The Tech SEO Trends You Need To Know About For Your Website In 2021

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the quest in which a website owner or professional leverages every factor of your online presence for the sake of increasing search engine ranking. The relevance of this field becomes increasingly important as search engines like Google make their algorithms more and more sophisticated. This increases the barrier to entry for websites without this expertise.

Since search engines are constantly changing, SEO practitioners and webmasters have to do their best to stay up to date with the latest SEO and technology trends for their best performance. Follow this guide to get to know the 5 most relevant SEO tech trends that will affect your business ranking in 2021.

The Top 5 Most Impactful Technical SEO Trends We Need To Know

Like all other technology-focused markets, the SEO space is a highly competitive one. This emphasizes the importance of staying up to date. Failing to do this and falling behind your competitors can be a fatal mistake that will negatively impact your business as well as your reputation. As the SEO space evolves and changes over time, the importance of different factors that affect optimization also changes. As SEOs in 2021, these are the 5 most impactful trends that we need to stay up to date with:

• Core Web Vitals
• Focus on User and Search Intent
• Google Schema and Structured Data
• Google My Business For Local SEO
• Automation As The Backbone Of SEO

Each of these trends will be discussed in further detail, as well as how we can leverage them within our websites to improve our search engine ranking.

Why Core Web Vitals Are Now A Huge Ranking Factor

Core Web Vitals refers to an update in Google’s ranking system that was announced in May 2020 and released at the same time the next year. Core Web Vitals encompasses 3 metrics that affect user page experience:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

This metric is the measurement of the time it takes for the majority of the page content to be visible. Essentially, a faster loading page will yield a positive outcome. Google has mentioned that the standard for a good LCP value is 2.5 seconds. If it takes longer, then Google will consider this metric as a failure. There are three factors that affect LCP that we can improve upon in order to reduce the value to 2.5 seconds or under. The first is server response time, slow server response times will cause your browser to collect information slower, increasing LCP time. The second of these factors is resource load times, this refers to how long it takes for non-text elements like images and videos to load, a good way to reduce these times is to lazy load images, or simply reduce the size of these resources. The last of these is the render time for JavaScript and CSS on your site. This is the time it takes for your browser to read through (parse) the HTML of your page, and structure it in a readable manner. If there are CSS or JavaScript elements that block the HTML parsing, your LCP will be longer.

First Input Delay (FID)

The First Input Delay is the time it takes for the page to become interactive for the user. Ideally, this is less than 100 milliseconds to be considered good. This factor is primarily influenced by JavaScript that is executed on the main thread, as your browser cannot respond to user input while it is executing JavaScript. To reduce the FID, we can simply reduce the amount of JavaScript on the main thread, break up long tasks, or reduce the execution task through optimization.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

This factor relates to page stability, the less a page unexpectedly shifts as the user scrolls through it the better. Google considers a good standard for this to be less than 0.1. To improve this factor, always implement exact size attributes for your images and videos, this will make your browser allocate the exact amount of space, causing no layout shift. Another action we can take is to limit animation changes that affect the layout of our pages.

The True Significance Of The Core Web Vitals Update

With this, we know that Core Web Vitals have become a ranking factor in search, but how big of a ranking factor are they actually? It is likely that Core Web Vitals on their own will not make or break your site, and many think that they are somewhat overhyped. This being said, improving them, along with other SEO factors on your site will definitely yield a positive return on investment, as a better user experience, will likely lead to more frequent visitation from these users.

How To Focus on User and Search Intent And Why It’s So Important

The phrases that users search for can be split up into two types The first are those that are very specific, with which the user is looking for more information on (ex: “How to bake a red velvet cake in under one hour”). The second type of phrase is those that are simply searching for more general information about a topic (ex: “How to bake a cake”). With this, the content you create and user intent throughout their searches are highly related. By understanding the search intent of users, we can form content that targets what they are looking for.

Search Intent In The Context Of A Search Engine

Satisfying the search intent of a user is the ultimate goal of a search engine. With this, search engines are consistently updated with new technology that helps to better understand the search intent of the user. The increasing sophistication of these search engines allows them to better navigate issues within language.

Queries with multiple meanings are a key example of this. For instance, if a user searches ‘apple’, Google would not know whether the user is looking for the brand or the fruit. However, now these search engines have the capability to find out the intent of your search by looking through the greater context of the key phrase, as well as seeing what other users meant when they searched for the same or similar key phrase.

Why SEO’s Should Understand And Leverage Search Intent

As an SEO, it is vital to understand the search intent of a user, simply because search engines reward this practice by reflecting it in their rankings. A key example of this is Rich Results like Google Featured Snippets. Rich results are not new or groundbreaking in the SEO space, but their importance is increasing, especially within competitive markets. By appearing in position 0, above all the other links, Google is essentially telling the user that your link is the best information available on that topic.

