this year due to the prevailing pandemic.
Piotr Borkowicz, Digital Marketing Specialist, LiveWebinar
Focus on local SEO.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, customer habits have changed dramatically. People are moving less, favoring solutions that are close by to diminish their travel distances and to support local businesses.
If your business can provide in-person service, optimize your website for it.
Start by making sure your “Google My Business” profile is claimed and fully updated. If it hasn’t been updated, update it yourself with professional photos and encouraging client reviews.
Use it to reflect changing schedules, and make sure you’re including it as part of your marketing campaigns to give the customer a consistent experience.
Then, it’s time to focus on your content. Optimize your online content so it’s easy to search through voice commands. Make sure your website is 100% mobile-friendly. Create content based on local events, and engage with your local community through social media.
Finally, optimize for keywords like “X near me” to ensure your local community is always just a search away from you.
Max Benz, Founder at BankingGeek
Use SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to receive notifications every time your pages rank higher in search and every time you get a backlink. Use the tools to also do your research for topics, keywords and backlinks. I highly recommend taking the free class from Ahrefs “Blogging for Business”. Those tools are fundamental for SEO and make it so much easier and more fun to do SEO.
Helena Ronis, Co-founder and CEO, AllFactors
One of the hardest parts of doing SEO audit is to identify where to start.
Audits don’t need to be long, nor done in a way so that only technical people understand it. The purpose of the audit is to identify issues affecting organic search performance.
SEO audit should present a prioritized list of recommendations that should be actionable and their justifications that map the steps that need to be taken to improve organic search performance.
Shrey Gupta, Sr. SEO Executive, ProProfs
Two words: featured snippets.
For years, the ultimate SEO goal has been to muscle into the #1 spot on Google. But going into 2021, ‘position zero’ is becoming increasingly important.
The featured snippet works differently than other results; it tries to answer the searcher’s question without the need for a click.
With a snippet, you’ll still get lots of clicks thanks to the real estate they take up in the SERPs.
But you also get clout for being the authority on whatever the searcher is looking for. Plus, snippets are a favorite for voice search which has been growing too.
When chasing snippets, keep these three tips in mind:
– They’re mostly for long-tail keywords (think “How to add google analytics to Shopify”)
– Think about the format: step-by-step, lists and definitions all work well
– Answer the keyword question as concisely as possible with bullet points or a table
Ruth Haim, Co-Founder, Reconvert.io
Target keywords you want your audience to start searching.
Whenever I do keyword research or brief for a piece of content, I always look for all the options. Grab your seed keyword for the article, and create as many variations as possible. If you are targeting a word, let’s say “online marketing plan” it’s very easy to see that it’s very hard to rank for without going all-in.
Therefore look for the other combinations. Add industry. Now you have an online marketing plan for real estate, an online marketing plan for SaaS, etc. You might add business size, size of the plan, or even paper format. Combinations are endless. And if some of the combinations doesn’t show any meaningful data, I don’t bother. If the word makes sense from a business standpoint and I can see at least some of the similar keywords out there, I go for it.
Do you remember everyone advise you to go niche? It’s the same here. Even if it is an investment for the future. Big companies have plenty of resources they can spend just to protect their market, so you have to be very smart where you will focus your attention.
Matej Kukucka, Founder, Marketing Player
Positioning development will be crucial
Restraint in the area of Google results will be a big mistake. There is an increasing desire to enter the Internet with its ecommerce. So we should budget for positioning so that we are not pushed away by new competition.
Agnieszka Kuprianowicz, Marketing Specialist, Angry Nerds
In 2021 SEO will be about optimization of the user experience.
Google doesn’t like slow websites, your visitors don’t like slow websites either. The basic things like the fast website, clean design with UX practices and valuable content will make your visitors happy.
Content should focus on answering customer questions. The skyscraper Technique damaged content marketing. Users need actionable and helpful content. Can the article be useful with the best 99 tips and tactics? I don’t think so.
If you will think about how to create the best experience for your readers – good content architecture, links to high-quality resources, clear CTA, visualizations, you will be successful in organic traffic growth.
Evaldas Mockus, Director of SEO, blogger at growingsaas.com
