What will search marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) look like in 2021, and where will it take B2B marketers and brands when a post-pandemic world eventually arrives?
To help answer these questions and more we’ve gathered 12 top B2B search marketing insights from both industry experts and our own team, and present our annual look at SEO predictions and search trends for 2021.
When I first went online in 1984 operating a 300-baud bulletin board system, it would be six years before Archie’s FTP site search arrived in 1990, followed three years later by Excite and the other early web search engine innovators, and if there’s one aspect of search that has remained constant throughout the ensuing decades, it’s been unending change.
The search marketing landscape has always been one of the rapid changes and keeping up-to-date with ever-shifting SEO machinations and technical search intricacies can be more than a full-time job for top B2B SEO professionals. Luckily, for 2021 we’ve got a 工作职能邮件数据库 wealth of SEO insight from 12 of the world’s leading search subject matter experts that you can use to hit the ground running as a new year of search unfolds.
Let’s jump right in and see how top search marketing practitioners expect 2021 to change the way we do business, and why it could quite likely be a groundbreaking year for search.
1 — A Greater Understanding of Search Intent
Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz
CEO, RustyBrick
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable
In 2020 we really saw advances in search engines understanding queries better and the content on the page — i.e. BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers) is now used in all queries. This is helping Google, as I wrote last year, in understanding voice queries and responding to those queries but also in serving better results.
I am excited to see how passage indexing rolls out and how SEOs react and adapt, if necessary, to that roll out. The Page Experience update is rolling out in May 2021, so that should be exciting to watch as well.
Search is in a very exciting place right now, we are at the verge of really being able to understand the true intent of queries and 2021 will be an expansion of that in so many ways.
Search is in a very exciting place right now, we are at the verge of really being able to understand the true intent of queries and 2021 will be an expansion of that in so many ways. — Barry Schwartz @rustybrickCLICK TO TWEET
2 — The Rising Importance of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
Lily Ray
Lily Ray
SEO Director, Path Interactive
Google has already provided some clues as to what they will prioritize in 2021 from a usability and performance standpoint: Core Web Vitals and the final push towards mobile-first indexation for all sites. There are also new Google products and features worth focusing on, such as Web Stories and Google Discover (the two go hand-in-hand); advancements with indexing video and podcast content; and improved experiences in Google Shopping and Images.
But from my perspective, the biggest overarching trend in SEO in recent years which will undoubtedly continue in 2021 is the focus on E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. E-A-T has become a necessity for sites in many categories to perform well, but especially for YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) sites, especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic and the rampant rise in misinformation online.
The biggest overarching trend in SEO in recent years which will undoubtedly continue in 2021 is the focus on E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. — Lily Ray @lilyraynycCLICK TO TWEET
3 — On-Page Analytics, Microsoft Clarity & Google’s Forthcoming Offering
Dixon Jones
Dixon Jones
CEO, inLinks.net
Whilst I’d love the SEO world focused on BERT in 2021 to give InLinks.net cover (As SEOs should be!) — I think the new gig in town will be heat maps and UX improvements.
Whilst these are not new ideas for Internet marketers, it looks like “Clarity” —Microsoft’s new and free UX tool — will not be taken lying down by Google, who have announced something that sounds remarkably similar to roll out in May 2021. Google rarely give us this much notice, which suggests that this will be the new SEO playground.
The Clarity tool, from Microsoft is already up and running, though, and I cannot imagine any SEO not at least taking a look. It will be interesting to see if paid tools in a similar space — such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg — will benefit or suffer from this newfound interest in on-page analytics.
The Clarity tool from Microsoft is already up and running, and I cannot imagine any SEO not at least taking a look. – Dixon Jones @Dixon_JonesCLICK TO TWEET
4 — Create Content with Stages of Intent to Move Beyond Keywords
Melissa Fach
Melissa Fach
Senior SEO Analyst, Cox Enterprises
Google will continue to improve and perfect the ways it determines the right results for a query. For years they have been indicating.