Keeping up with the latest trends is one of the most difficult aspects of any SEO consultant’s job. As an SEO professional, you need to know the current ways that can optimize website ranking for your clients.
The landscape of SEO keeps changing all the time, mostly because of the regular updates from Google regarding their search engine algorithms. That is why leading freelance SEO consultant – Daniel Foley believes in modifying strategies according to the latest trends. According to him, these are some of the latest Google trends in 2021 that every SEO consultant should know about.
Core Web Vitals
Website speed has always been an unofficial ranking factor for a long time. But in May 2020, Google announced that it would be using three new metrics to measure the user experience from a website. These three metrics, called Loading, Interactivity, and Visual Stability, are known as the Core Web Vitals.
All of the three metrics essentially point at one factor, which is page speed. These metrics will evaluate the speed at which a web page loads and becomes interactive. It will also measure the page stability while it is loading.
Core Web Vitals were initially supposed to become effective from May 2021 as part of the Page Experience update. However, Google further announced that the update would start to roll out gradually from July 2021.
SEO professionals and Webmasters need to pay more attention to the page loading speed to improve its chances of appearing on search engine result pages (SERP). The user experience metrics will also enable search bots to choose between two contents equally relevant to the search query.
BERT
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) combines machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to match content with search intent. BERT can understand more than 70 languages and operates for almost every search query in English.
Google bots are using BERT to look for conversational language and content to match a user’s query. The update enables Google to understand and think like a human brain to produce the best results on the SERPs.
Therefore, it will be the job of SEO consultants and professionals to rectify content-search intent mismatches so that the website is not impacted negatively. Even though BERT does not penalize sites, such mismatches can hurt website ranking.
SEO consultants need to be extra careful with keywords that can match multiple search intents. Google also announced recently that it is creating a new AI model based on BERT called Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to unify multimedia search results.
Google My Business
It has been noted that the search for local businesses has increased a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic. Google also understands that when users located in New York are looking for burgers, they would prefer the results from surrounding areas.
Therefore, SEO consultants need to urge their clients to optimize their Google My Business account with the current details. GMB optimization is a major contributing factor to local searches. Google has also changed the number of results that appear on search pages from 7 to 3.
The previous 7-pack could squeeze more local businesses into the top search results. However, with the increased use of mobile phones to search for products and services, Google has changed the local results to a three-pack system.
Therefore, SEO consultants will have to urge the clients to put more effort into their products and services, as the top three results must have good ratings.
Consultants should also ensure that their clients include a long and unique description for their business on the GMB account along with the company name, address, and phone number. It can also contain links to the website and social media pages.
YouTube Marketing
YouTube is the second most popular social media after Facebook and search engine after Google. Therefore SEO consultants can focus on creating marketing videos for their clients.
Apart from the content, YouTube videos also provide a plethora of opportunities to optimize the SEO factors. Consultants can ensure that the channel name and description contain the right keywords.
The growing need for website accessibility makes it mandatory for the videos to have appropriate subtitles and transcripts. The subtitles and transcripts are also ideal places to insert the relevant keywords so that the video can match the user intent.
Influencer SEO
Influencers often have numerous followers who can become customers if the business can come in front of them. Influencers can take years to build trust with their audience. So if they recommend and support a company, their followers can become long-term customers of the brand.
SEO consultants should have connections with the top influencers of their industries who can help the brand reach the right audience. SEO consultants can also seek help from the influencers to get natural, high-quality backlinks for their clients.
Influencers can increase brand visibility and engagement by showing support on their websites and content. But the real SEO goldmine from influencers is through their social media engagement and referral traffic.
Google is always changing its algorithms to optimize the user experience from their search engines. However, these changes tend to make the life of SEO consultants and professionals a little difficult.
They have to keep themselves updated with the latest trends to ensure that they can perform the best for their clients. We believe these are the five top Google SEO trends that every consultant and professional should be aware of in 2021.
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