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Search engine optimization or SEO is an efficient way to attract more visitors to your online platform. If you use it properly, that is. Nevertheless, we are at a point where ignoring it would be a mistake. It doesn’t matter if you want to gather more leads, boost brand awareness, or sell a product, this is a crucial element of a successful marketing strategy. It increases the website’s visibility in the Search Engine Results Page, or SERPS, to attract more organic traffic.

Today, companies have the opportunity to outsource some of their work. Thankfully, there are companies like WebQuest agency that provide these services. Since we are talking about a concept that constantly evolves, following all the latest trends is an absolute must. Otherwise, you can fall behind, which nobody wants. Let us take a look at some of the relevant trends to look for in 2021.

1. Data and Analytics

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Data and analytics play a vital role in the world of business. At the same time, we can see that it includes their SEO efforts as well. Without insight into the data, learning about your SEO’s effectiveness in the past is almost impossible. Data provides an opportunity to understand buyers, envisage campaigns and create personalized messages.

By using analytics, you can check bounce rate, have an insight into the traffic, the best keywords to rank, and what’s the page’s load time. It's needless to say that you cannot do it without using an effective method or tool that captures information and uses it. Knowing all this information will provide a better understanding of what you should do next.

2. Voice Search

In the last couple of years, voice search technology has come a long way. Nowadays, we have many innovations like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant. With every invention, technology got more effective and more popular. In 2016, one in five Google searches on android was made via voice search. According to predictions, roughly 55% of all households will own a smart speaker by 2022.

How this translates to SEO? Well, to optimize your voice search, you will need to consider keywords. You can do it by identifying longer phrases people use in their everyday communication and come up with long-tail keywords. The reason is that these voice searches are usually longer than traditional keywords. Furthermore, people can perform these in their native language, which is a plus.

3. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is altering the way people interact with online content. Google developed RankBrain, a groundbreaking, machine-learning AI algorithm used to process search results. It goes through all the relevant search results even when a user enters an unusual query, which is a pretty common occurrence. Its ability to improve itself without human intervention is what makes it impressive.

Sure, this makes the task of meeting standards much harder. In some cases, it requires a change in approach. Instead of using black hat tactics, it is better to focus on making excellent content that complements the target audience. While we can see that RankBrain is not new, it looks like that it will become more significant in the future. So, you should start paying attention to it today.

4. Video Marketing

After Google, YouTube is the most popular search engine with more than one billion users. If you haven’t paid attention to videos so far, now is the time to do it. To get the most of it, you will need to optimize the channel’s name and description. Instead of focusing on creating a long one overloaded with keywords, keep it short and sweet.

That doesn’t mean that keywords are not relevant in this case. To optimize a video for YouTube, you should use YouTube’s autocomplete option. Start typing the video’s subject, and some recommendations will pop-up in the search field. Of course, these are related to keywords used for optimizing a video for reaching the target audience.

5. Mobile Optimization

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Since the majority of searches come from mobile devices, this is what you should focus on. It became so big that Google switched to mobile-first indexing two years ago. It means that the search engine uses the mobile version of a website for ranking and indexing. If you know that around 60% of all searches came from mobile devices in 2019, this is not a surprise.

With the constant growth of mobile users in the world, the potential seems limitless. To make your page is mobile-friendly, make sure the search engine sees the content as lazy-loaded content. Plus, use exactly the same meta robots tags on mobile and desktop sites. So, content mobile optimization is no longer a choice it became a necessity.

Summary

All the predictions say that SEO will only get more complex in the future. Therefore, it is vital to stay on top of your place in the rankings. There’s no better way to do that than following the newest trends and making the most out of them.