Search Engine Optimization is a great way to draw customers to your online platform. But it’s continually changing, and keeping up with the latest developments can be a challenge. This article offers the latest insights into some of the most relevant SEO trends for 2021 to help you optimize your digital strategy.

Create visual content

The demand for visual content is growing fast. In fact, recent studies have found that nearly 90% percent of marketers use visuals in their content marketing efforts. Thanks to content sharing platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, visual content should grow more popular in 2021.
To take advantage of this development, you should incorporate more visual elements into your content, especially “concept visuals.”
If you don’t know what those are, here’s a quick explainer: Concept visuals are visual assets that other websites can easily embed into their content.” They make it easier for other sites to use them, which increases the likelihood that they will link back to you.

Publish research data

Journalists and bloggers love data. If you give them statistics, survey findings, even the results of an industry study, they will link back to you quite fast. For instance, Backlinko published 5 pieces of research content in 2020. those 5 pieces of content won over 20000 backlinks, 23,217 shares on social media, and over 250 million visitors.
Note
There’s a disadvantage to research content, though. It takes a lot more effort to create than making a list post or case study. However, done the right way, the extra effort will get significant results.

Start a podcast

Podcasts are remarkably popular, so they’re an excellent opportunity to distribute your brand’s content. Unfortunately, however, even the people who have them don’t rank their notes on google. The good news s that optimizing podcasts for SEO is not that hard.
First, get a complete transcript of your interviews, then turn those transcripts into full blog posts.
Don’t just copy and paste your transcript, then call it quits. Instead, repurpose its content into a post that can stand independently. You’ll need to add an introduction, screenshots and visuals, subheadings, and internal and external links to achieve this.

Win backlinks as a podcast guest

Sharing an interview on a podcast is one of the the easiest ways to win backlinks. The process is very similar to guest posting, without the hassle. All you need to do is go to the interview, share your knowledge, and then you’ll get a backlink.

Publish content hubs

Content hubs are just a series of related content that address a specific topic. Instead of linking random blog posts to each other, present them as part of a single series, or hub. then, create a home page for your hub. The hubs serve two primary functions. First, they are the type of content that will convince people to share and link to you. Not many people are willing to invest th work required to build a hub, so you’ll stand out immediately when you do. Your hub pages are also the best way to rank for several definition keywords.

Featured snippets

According to SEMrush, about 6% of all search results have featured snippets, and they steal lots of clicks from whoever is at the #1 position. If you want to win featured snippets, the first thing you’ll need to do is find snippet opportunities. And like most aspects of SEO, you’ll need keyword research to do so.
It has to be keywords that you already rank for that have featured snippets.
Why focus on key phrases you rank for already?
99.58% of all featured snippets come from websites on the first page of google search results. If you don’t already rank among the top 10, you have no chance of winning a featured snippet.
Tools like Ahrefs organic keywords report will show you keywords you rank for that also have featured snippets.

Add snippet bait to your page.

Snippet bait is a piece of text 40-60 words long that’s specifically designed to appear in the featured snippet position. Doing so will help your content rank in the featured snippet position for several keywords.

Format your content for other types of featured snippets.

Snippet bait will also work for paragraph snippets and list snippets. To optimize for list snippets, use H3 or H2 subheadings for every list item. Google will take those sub headers from your content and put them in a featured snippet.
To rank for table snippets, you’ll need to create tables that google can easily extract data from.

Visual search

Visual search may not be a major trend yet, but the way things are going will be very popular this 2021. more people are using visual search than ever before. in fact, google lens has already been used 1 billion times.
Pinterest gets about 600 million visual search requests each month.
Visual search may still be an emerging field, but it’s fully functional. It can already identify 1 billion projects, and that number is growing every day. If you’ve used it before, you’ve likely realized that visual search helps with directions, shopping, translation, local business reviews, and finding landmarks, and many others. That’s why most young consumers show a preference for visual search-based technology.

Domain authority 2.0

Not so long ago, domain authority was all about links. But, things have changed. Right now, Google assesses your website based on Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness or E-A-T in short.  Just to be clear, E-A-T has been part of Google’s rank criteria for a long time. What’s changed, however, is that it has been given more prominence.
For instance, Google’s current for how search works mentions that they prefer to rank “reliable” sources, and they mention E-A-T as a ranking factor.
Hire an expert (or become one). If you hire novice bloggers to write your content, it’s going to cost you. Google wants to feature content written by legitimate experts in their fields. They even go as far as saying that medical content should be written by health care practitioners. If you want good SEO scores in 2021.

Transparency is key

While Google considers off-site signals to determine your website’s E-A-T score, the raters time rating your website itself. Google expects most websites to have information about what they do, who’s in charge, as well as contact details.
This means you need to have a comprehensive about page, an easily identifiable contact page, external links and references, a privacy policy, and terms of use.
A lot of google’s evaluation of your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness happens outside your website. This makes sense because anyone can claim to be an expert, but getting other websites to agree to that is much more challenging. When Google finds that a website says one thing, but reputable external sources don’t agree, it will trust the external sources.
First, you’ll need to be cited on several other trusted websites. it doesn’t matter if the mentions are linked
Next, your website should focus on a specific topic. Again, this depends on off-site mentions from other authorities in your field.

Video content

Video is really popular right now. According to Cisco, it will account for over 80% of all internet traffic by 2022. Even though there are more videos than ever, HubSpot says 43% of internet users want even more. If video is not a part of your digital marketing plans, you’re missing out a lot.
You can optimize your video content by

• Organizing your video content into discrete sections to help search engines understand it.
• Optimizing your video metadata. Use your descriptions, titles, and tags to help search engines understand what your videos are all about.
• Providing transcripts so google can interpret every word in your video.

SEO is only growing more complicated, as you’ve probably learned by reading this article. The days of merely optimizing meta titles and keywords are over. However, with the latest tools and strategies, you can create an effective SEO strategy. If you’re worried that you don’t have what it takes, there are several digital marketing agencies in Uganda you can consult for help.