SEO Practices That Will Still Be Big in 2021

The year 2020 started off pretty normal but quickly took a turn into uncharted territory. If the pandemic has taught us one thing it’s that SEO is more important than ever. 

Just when we thought Internet use couldn’t increase, people around the country were given lockdown restrictions that kept them indoors and millions of people started working from home. More web surfing means search rankings play an even bigger role in a business’ success. 

SEO optimization is a given, but what you should do to boost your ranking in the coming months is the uncertainty. At the moment, it looks like much of what we’ve been doing this year will be useful in the near future. 

So let’s do a recap of four top SEO trends of 2020 that will still apply in 2021. 

Link Building Still Matters

The focus on link building wasn’t all outward in 2020. The link building SEO trend of 2020 was all about internal links. Internal links are about information hierarchy and providing insight on page content. They tell search bots what the page is about. 

If you’ve already got a plan in place to external link building, 2021 is the perfect time to put your attention toward an internal SEO link building strategy. The SEO importance of links is highlighted in one of our posts that also gives a description of the five most common types of links.

Putting Even More Effort Into Your SEO Content Strategy

Content is still king online. You need words on pages to get rankings. But it’s not enough to generate good content and use SEO keywords. To get top search rankings you need to continuously produce good content. Fresh content also attracts more users to your site and social media platforms. 

If you haven’t created an SEO content strategy yet 2021 is the year to do it. You can get started with our post on how often to blog for SEO. Use it as a guide for creating a blogging schedule.  

Mobile SEO Optimization is Never Going Away

Unless everyone stops using their smartphones and tablets, mobile SEO isn’t going away in 2021. For obvious reasons, mobile SEO optimization is only going to get more important with each passing year. 

One way to seriously boost your mobile SEO is to increase page load speed. It’s not just a critical factor for search rankings. Mobile users are increasingly impatient. If a mobile web page doesn’t load within 3 seconds 52% of users bounce right back to the search results. 

A change that is likely to occur in 2021 is local mobile searches and mobile ads going back to their pre-pandemic levels. With talk of a vaccine being distributed in Q1 of 2021 people will be itching to be back out and about by spring. You may even see a surge in local mobile searches at that time so get ready for it now.

If you still aren’t convinced mobile SEO optimization needs to be a focus in 2021 check out this post on why mobile SEO is important today, tomorrow and for years to come. 

Emphasis on SEO Click Through Rate Optimization

Anything that can improve your rankings and traffic to your site at the same time is a win no matter what year it is. Click through rate (CTR) optimization is squarely in that category. 

Google can and does measure click through rate on the SERPs. It uses the data to determine the importance of a web page (some SEOs even say it influences rankings). Beyond getting you higher search ranking, optimizing for CTR can also bring more people to your page.

We recently covered why click through rate matters for SEO and provided a few proven tips for improving CTR on SERPs. Earlier we also gave readers advice on how to write SEO meta tags that boost ranking. It’s worth a read!

The SEO best practices of 2020 are here to stay because they improve the user experience. That’s really what Google says it’s all about - providing a great experience for the end user.  It was a great 2020 for SearchRPM, and we’re sure 2021 is going to be even better. If your 2021 goal is to move up in the SERPs let’s get in touch to start putting together an SEO plan!