How Google ranks your website may not be the same as your business enters the new decade. From user experience to voice search everything is going to change and for your small business to stay ahead of the competition and enter 2021 with a bang you need to embrace these changes right away.
1. Optimise Your Business for Local Search
The online landscape is becoming more competitive by the day and if you are not ready for customers looking for local businesses in their area, you might be handing out your precious leads to your competitors.
For example, if you an electrician based in Ballarat, your need to optimise your online presence to reflect that in the most efficient way.
There are 2 things you need to take care of right away:
a. Make sure all the information you have provided on your Google My Business Page is not only accurate but also up to date.
b. If you serve various suburbs in Ballarat, make sure your website has different landing pages for different local areas, with content incorporating keywords that make the best use of your services and the local area.
2. Focus On User Experience
User-experience will lead in 2021. When someone visits your website, you need to make sure you are catering to their exact needs in order to keep them engaged as they interact with various pages and to keep them coming back.
This is because to rank higher in Google search, Google will now also be considering website analytics such as user behaviour on your site and how much time people are spending there to determine whether the site is relevant to a search or not, and rank it higher or lower accordingly.
This might require you to do some A/B testing on your pages to see how well each page is performing. Now is a great time to start and get prepared for 2021.
3. Exclusive Website Content
This one cannot be stressed more. Great content will remain to lead Google searches and for all the right reasons. Not only good content keeps the audience on the site for longer and keeps them coming back, but exclusive content, unique to your site and relevant to customer’s query is sure to give them a great user experience which is what Google has been asking for.
4. Mobile Optimisation
With over 80% of all website traffic coming via mobile, your website needs to be able to give the best experience to your site visitors coming through that route.
Slow loading, bad alignment, text too small to tap on while using mobile and other issues might just turn off your audience and they might go to a different site looking for answers.
Having a mobile-friendly site not only makes it easier for people to navigate through the different pages on your site but is only great to improving your Google ranking.
5. Voice Search
With 25% of all searches made using Google voice search option, means people are time-poor and want quick and relevant answers without having to type a query.
This also means that most searches made will be through queries similar to a real-life person to person queries. So if someone is looking for an Electrician in Ballarat to fix their smoke alarm they might say just. Hence you need to craft content that focuses on long-tail key phrases rather than your regular keywords.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, most of the trends in 2021 will not be too different from what they are now. However, Google might be giving more weightage to some and less to others as we enter the new decade. Voice, mobile, content, user-experience and local searches will all top Google’s list when ranking your website.