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It is nothing to hide that Google always keeps on updating its algorithm, especially that is related to SEO or Digital Marketing. Every year there appears something new that compels the marketers to implement the same to drive better results in their online business. This year, 2021 has also come up with a handful of secrets that can awe you when you introduce them in your digital marketing strategy.
Before talking about the trending SEO factors of 2021, let us have a brief description of what is SEO. Those who are new to this or planning to take their business online should go through this before checking out the tactics.
What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing practice by which you can increase the quantity and relevancy of the traffic, generating more organic results for the website. Usually, the entire process has two major steps – on-page optimization and off-page optimization. Both of them optimize the factors responsible for drawing higher rankings of the website either externally or internally.
On-page factors – These are mainly the title tags, content, site speed, page URLs, internal linking, image alt tags, etc.
Off-page factors – These are usually the links that connect to your site from other sites of the same niche.
How SEO of a Website Works?
No matter which search engine you consider, for example – Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, etc. all of them act as a crawler. You can also call them spiders, the automated robot kind. The search engine crawls the entire website to gather relevant information related to the searches.
It navigates to all your web pages and collects all kinds of information that represent your site. This helps the search engines to index the pages and rank the site for better results. Some important data acquired by a search engine is page speed, title tags, social links, internal links, backlinks, and many more.
Stats and facts
We all know, how important is SEO in an online business. It boosts online visibility, draws a high volume of traffic, triggers high conversions, generates more leads, and eventually amplifies the business sales.
But do you know, 95% of search traffic in Google is generated from the first result page and the top-ranked sites? If you are unfortunate enough to rank your site on the first page, you will be ending up driving at most 5% of traffic to your website.
Will you be satisfied with such results? Of course, not. Any business moving online aims to drive home a good percentage of traffic. This never happens without good quality content on your SEO-friendly website.
Are you desperate to make your site appear on page one of Google? Never forget to optimize your website with the SEO-friendly factors that are responsible for building high website traffic.
Here in the following section, we have listed down a few SEO tactics. Embracing them in your business can help you to start this new year 2021 with a bang.
10 Best SEO Tactics you Must Consider in 2021
1. Create a High-Quality User Experience
Creating a quality user-experience is very substantial. No matter how great your website content is if you fail to deliver a positive user-experience you can hardly enjoy a good volume of traffic to your site. Of course, no one likes to stay connected to a site that showers negative UX. They will quickly leave the site, looking for other alternatives. This makes the most crucial factor responsible for building your SEO.
To ensure a better user experience, you need to boost the readability factor of your website content.
Check out the following few factors that influence the user experience of a site;
Creating quality content: Quality content represents that the content is relevant, informative, to-the-point, and zero plagiarism. Adding great ideas and thoughts and creating sentences with zero grammatical mistakes add value to the content.
Adding white spaces and paragraphs: Shorter paragraphs with multiple white spaces make the content attractive and eye-catching. Just imagine you have lengthy content with no paragraphs and you have content with multiple paragraphs and short sentences. Which one will you prefer to read? Obviously, the second one. That’s the trick.
Including bullet points and sub-headings: Another factor that influences the user experience of a site is content with bullet points and sub-headings. Introducing bullet points and breaking the content into multiple headings also turn the content appealing.
Adding images: Instead of writing textual content, you can even add a few images to your content. This makes the content more authentic and attractive at the same time.
Making the site good for navigation: Is the site good for navigation? Every visitor wants to navigate the entire site to get accurate information related to their query. Hence, an easy-to-navigate website is very much needed. Otherwise, it will take no time for the visitor to leave the site.
A single miss out on the above-mentioned factors can drive huge bounce rates to the doorstep, affecting the SEO of the business a lot.
2. Focus on Voice Search Optimization
Do you know, 25% of US adults and young adults are using voice search to make a query or find a query? It is expected that the rate will hit 55% by the year 2022. Hence, this year 2021 will be a year for smart search, voice search. As a consequence, paying more attention to voice search optimization is very important.
Unlike text search, voice search is getting more and more trendy. It saves time and effort of typing the entire sentence. Not just that, people are now using voice assistants like Amazon Echo or Google Home as a part of their daily routines.
Let us explain this with a few proved statistics;
- 72% of people are now relying on voice smart devices for their daily work.
- 2 in 5 adults are using voice search at least once every day.
