Influence Your SEO Strategy for 2021 & Beyond

The role of an SEO professional has drastically changed from one being able to implement their skills after the website was developed to the one in which SEO plays a major role right from the ideation of a website.

This article contains the essence of some of the most underrated, and even overlooked practices in SEO that most professionals must now take into consideration to catapult their services and drive results.

Here are the top five ways in which you can influence your SEO strategy for 2021 and beyond.

1. User Experience (UX) Optimization: Consider UX as an important part of any SEO strategy. UX design will directly affect your SEO rankings through user engagement metrics. By taking the time to improve your UX design, you will also see improved SEO rankings, increased brand credibility, and better audience retention.

The following image states the Core Vitals by which Google tests your website:

Core Vitals by Google

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
2. First Input Delay (FID), and
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

From a technical standpoint, you must know that these factors contribute to the performance of the website.

2. Voice Search Strategy: According to The Smart Audio Report by NPR and Edison Research, 60 million (24%) American adults have a smart speaker in their home.

People use their digital assistants — either on phone or desktop — or voice-assistant enabled devices to search as they would type in Google search bar.

Voice technology is dominant in:

• Voice search
• Voice production
• Voice integration in apps

Voice strategy is a complete hands-free option and SEO professionals the best way to start is to ask: How can your brand’s content show up in voice search?

3. Optimizing for Accessibility: As an SEO professional, prioritize to ensure your brand and content is accessible and usable for everyone connected to the digital world. Don’t leave the developers and designers responsible for accessibility. People with disabilities are consumers as well. It is a great way to dominate your niche by serving a community that most of your competitors might be overlooking. Accessibility is known to increase traffic, sales and decrease bounce rates.

As an SEO professional, you need to be aware of the laws and regulations around accessibility as well. For example, the European Accessibility Act was introduced in 2019. This act covers products and services such as computers and operating systems, smartphones, and ecommerce platforms.

An accessible website helps all users to:

• Easily navigate the site.
• Improve their experience.
• Find information they are looking for.

Deque conducted a survey in March 2020 and April 2020. They reported that 62% of accessibility practitioners surveyed mentioned that “COVID-19 has raised the awareness and impact of accessibility on the digital channel.”

4. Context over Keywords — Featured Snippets: Long-form content or better known as cornerstone content is broken into logical subsections, featuring attention-grabbing images. Even if you don’t believe that cornerstone content receives any special treatment in SERPs, long-form content helps you to cover more related questions within a piece.

The following types of search queries get featured results most often in featured snippets:

• DIY processes
• Health
• Financial
• Mathematical
• Requirements
• Status
• Transitional

Images, videos, local information and shopping related search queries usually don’t have answer boxes.

5. Localization: Localization of your brand is crucial to widen your reach to an audience speaking the local language.

Benefits of Localization are:

• Allows you to target local customers — Increase reach when audience uses local search engines
• Enhances local experience — Visitors tend to spend more time on a website or app if the language used is local
• Builds credibility, reputation and boosts growth internationally — this does boost domain authority

But, as you may be well aware, SEO trends are continuously changing. To be at the top of the game by adopting these changes early, you need to be well-versed with the latest updates made by popular search engines and where do you start to implement them.

All my actionable SEO recommendations are the concepts where we are no longer limited to on-page and off-page SEO. We are moving towards a rather technical role, in which understanding the concepts of website development cycle and app development cycle are absolutely essential. And this is where our role expands.