Top 5 SEO Trends of 2021

Looking for SEO Self-Help For Your SEO DIY? Here are 5 SEO Trends of 2021 to share

SEO consultants

Have you ever heard about SEO Consultants in Singapore or in other parts of the world for that matter? Being an SEO consultant means that you are responsible for a lot of things like planning, implementing and managing your clients’ overall SEO strategy. The company and SEO consultant’s main goal is to attract targeted audiences from search engines like Google or Bing, and try to turn them into customers. This usually requires a lot of planning, strategising, creativity and execution. A professional and experienced SEO consultant will help you stay competitive in the digital marketplace, stay relevant with the trends, help you find potential customers and more. Most importantly, they will help you gain brand recognition. There are many SEO consultants out there who claim that they can move the mountains for you. However, what is important is that you must ask the right questions and sieve out whether the SEO consultant is really what he said he is.

Some of the Search Engine Optimisation consultants’ job scopes include:

• Understanding Client’s Marketing Objectives – knowing customer’s search marketing objectives and goals
• Keyword Research & Analysis – prioritise keywords and phrases
• Know Client’s Company Industry Trends  – always be informed on industry trends
• Improve Existing Website Content – be competent in content editing and update content every now and then
• Keyword Mapping – it assigns phrases to individual web pages so it will be organized
• Continual Process Improvement – there is a need to keep improving content engagement as time goes by to cater to suitable audiences
• Web Re-design & Development – it is crucial to have a understanding of web development and web design (Technical SEO)

You may wonder what does SEO even mean? Well, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of improving the quality and quantity of a website’s traffic from search engines. SEO services increase your website’s visibility for when potential customers search for products or services related to what your company offers. All of these work, as it uses a very complex algorithm to determine which website would be most appropriate for you.

Two examples of SEO services are, On-page and Off-page. On-page SEO are SEO strategies and execution or implementation that happen on your company’s website. Whereas for Off-page SEO, it happens off your company’s website. Both strategies are aimed to make your website friendlier and more trustworthy to attract potential customers.

Moving on, we will be talking about the top 5 SEO trends as of this year. The top 5 trends consist of voice search, video marketing, influencer SEO, Google’s BERT and lastly, featured snippets.

Voice Search

Voice search SEO is the optimization of key words and phrases by voice assistants. It focuses on the user’s natural language and delivers answers accordingly. Some examples of voice search are Google home, Alexa, or Siri. How it works is that users will summon the device, ask a question and the voice search device will read out the answer.

It is important for companies and businesses to use the voice search optimization strategy as more people are starting to use search devices. This will also allow you to reach out to more potential customers.

If you are on the road, you can just say “Hey Google. What are the opening hours of SAFRA Toa Payoh?”. Google will be able to tell you the answer based on the SEO done on SAFRA’s website.

Video Marketing

Video marketing SEO is about producing video content that is discoverable in search engines of video platforms or social media platforms. You may now wonder how videos help? Users are more likely to click on a video thumbnail as compared to a search result.

Google also prioritises search results that have a video above those without. It is also more likely for you to outrank search results if you display video content. You not only earn traffic from potential customers, but you will also get backlinks. Backlinks is a link created when one website is linked to another, it is also considered as inbound links.

Nowadays, iClick Media helps our customers with a lot of their photoshoot as well as video production. Here’s an example of work done for My Brother SG – a project headed by NUS, and supported by World Health Organisation (WHO), Ministry of Manpower (MOM) and Ministry of Health (MOH).

Influencer SEO

Influencer marketing focuses on delivering your brand message to a targeted group of influencers rather than potential customers. By doing this, you are relying on influencers to be more known and seek customers. You may be wondering how this works. Well, when influencers create content with relations to your brand, they are helping you to create backlinks for your website. It increases your chances of having other people receive and share these links. There are not many influencers compared to consumers, so it takes time to look for someone who will reach the right target customers.

Here are some examples of Influencer Marketing. Hayley Woo has an instagram following of about 221,000 people! Here is an image of her promoting a handbag for ToryBurch.

Google’s BERT

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. What it does is it analyzes context and brings a much deeper understanding of the relationships between every term and sentences.

Google’s BERT is an algorithm that can be used in many applications. One of Google’s missions is to organize all content on the web so they can deliver the best answers to consumers. That is why Google BERT is important for the search experience.

BERT understands what consumers are looking out for and what web pages would help, so it will connect the user to the website. Therefore, BERT gives Google a better understanding of search queries.

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are chosen search results that will be showcased at the of Google’s results. It is used to answer users’ enquiries immediately so they would not have to scroll through different websites. How featured snippets work is that they come from pages that are ranked top 10. So the higher your content, the higher your website will get a featured snippet. Since Featured snippets are at the top of the results page, they offer visibility to users and boost brand recognition for your company. Not only does your brand get more recognition, it also has an increase in keyword rankings.

Here is an example of an SEO snippet work we did for LegallySmart. When you google for ‘property lawyer fees singapore’, besides us dominating the #1 position over the last 3 years, we also showed other information such as the actual fees of the lawyers on the SERP itself!

Of course there are more SEO marketing strategies to use. The 5 trends that we listed are the popular ones as of 2021. SEO consultants are responsible for a lot of a client’s overall SEO strategy. Being an SEO consultant is not the easiest job in the world. They require a lot of knowledge, researching, branding, formatting and much more. If you would like to do SEO yourself and you want to learn basic SEO, check out this blog post on 6 Do-It-Yourself-SEO.

SEO consultants also have to keep up with the trends and find what is the most suitable SEO strategy for their client’s brand and company. By keeping up with the latest trend, they help their client to stay relevant and seek customers. If you would like to learn more about Search Engine Optimization and how it all works out, feel free to continue to browse through our channel as we have an article fully explaining it.

Over at iClick Media, our chief SEO Consultant is Mr. Terence Sim. He has more than 12 years of experience managing and executing SEO for many big brands from the FMCG industry, healthcare industry, government sector, SMEs and many more! Read more about him below!