- 25 of people use voice search on their mobile devices.
- Voice search has driven $1.8 billion in sales for the eCommerce business.
Thus, for a digital marketer, showing accurate results based on voice search queries is very important. It is equally essential to your textual search optimization.
3. Use More Internal Linking
Links are the most significant addition to the SEO strategy. Not just in improving search engine rankings, internal linking contributes a lot to SEO.
Some compelling advantages that make SEO experts think twice before ignoring internal linking are –
Internal linking boosts website usability through anchor texts – It eases out the user’s navigation, making it more convenient for the user to travel from one link to another. However, to ensure this, the anchor texts should be more relevant and specific to the content.
Internal linking builds authority for the website – By linking one content to another, makes the website content much more informative and authentic at the same time. This helps readers to gain proper knowledge of a particular subject.
Internal linking improves the page views of a site – With the inclusion of anchor texts, visitors find it easier to navigate from one web page to another to gain more knowledge. Following the links and discovering new pages relevant to the content increase the page views, making the page appear on the first page of the search engine.
Internal linking reduces bounce rates and improve page rankings – Bounce rates are decreased when the visitors spend more time on a particular website. Internal linking intends to perform exactly the same thing. By retaining visitors on the site, actually decreases the bounce rates and improves the website ranking, boosting the quality score of the site.
Internal linking helps search engines to crawl and index – Google (or any other search engine) crawls the entire site to bring out the necessary information and index the site accordingly. Following the internal linking, the search engine visits the entire website without any miss. This helps in finding the deeper pages and ranking them higher on Google.
4. Earn High-Quality Backlinks
After grasping the benefits of internal links, it’s time to leverage high-quality backlinks for better SEO. Before focusing on the quality perks of backlinks, let us describe what a backlink is in SEO.
A quality backlink is derived as a link created to make a connection between one website to another. Earning such links adds value to the website, making it much more trustworthy for the visitors. This makes backlinks valuable for SEO.
Earning backlinks is nothing but a part of the off-page optimization process. An SEO expert ensures generating backlinks from high-authority sites. These links lead the visitors from the external sites to the internal pages of a website. This is indeed the most sophisticated way of ranking a website on Google.
Whenever you decide to link your pages to an external site, ensure the page you choose (in terms of page authority, content, search engine accessibility, and so on), the anchor text, follow or no follow the link – all have a great impact on the SEO.
5. Learn User Search Intent
Do you know what’s the best tactic to drive in more relevant traffic and build conversions through SEO? By learning the user search intent. Just targeting the keywords in your web content and sticking to the exact phrases are not enough to draw in high traffic. This is when you need to research user intent or search intent.
A user intent defines the intention of the user while searching for a query in a search engine. For example, if a user searches for “best continental restaurants near me”. It means the online user is looking for the best restaurant that offers continental food items. Google understands the user intent and displays the content that fits the search query.
To make your content appear on the search result, you need to create content relevant to this topic instead of creating anything using that specific keyword. Such content will always fail to gain high traffic and a greater number of clicks.
Research on the user intent based on a specific keyword and learn about the topics that are currently in demand. Use those topics to enjoy better traffic and more leads.
6. Target Long-Tail Keywords
When you are planning a good SEO strategy, make sure you choose long-tail keywords instead of short ones for the overall campaign. Long-tail keywords are much more effective and more result-oriented than short-tail keywords. They are much more specific and can derive accurate results as per the relevant search.
In long-tail keywords, a long-phrase that includes more than three words is used so as to focus more on the business niche. For example, if you want to rank your food outlet on Google, you can use keywords like “best restaurant near me” instead of using “best restaurant”.
In contrast with the short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords are much comprehensible and understandable.
Following are some reasons why you should focus more on them;
- Long-tail keywords are much easier to rank as they attain low competition compared to the short ones.
- Long-tail keywords can make better conversion rates as they are more specific and the interested people are likely to get converted using the content.
- Long-tail keywords improve content visibility as they are more accurate and personalized.
How to list out proper long-tail keywords based on the business niche?
- Pay attention to the list of keywords suggested by Google.
- Check out the LSI keywords or the related searches that appear at the bottom of the search engine result page.
- This may take enough time but are much more impactful for your website SEO.
