It is very important to keep oneself always updated regarding the changes in the algorithm of the major search engines so that one does not face search engine penalties in terms of drop in the search engine results. Some of the major and emerging trends in search engine optimizations in 2021 are listed below –
1. Core Web Vitals
In May 2020, Google announced three new metrics, called Core Web Vitals to be used for measuring user experience: Loading, Interactivity, and Visual Stability. All three metrics are basically related to just one thing, and that is page speed: how fast does the page load, how soon does it get interactive, and how stable is it while loading.
Core Web Vitals will be among Google’s ranking factors in May 2021, meaning you will have to pay close attention them in order to appear on the first page. For example, if there are two pages with equally relevant content, then user experience metrics will help search engine bots to decide which one should be ranked higher.
2. Google’s BERT
Google’s BERT algorithm (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to better understand searches and what users are actually looking for. It works in more than 70 languages and for almost every query in Google English.
With Google’s BERT update, the Google search engine bots have become much more “conversational,” so now, Google’s algorithm can now interpret the intent of the searcher. In simple words, Now Google can understand things like the human brain.
What this also means is that websites that have content-intent mismatches will be negatively impacted. No matter how detailed or high-quality that long-form content is, if it’s is not satisfying user intent then BERT will ignore yours and prefer another content piece that satisfies the intent for the given query.
One thing to note is that Google BERT is not an algorithmic penalty. It’s a part of the Google search engine that helps filter out the most relevant & useful content to users by understanding search queries and content as humans. So it won’t de-rank or penalize sites. It will just give favor to those that show the best results to users, which is what Google has always strived to do.
If your content is not providing what a user is looking for, then your content is not BERT-friendly and you won’t rank for that keyword for the long-term. That’s why publishing valuable content that satisfies the user-intent can help you.
In addition to the above two factors, Mobile SEO, Zero-Click-Search, Voice Search, Video Content are the very important emerging trends in 2021