Is SEO still useful in 2021
With the digitisation of marketing, SEO has for a while now been the go-to-tool for businesses, of any size, seeking to increase online visibility in search results. However, with Google’s updated algorithms and search results page, is it still an effective marketing tool in 2021? This is a valid question which I’ll answer in this article.
Basically yes, SEO is absolutely still useful in 2021. It remains one of the best ways to achieve organic, long term digital marketing goals, and is still used by countless brands seeking growth and maintained interaction with clientele. A study by Bright Edge found that organic traffic was what drove over 51% of visits to websites; this shows that most people search for what they want, and click on the result which best suits their expectations. While adverts are still important, this clearly shows that a lot of people would rather do the searching themselves. To ignore this form of free growth doesn’t make sense – relying on active marketing is expensive and only taps into a small section of the market.
People still trust Google’s ranking, whether they’re conscious of it or not. Achieving #1 ranking gets sites a massive 21% of clicks, with #2 and #3 achieving 10% and 7.5% respectively. When it gets to the top few spots, a high ranking can achieve incredible results, and once outside of the top 7 spots, clicks drop to about 1.5% – a significant decrease.
Most business owners know the benefits of a high ranking – what’s being asked though, is has the way that SEO needs to be produced in order to be effective changed? Yes, it has. Over the past 10 years of so, Google’s ranking algorithms have become far more sophisticated. It no longer suffices to simply string together a bunch of incoherent keywords and hope for the best. Google now accounts for the following:
- Quality. From 2011, Google has penalised websites with bad quality content, and with advances in AI, its ability to analyse the standard of language in content has increased dramatically. Updates in 2019, with the introduction of BERT, mean that Google can now check is the content of an article matches the readers intent from their searches and conversions. Quality is both hard and simple to optimise for – it’s not really a science, it just requires the production of excellent and engaging prose which people enjoy reading.
- Mobile friendly. The majority of Google searches are carried out on smartphones, so it only makes sense that sites which are mobile friendly are ranked higher.
- Accuracy. Linked to quality of course, sites which use language to achieve a specific goal – providing clear information on a specific topic for example – are ranked higher. Vague assortments of words, even if connected together grammatically perfectly, are not enough to satisfy user intent, and therefore are not SEO.
It may seem like a bit of a minefield, and in a way it is. SEO has become highly specialised, but at the same time the number of expert providers of both content and advice have exploded, making it easy to seek help. Consultants like James Taylor SEO and sites like Moz and Ahrefs are good places to start for finding help and unbiased information.