3 Important 2021 SEO Trends You Need to Know
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of growing your online business, blog, or eCommerce store. It helps you get in front of more eyes, which can generally lead to more potential leads and sales. As with seemingly every industry, the SEO space is constantly evolving and going through changes.
A key to a good SEO strategy is knowing the trends in the space in being able to adapt and adjust in response. In an effort to help you out this coming year, this article is going to go over some of the most important SEO trends you will need to know in 2021.
The Growing Importance of Mobile
With mobile devices being responsible for around half of all internet traffic, it is more important than ever to optimize your content and site to look good on phones. You want to ensure that no matter how people find and/or interact with your site, they will have a good experience.
A large part of the algorithms that search engines use is the quality and experience of your mobile offering. If your website or store isn’t optimized well, it may not rank as highly as it could have. In general, you want your mobile experience to be simple and personalized for the user. Navigating your site should also be a breeze. In addition to that, you need to ensure all-important content, photos and videos aren’t being hidden.
Also, with Google implementing mobile-first indexing back in 2019, the mobile versions of sites are used to decide rank. This is large because of how many people are making searches on mobile devices than in recent years.
Image Optimization Will Be Crucial
Optimizing the text content has always been important, and now, optimizing images is just as (if not more) important. This is especially true if you have an online store, as you want to attract those who are shopping through Google’s images.
Your images should be clearly and descriptively titled and names, you need to consider alt attributes and choose the right file type. For best results, consider adding your images to a dedicated sitemap as well. This can give your images a much better chance of appearing in search results.
In addition to helping your images rank highly on search engines, you also want to optimize their size. You want to reduce the file size of your images, without negatively affecting their quality too much. Doing this can help ensure images look great, while still keeping page load times low enough to not push potential visitors away.
Data and Analytics are Key
Data and analytics play a massive role in most businesses today, and this includes their WordPress SEO efforts. Without referring to the data, it can be difficult to know how successful your SEO has been in the past. Analytics can be used to check how fast your pages are loading, check bounce rates, see where your traffic is coming from, and which keywords you should be attempting to rank for.
Of course, be sure you have an efficient method or tool to help you capture this information and use it. Analytics should guide your SEO-based decisions, and help to track your progress. Using data is far from new, but it is coming to the point where it is almost a necessity. If you are not using data and analytics to understand your customers, and fine-tune your SEO efforts, it will be difficult to keep a high rank on search engines.
Whether you optimize your content and site for mobile devices or get serious with data and analytics, it is important to be aware of the various trends in 2021 that will have an impact on the SEO industry.