Greater Focus On Implementing Google Schema and Structured Data

Structured Data and Google Schema have a lot to do with the previous section. The implementation of these is the next step after satisfying user search intent in your content. These are also reflected in the search results of Google. This is the practice of implementing a standardized format to tell Google what type of content you are creating, which allows Google to display it more efficiently. One of the most prominent examples of this is FAQ schema, where somewhere in your SERP (search engine results page), the most common questions are displayed with their answers. The example below shows the FAQ results for the search “Cake.”

The Most Popular Types Of Google Schema & How To Implement Them

Following are some of the most popular types of Google Schema, and what they mean.

From this, we can see that implementing Google Schema for structured data is a very valuable process. However, many people stumble when they found out that they can only implement this through the code on their website. Luckily, there are a lot of free resources on the internet on how to implement schema, as well as examples of files that are simply available for free download. These vocabularies are community-grown and so free to use. An example of one of these sites is www.schema.org.

Google My Business For Local SEO

Following the previous section, local business schema, as well as the implementation of Google My Business, is becoming increasingly popular. Due to globalization, all markets are becoming increasingly competitive. With this, showing the consumer that you are a local business, with which they can have personal interaction, could be a key-value factor that causes them to choose you over your competitors. The best way to do this within the context of SERPs is through Google My Business.

By using this platform, when a user searches your brand name on Google, a featured card with all your relevant business information will show up. This information includes relevant photos, a map location, reviews, a link to your website, address, hours, phone number, as well as the times when you are busy. Having this type of information displayed online is invaluable for your organization. Additionally, having this information is another reason in Googles’ eyes to rank you higher than your competition if they do not have this information displayed.

How To Create And Verify A Google My Business Account

Creating and verifying a Google My Business account is very simple, here is a step by step guide:

Step 1 – Create a Google Business Account if you do not already have one.

Simply go to create a new Google account and you will be prompted with the options “For myself” or “To manage my business”, select the latter.

Step 2 – Create your Business Profile.

In Google Maps, search your business, and select ‘Add a missing place’.

Fill in all the relevant information.

Step 3 – Sign up to Google My Business

Log into your business account from step 1, and using that account set up your Google My Business account with your relevant credentials.

Step 4 – Claim your business.

This is the most important step, ensure that you claim your business by selecting ‘Claim this business’ on your business profile (this can be viewed on Google Maps after step 2), and follow the steps to verify ownership.

Automation As The Backbone Of SEO

Automation in this context is the practice of investing resources to create software that will automatically do tasks that will benefit SEO practices, and make them easier. Unfortunately, there is no software available today that does everything for you without any personal involvement. That being said, however, there are a lot of tasks that can be automated, which allows you to scale your processes to a larger scale, yielding better results.

What We Can Automate In SEO

There are multiple tasks that can be automated in the SEO process. The aspects we can automate in SEO are site monitoring and rank tracking, backlink analysis, and competitor monitoring. Site monitoring and rank tracking is the practice of measuring the performance of your site across your marketing campaigns, of course, this can be done manually, but it takes much more time to do, and is subject to human error. Additionally, automation tools will display this information in a clear, succinct, and readable manner allowing you to target, and amend issues as early as possible.

Backlink analysis is essential to maintain your rank. This involves having a tool tell you about dangerous sites linking to your site, this is invaluable as it allows you to disavow these links before they can do any damage. Finally, as with any strategy, identifying and monitoring competitors is crucial for long-term success. Automating this part of the process will help to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, with this information you can either capitalize on their weaknesses or bolster up your performance against their strengths.

Automation in SEO is becoming increasingly popular as these technologies become more widely available, making the market even more competitive. This is where we come in, at GainChanger, we specialize in creating a long-term, holistic SEO strategy which is facilitated through our expertise in automation.

Key Takeaways

In this article, we covered the most relevant SEO tech trends that as website owners we need to keep up to date with, for the best results possible. To learn more about the fundamentals of SEO and best practices, we strongly recommend you head to the GainChanger Resources page for a wealth of free articles on the topic.

If you would like to take your strategy to the next level, and reap the benefits of having the guidance of a full SEO team with a wealth of experience, visit our website at www.gainchanger.com. We offer Technical SEO Audit Services, SEO Automation Tools, as well as Enterprise SEO services. By having us handle the scaling of your outreach and exposure, you can focus on closing your most valuable clients with the peace of mind that more will follow.

Author

Jean Abela.

Jean is an SEO Executive part of the GainChanger SEO Team. He recently graduated with a Master’s degree in Strategic Management and Digital Marketing and is helping Gainchanger build automated SEO services for Enterprise Customers.