The year is coming to a close quickly, which means that many companies are looking to the future to determine what they should do to prepare for next years. SEO is always a common consideration in these preparations. SEO best-practices change over time, and companies need to make adjustments to ensure that they can meet the needs of a growing and changing market. Some of the best SEO practices for next year are already becoming commonplace this year. In this article, we discuss the top 5 SEO tips for 2021.
Focus on High-Quality Content
Although many things change in SEO every year, the focus on high-quality content continues to be one of, if not, the most important trends in SEO. The quality of your content does more than determining your SEO standing, it provides value to customers. That is why the search engines continue to push high-quality, informative, valuable, and relevant content standards in every update to the search engines. They know that the most important thing that you can do for your audience is to create the best content possible.
The need for long-form content is becoming more important though. Many companies focus on creating medium-sized blog posts (around 500 words), which is easy to produce on a regular basis, but detailed enough to provide a lot of value. Long-form content, like pillar posts (2,000 words or more about a specific subject) is gaining weight with search engines. The reason for this is that they are highly valuable. Pillar posts go in-depth about a specific topic and provide so much detailed information that they become the reference point for other posts. Sites that occasionally put out these types of posts can significantly improve the SEO of their websites with backlinks, reference links, and general SEO from quality content.
Going forward, companies should try to include long-form content in their SEO strategies throughout the year. Creating two long-from posts throughout the year can go a long way toward maximizing your website’s SEO and creating additional value for your audience.
Be a Topic Expert
One of the keys to improving your SEO is to become a topic expert. There is a lot of content on the web that is focused on the same topics. However, you can stand out by creating a series of posts making you a topic expert. By blogging about a topic in detail across multiple posts, you are creating a body of knowledge that other people will refer to when trying to understand that topic.
The more you blog about this one topic, the more authoritative you become. People want to learn from experts in specific fields that have a lot of experience and can provide a lot of quality information. Going forward, your focus should be on creating a lot of high-quality content about specific topics. Create exhaustively detailed posts about those topics and continue to write about them so that your audience will rely on you as the expert in a particular field.
Understand Audience Intent
SEO is becoming more sophisticated since search engines are getting better at reading the meaning behind what people are searching for. It is this audience intent that can point to better search results and connecting with companies that can provide the information that they need. For you, the focus should be on understanding audience intent.
Since customers may search for things that are not always apparent in their search terms, understanding that underlying meaning is the key to making a deeper connection with your audience. For example, someone using the search term, “types dog beds”, that person is probably looking for information about a specific type of dog bed. Someone searching for an “inexpensive dog bed” is probably shopping for a dog bed. Understanding their intent can help you serve the right type of content to the right audience. Because of this, your interactions will provide more value.
Make Technical Improvements
Technology improves every year, and the technology that was popular this year may not be in 2021. As technology improves, users expect better performance out of everything. Because of this, your online presence needs to be optimized for performance as well as SEO. Search engines take performance into account as well since they want to ensure that their audience is served quality content on devices that perform well.
For you, this means making sure that your platforms meet performance standards. Update your website to the latest technologies and take steps to optimize content. This is especially true for mobile devices since the majority of people on the internet and social media use mobile devices. Improving performance will improve your SEO and keep your audience happy.
Partnering with SEO Agencies
Although it is possible to do it all yourself, most companies find that the investment in time and energy to manage SEO is better spent working with an agency. At KitelyTech, our SEO team is ready to help you develop more effective content that continues to rank highly on search engines. We can help you develop content, as well as create a social media strategy that keeps you high in the rankings. Call KitelyTech at (800) 274 2908 to schedule a consultation with our team.
