The top 5 SEO trends to watch in 2021

Hot off the heels of a big Google Core Update in December and the wave of volatility that followed, SEOs are already expecting more significant updates to Google’s search algorithm in 2021.

From the roll-out of Mobile first indexing due to be completed in March 2021, to the introduction of the new Core Web Vitals metrics as ranking signals from May 2021, SEOs can expect to have a variety of new factors impacting their rankings in SERPs this year.

With that in mind, I’ve put together my list of what I expect will be the biggest SEO trends in 2021:

1. Mobile-First is Mobile-Only

Google started rolling out mobile-first indexing as the default behaviour for the search engine back in March 2018, and in March 2020 claimed to have already moved 70% of all websites over to mobile-first indexing. Google was expected to complete the rollout in September 2020, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic they pushed this date out to March 2021.

Although most modern websites are designed using responsive frameworks optimized for mobile screens, older websites and websites using separate desktop and mobile versions could be severely impacted by this update. Web developers and SEOs will need to prioritize mobile devices over desktop computers, and will need to focus on improving their website experience on mobile devices. Even Google’s John Mueller has said “mobile-first” should instead be thought of as “mobile-only.”

To check if your own website is ready for mobile-first indexing, test your URLs using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

2. Blurring the line between SEO & UX

Google recently announced its new set of page experience metrics, known as “Core Web Vitals”, will become ranking signals in May 2021. The three Core Web Vitals are:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
   The render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport.
   
2. First Input Delay (FID)
   The time from when a user first interacts with a page, such as clicking on a link or tapping a button, to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to the request.
   
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
   A measurement of the unexpected layout shift that occurs while elements on a page are loading. A layout shift occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one rendered frame to the next.

These three metrics would typically be regarded as UX issues, but because Google will be using all three Core Web Vitals as ranking signals, SEOs will need to work closely with their UX teams to improve their website Core Web Vitals before introduces the update to their algorithms in May 2021. This overlap with UX is expected to continue as a general trend moving forward. SEO expert Lily Ray recently tweeted “IMO, if it’s good for users, you should treat it like it’s a ranking factor”, and Google’s John Mueller agreed:

You can monitor the Core Web Vitals for your website using the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console, or analyze each page individually using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

3. Prioritizing E-A-T signals on YMYL websites

Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (collectively known as E-A-T), are a set of website quality standards used by Google’s independant quality raters when evaluating websites in search results. The E-A-T terminology was first seen in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in July 2018 (you can find the latest version here), and is believed to have started impacting search results since the broad core algorithm update in August 2018 (although Google does not reveal the specifics about any algorithm updates).

“Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) pages are defined by Google as pages or topics that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. This is a very broad term that includes e-commerce websites, news sources, government information, and financial or health advice.

Google has higher quality rating standards for YMYL pages, as low quality YMYL pages could potentially have a negative impact on a person’s happiness, health or financial stability. In their October 2020 short film “Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers“, Google revealed that for websites falling into the YMYL category, E-A-T signals can often be more important than keyword relevance when determining website rankings.

Google is clearly placing a high priority on E-A-T in 2021 – in the total 175 pages of the latest Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, the phrase “E-A-T” is mentioned 137 times. Expertise is mentioned 99 times, authoritative is mentioned 57 times, and trustworthy/trustworthiness mentioned 54 times. YMYL is mentioned 113 times.

With Google placing so much emphasis on the importance of E-A-T, SEOs and website owners will need to do the same. Here are some steps you can start taking to improve your website’s E-A-T signals in 2021:

Improve your Expertise:

1. If your website falls into the YMYL category, your content should be written by a subject matter expert. If you are providing financial advice, the author should be a qualified financial advisor, or if you are you providing medical advice, the author should by a medical professional. Try to include as much relevant information about the author, including their profession and qualifications. You should then add schema markup to the pages as an extra layer for search engines providing more information about the author’s experience.
2. If your content is not being written by a subject matter expert, you must make sure the content you produce is factually accurate, and provide citations (links) to your source for any facts stated in your content .

Improve your Authoritativeness:

1. Aim to become the expert and go-to source of knowledge in your niche. You can do this by producing high-quality, well-researched and original content, and by putting yourself out there to do interviews or write guest blog posts on other websites.
2. You can also find high-quality data by looking at your own customer data or conducting surveys of your customer base. Journalists and bloggers in your niche could be very interested in your original data, so reach out to them with your insights in exchange for them linking back to your website.

