Five SEO trends for 2021: CTR is dropping, so fix headlines and target featured snippets. YouTube matters more than ever. Core Web Vitals become a ranking factor, so optimize page speed and mobile experience. Long-form research content earns more backlinks. Google now prioritizes E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
All right. So today we are going to talk about SEO trends for 2021. All right. So let's jump into it. This is not a completely exhaustive list. I'm just going to give you a couple that I think will be a big deal. So first and foremost is just thinking about how click-through rates are continuing to decrease. So click-through rates, um, over the years have changed because Google is continuing to adjust the search engine result pages. They're continuing to have the ads blend in and maybe they're making the search engine result pages smaller and mobile. Depending on the page that you get, maybe depending on the industry you come through, maybe it looks significantly different, right? So if you have local locations, you know, your organic results are going to be pushed even lower. You have to optimize for local search as well. So there's a lot of factors that go into it, right? So how do you combat click-through rates decreasing? Well, what you can do is continue to think about how you can write really enticing headlines and meta descriptions so you can entice people to click through, bring people to the point of sale. You can use a tool like ClickFlow. Which is the— full disclosure, that's the software that I have to help you with that. Or you can just do it using Google Search Console, which is completely free. You can just sort by pages that have a high impression count but a low click-through rate and you can try to get a higher click-through rate that way. That's one way to do it. And then also thinking about how you can get more featured snippets and, you know, so you can get that rank 0 position, right? So those are just a couple of things to take a look at over there. Now, number 2 is the world of video. So YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and the algorithm them still very powerful, and people might be thinking, oh, YouTube is— it's saturated, it's, um, you know, a lot of people are doing it already, it's too late for me to get in. The reality is that some of the top YouTube subscribers, depending on the channel size, maybe 5 million plus, 1 million plus, 100,000 plus, 10,000 plus, they're all growing very quickly. Over the last 3 months or so, they've grown by 10%. So these channels are continuing to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So, you know, it's, it's much easier now. You know, you can create videos using a phone, you have a lot of— you have a whole host of tools to do it. So I don't think there's any excuse to not do video. Even if you're shooting it. I think more important than your video is actually the sound quality of, well, the sound quality in general. So, you want to make sure you have a good microphone. This one right here, this one is a Heil PR 40, and I love it. And I think the third one to take a look at is Core Web Vitals, right? So, this is going to become a factor in 2021. So, when you think about Core Web Vitals, you have to be thinking about how fast is your page loading, How stable is it when it comes to just from a visual standpoint, right? You know, are you using HTTPS? Are you thinking about what is the first input delay, right? So, some of these might be technical terms. And is it mobile-friendly? Is it safe browsing? All these different things, right? Core Web Vitals is are you creating a very good core, the way I see it, a core user experience that will help people. And that would be the third one. And then the fourth one would be around thinking about how you can create research content, right? So, whenever I find, you know, people writing stuff around, let's say, you know, jobs case studies or statistics case studies, things like that, those research-driven posts might take a lot longer, but they actually attract a lot more links, right? So, think about how you can create that. Maybe you do it once a year and that can help you go a long way. And the other one, people call it EAT, so it's expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, right? So Google's evaluating that more and more. So is your website getting cited? It doesn't have to be necessarily cited in terms of a link, but are people talking about it on the web? And are you seen as an expertise? So if you're writing about health stuff, are you a doctor? Are you actually cited as an expert? So all of that is taken into account now. Google's getting smarter and smarter, so you gotta think about that as well. And those are kind of the core things. I think there's a whole host of other stuff, but I think just to keep things simple for you, think about how you can create the best user experience, how you can make things fast, how you can create more long-form content, well-researched content. Don't just create long-form content for the sake of it, but that's gonna contribute to the EAT algorithm, right? I guess EAT within the Google algorithm. Think about how you can integrate video, because right now we're doing a video, and then this will be pushed over to podcasts as well. And then there's also podcast snippets to think about in the near future. How you can optimize for all of that. But at the core of this all is having really good content, right? So that doesn't go away. Just because you understand SEO doesn't mean you're necessarily thinking about good content, right? So that, they kind of go hand in hand. So that is it for today. 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