7. Create Amazing Title-Tags and Meta Descriptions
Two major factors that influence Google rankings are – title-tags and meta descriptions. Unless and until you work on these two, it is hard to draw the expected result through SEO.
When does a page earn a greater number of clicks? This happens when the title tag and the meta description of the content used on search results are attractive, specific, and keyword-rich.
The title tag of a site contains the title of the content. It should be eye-catching, short, crispy, and accurate. The best way to create a title tag is by adding a number followed by an adjective that glorifies the content. For example, 5 Budget-Friendly restaurants to satisfy your appetite.
Meta descriptions are basically a brief about the content of your page. The online users while searching for a query, read the meta description first before clicking the link and visiting the website. Hence, creating an accurate, appealing, and affirmative content for meta-description is pivotal. After all, it has a great impact on a page’s CTR and eventually on the search ranks.
Google allows 150-160 characters of a meta description for every content. Make sure you keep this in mind before creating one for your web page.
8. Optimize Page Loading Speed
Another most recommended SEO tactics are optimizing page loading speed. A website with a slower loading speed often faces trouble in gaining a greater number of clicks and high conversions. This is because many users expect the page to load within two seconds. When you fail to meet their expectations, the users take a second to hit the cross button and leave the page. This triggers high bounce rates and less click-through rates.
Several reasons are there that influence page loading speed. Just take a look;
Heavy codes – Heavy codes induced in a website often slows down the website speed. While designing a site, multiple times heavy CSS and JavaScript codes are used to style the content and improve the appearance of the site. Check out the unwanted heavy codes and eliminate them for better results.
Compress the high-quality images – To enhance the appearance of the website, developers often make use of high-quality images. Well, at one end you may find them suitable for your site. But they are highly responsible for cutting down the loading speed of a page. Compress the images and graphics and optimize the web page for better rendering.
Too many widgets and plugins – Have you used WordPress to develop your website? WordPress allows users to access plenty of free plugins. This excites the users to include them in their site, thus slowing down the overall page loading speed. The more widgets and plugins you choose on your site, the longer time it takes to load.
Too many redirects – Have you linked a specific address multiple times within your site? Redirects are used when there is a need to link between addresses. Too many redirects often take time to change to a new address whenever a user clicks on the old address. This keeps the user waiting for a long time, affecting the SEO a lot.
Use online tools to check the website speed and improve the performance accordingly for better SEO.
9. Deploy Featured Snippets
Over 11% of search results have a featured snippet. They are quite a trend. The best thing about these snippets is they are displayed at the very top of the search engine result page. However, it only happens when you have the exact answer to the search query. This makes the site stand out from the competitors, having the ability to steal clicks and even the highest rank results.
Creating snippets is not that easy. It requires certain knowledge and expert hands to develop extremely high-quality content.
Read the following points to understand the ways to optimize your content for featured snippets;
- Make the content short, precise, and to-the-point.
- Don’t miss out on adding headers to make it easier for Google to crawl and find the exact content.
- Make sure the content boosts cross-device usability.
- Research and use strong resources to create such quality content.
Follow the basic tips and develop a good featured snippet that is easier to rank on Google.
10. Go for Mobile-First Indexing
The last yet not the least one is mobile-first indexing. It is no secret that mobile technology has brought the world into fingertips. The inception and high demand for this technology have compelled the marketers to introduce mobile-first indexing in their marketing strategy.
Here we have listed down some facts and stats that will help you to make the best decision;
79% of online buyers are using smartphones or mobile devices to make an ideal purchase.
80% of online buyers prefer to use mobile devices inside a physical store to browse online reviews of the products, compare the price, or to find alternative options.
The important thing about this tactic is even Google rank a website based on this factor. If Google finds a mobile version of your site, it will crawl and index it first compares to the desktop version of a site. This increases the rank of the website, making it one important factor in boosting your website SEO.
Get Experts from Ethane to Optimize your SEO Strategy
We guess you have noted down the aforesaid SEO tips and tricks to earn high rankings and improve your business sales. Optimize your web pages according to the above-mentioned tips and enjoy high visibility on Google. Make sure you don’t forget to satisfy Google’s algorithm (or other algorithms of the search engine you prefer) while drafting your SEO strategy.
Seek the help of the SEO experts, being one of the best digital marketers, we are specialized in drawing a good impact on the quality of the SEO services.
Remember, the better is your SEO strategy, the better will be your business outcomes.