Improve your Trustworthiness:

1. Focus on your customer reviews on 3rd party platforms such as TrustPilot. Your website score on these types of review platforms can have a major impact on your website’s overall perceived trustworthiness. If you are getting negative reviews, make sure you are responding to each of them as quickly as possible, and addressing the customers concerns. After you have resolved an issue with an unhappy customer, you should ask them to consider updating their review.
2. Ask your satisfied customers to leave a review of their experience on a 3rd party platform such as TrustPilot. This can be a great way of building up your positive reviews, and unfortunately people tend to leave reviews after negative experiences more often than positive ones.
3. Make sure your contact information is easy to find on your website, and provide users with multiple ways of contacting you.
4. If your business has a license or certification, make sure this information is displayed prominently on your website (for example, in the website footer across all pages).
5. It’s 2021, so you really should already have an SSL certificate installed on your website, but if you don’t, you’ll need to get one. Then, you’ll need to force redirect your website traffic from HTTP to HTTPS to make sure all of your website traffic is secure. SSL certificates are extremely cheap nowadays, and even free from Let’s Encrypt, so you really have no excuse not to have one on your domain. Without an SSL certificate, users will see a “Not secure” warning when they visit your website.

4. More competition for Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are short snippets of information that often appear at the top of a search results page. Featured snippets have 4 core types – paragraphs, lists, tables, and YouTube snippets. According to Moz, 24% of search results currently display a featured snippet, with this figure growing

Earning the featured snippet placement for relevant search terms has been a goal for most SEOs for a few years already. Since featured snippets occupy so much real estate on a search results page, winning a featured snippet placement can provide a great amount of brand visibility and improve your click-through-rate from organic search. Some SEOs were initially sceptical of the performance of featured snippets, due to a concern that users would ignore them and rather click on a natural search result below it. However, in April 2020 Moz conducted an experiment where they intentionally opted-out of featured snippets, and found that by losing their featured snippet placements, they lost 12% of their traffic volume on the affected pages.

Featured snippets provide a great opportunity for SEOs managing lower-ranking websites to improve their visibility. The website selected for a featured snippet for any specific search term does not need to be the top ranking website for that query.

To win a featured snippet placement for a page on your site, here’s some steps you can take:

1. Research relevant target keywords for the page and check if Google currently displays a featured snippet for your target keywords.
2. Optimize the page’s title tag to make people want to click it, without making it clickbait.
3. Optimize the Meta Description to make the page appear more interesting in SERPS.
4. Structure your content with numbered lists, bulleted lists, and tables.
5. Add schema markup to the page, using the types of structured data most suitable to the content of the page.
6. According to Search Engine Journal, you can win paragraph snippets for keywords including terms such as “How to do/get”, “Who is”, “Why is”, and “What is”.
7. Numbered list snippets will generally show for recipes, DIY tasks, and search terms including “How to” and “How do I”, while bulleted lists will generally show for “Best of” lists, ranked items, unranked items or feature lists.

In order to increase organic visibility and steal traffic away from competitors, SEOs should be looking to win the featured snippet placement for as many relevant search terms as possible. As new types of featured snippets become available, SEOs will want to take advantage and optimize their content accordingly to win these placements before their competitors do.

5. Optimizing for Voice Search

With AI virtual assistants such as Siri and the Google Assistant getting smarter every year, and the rapid adoption of smart speakers and hubs, consumers are relying on virtual assistants more and more for everyday tasks. It’s no surprise then that the volume of Google searches being done by voice is also growing at a rapid rate . Google reported in 2018 that 27% of the global population were using voice search on mobile. This figure increased to over 50% in 2020, according to a report from Comscore.

As an SEO, if you’re not optimizing your web pages for voice search, you’re missing out on a growing volume of search traffic. If your competitors are not yet optimizing their content for voice search, this can be a great opportunity for you to increase your visibility.

Here are some steps you can take to start optimizing your content for voice search:

1. Provide clear and descriptive Titles and Meta Descriptions on your website pages.
2. Mark up your content with schema.org structured data. Explore Google’s Rich Results search gallery to find the types of structured data best suited to your content.
3. Take advantage of structured data types such as “FAQ” and “How-To”, which can display additional information on a smart display such as the Google Home Hub when using voice search.
4. If you write about topical news stories, mark up your content using the Speakable schema.org property to identify sections of an article or webpage best suited to audio playback using text-to-speech (TTS). The Google Assistant uses the Speakable structured data to return answers for topical news stories on smart speaker devices. By using the Speakable structured data type, you can use Google Assistant to distribute your content and reach a wider audience.

What other SEO trends are you keeping an eye on in 2021? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter @JaySThomson