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The world is quickly becoming digital and firms all over the world are trying their best to leave their mark on the internet. As a result, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as a key practice in bringing consistent, organic traffic to your website.

Within SEO, the trend tends to change from time to time. And if you are are still dependent on the same old techniques while expecting miraculous results, it is not going to work in your favor. Therefor, for better results, you need to keep an eye on the latest SEO trends and implement them accordingly.

First, let's quickly take a look at the recent SEO market:

• The SEO industry is currently valued at $80 billion
• 14.6% of conversion rates are driven by using proper SEO tools
• 50% of SEO keywords & queries consist of terms four words or less
• For shopping and eCommerce sites, SEO drives 10x more traffic than social media
• Recent estimates suggest that, within the USA alone, more than 236.5 million people utilize search engines
• On a daily basis, Google performs over 5.5 billion searches, with over 63,000 search queries per second
• Around 44% of your website's referral traffic goes through Google

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As such, brands that are aiming to grow always have the common question of:

"How do I stay current on SEO trends?"

Well, to make your task easy, we are going to provide you with the top eight SEO trends for 2021 that you should consider executing in your upcoming projects.

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1. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) Continue to Dictate Search Results

In every search result, you are able to see a section of text appearing at the top of the web page featuring relevant snippets and boxes; these are nothing but Search Engine Result Pages. The content inside of these snippets features the best possible answer that is relevant to the search query. These days, the importance of SERPs has increased even further as they are being shown to drive a considerable amounts of traffic to websites.

But, why exactly are SERPs important for SEO?

Well, these featured SERPs provide the ideal opportunity to gather more clicks. The chances of getting a click for a website that is featured in a SERP is around 8% more than that of the top page. As a result, professionals often refer to it as position #0.

A recent study found that if your website is featured at position #0 as well as at position #1, it will result in an impressive Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of 27.6%!

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In this example, we were able to get our client’s website in a featured snippet for the search query “9 Cute Jewelry Gift Ideas”, to rank their jewelry blog at position #0!

However, there are quite a few different types of SERPs. Here are the types that you should be focusing on.

The Definition Box

The definition box is a featured snippet designed to provide a direct, concise definition or description of the search term to consumers. For example, the snippet shown here is for the search query, “internet marketing”.

The Table

Google often pulls relevant data from web pages and showcases it in the tabular form as seen above.

The Steps

Google tends to feature lists for search query results, which requires a step-to-step approach in order to solve a potential problem.‍

The List of FAQs

Many times, Google features the most frequently asked questions for a search query, which provides a chance for your website to be one of the featured answers.

2. The Evolution of Voice Search

Voice search has become an integral part of the Google Search Engine. This is due to the fact that the voice search feature allows the customer to search for their required products or services without having to type into a search box, utilizing spoken words instead. Nowadays, a large portion of the population is opting to use voice search, owing to its sheer convenience of allowing customer's hands to be engaged in other activities.

However, if you observe the data carefully, you will find that there are some fundamental differences between the way users speak on Google Search and the way that they enter their queries.

In voice search, consumers often add the phrase “near me” with their query, which is not the case with the conventional Google Search.

It has been seen that consumers often go with the voice search option to sort out their local queries; and as a result, voice searches are intensely dominated by 'near me' keywords. Hence, websites need to optimize themselves in such a manner that they can offer good outputs responding to this large volume of voice queries.

Thanks to the evolution of many popular digital assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa, voice search is becoming more and more popular every single day, so much so that the amount of voice searches is expected to be doubled in the next few years. As a result, stakeholders need to take timely action in order to eliminate any chances of losing a significant portion of the their potential customer base.

3. Smartphone Optimization

By the end of 2019, smartphones had successfully replaced traditional computers as the primary computing device. Today, more than 87% of total users use smartphones to resolve their queries, and that number is only going to grow even further for the foreseeable future. Therefore, the search engine is now also using a mobile-first approach for indexing web pages. Hence, mobile-friendly optimization of your webpages, along with having a responsive web design, is the need of the hour.

4. Visual Search Optimization

Similar to voice search, visual search has evolved as yet another one of the latest SEO trends, wherein a user searches for product images. As you can see here, the search engine showcases image results from authoritative pages.

So, in order to get a better output, you need to write unique alt texts for every image on your webpage.

5. Take Advantage of Video Content

No one would disagree on the fact that quality content drives traffic to a website. Each and every brand uploads content to their website aspiring to dominate the top position in the search engine one day. But sadly, 99% of them fail to achieve their objective.

So, if you are willing to make a difference and want your website to flourish, it is advised that you invest more into video content.

For example, if you have an e-commerce website that sells jewelry, it is practically impossible to demonstrate the exact look and feel of the products through text and images alone. By adding in video marketing, you will not only drive additional traffic to your website, but you will also maximize your conversion rate considerably.

Here at ITJ Group, we offer specialized video marketing services for our clients in Los Angeles, all across the state of California, as well as nationwide.

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6. Create Content Focusing on Your Target Customers

One can’t deny the importance of keywords in SEO; however, choosing the right keywords is the key to success. You need to select keywords based on the research done of your target customers due to the fact that unnecessarily inserting popular keywords in your content causes more harm than good to your website. Therefore, you should focus more on creating quality content that truly addresses the repeated query of your potential customers.

In most cases, relatively lengthy content works best for SEO, as people tend to stay longer on your page, which in turn causes a sharp decline in your bounce rate.

7. Standout Digital Experience

Having refined content plays an essential role in the ranking of your website; however, this is not the sole prerequisite to succeed in the complex game of SEO. For instance, if your website does not load fast enough, it becomes hard for potential customers to sit there waiting to check out your content, regardless of its quality. Your website must have a loading time below 3 seconds, as that has become the current industry-standard.

Google also takes note of your website's load time, with your loading speed being one of the most important factors in SEO that determines your ranking in the search engine. Therefore, you need to offer a standout user experience and ensure a smooth experience from start to finish for your users.

8. Leverage influencers for SEO

Nowadays, influencer marketing is gaining an enormous amount of attention. Firms across the globe are aiming to improve their brand awareness, and ultimately drive more sales, by using this new SEO trend.

By building well-structured websites that are putting out quality content over an extended period, brands end up competing with each other to be featured on the top spot in Google search results. Yet, creating quality content is not enough to dominate the search engine results pages, due to the presence of tens of thousands of similar websites aiming to do the same exact thing, especially on a popular platform like Google. Hence, influencers play a key role in building and growing your brand.

However, while shortlisting influencers, you should make sure to check both their credibility and the number of followers they have. Building proper influencer campaigns is what will be most effective in maximizing your ROI.

Key findings on Upcoming SEO trends

• Over 93% of online experiences will be able to be detected by search engines
• 57% of the B2B marketers find SEO to be a convenient tool for growing their business
• Having a higher focus on search intents produces better search results
• SEO marketing is not only useful for measuring traffic, but is also a safe way to maintain customer retention and gather analytics
• Using Google's new page metrics and optimization feedback, everything is much easier to keep track of
• The mobile SEO market is going to be growing exponentially
• Having a focus on automation and/or bot responses is going to play a key part in SEO

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How We Can Help You

Here at ITJ Group we are specialized in web development and design, and you can check out our portfolio here. We are proficient in multiple popular technologies in this market, such as Angular, Flutter, ionic, Java, MongoDB, and NodeJS.

We have successfully built jewelry brands with effective digital marketing strategies using the latest industry-standard SEO tools like AHREFs, Google Keyword Planner, and SEMRush. As such, we feel proud to term ourselves as one of the best web development and SEO companies in California.

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