Digital Marketing Trends that will Dominate 2021

February 16, 2021

As a business, it is essential to keep up to date with current trends so you continue to grow, be competitive and stay relevant to your target market. Being aware of these trends is important in developing your marketing strategy. Below, we list the top digital marketing trends that will dominate the digital landscape in 2021 and explain how you can apply the trends to your business.

Google’s Mobile-First Indexing

What is Google Mobile-First Indexing?

Before any searches are made online, Google crawls all webpages to gather and analyse information in order to organise it. This is known as indexing. During the last couple of years, the use of mobile devices to make searches has increased. This has resulted in Google now shifting priority towards the mobile version of content on online platforms in its indexing. The search engine will be implementing this change officially from the end of March 2021. This deadline has been set for businesses to prepare their sites to be ready for mobile-first indexing.

So what can you do to prepare for this change? We have put together a short checklist that will make the transition a little less daunting.

If Googlebot can’t access the full content and resources on your website, your site will not be indexed so it is critical to check this. You can check to see if your website is mobile-friendly by using Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.

There are some robots meta tags on mobile versions of sites containing ‘noindex’ ‘nofollow.’ Having this will cause Googlebot to not index that content/link. Make sure that those blocked content is content that you don’t want to be indexed.

Delaying the loading of non-critical or non-visible content is called ‘lazy-loading’. You should double check that all your relevant content (content you want to be indexed) is loaded through lazy loading implementation.

Traditionally mobile versions of websites are watered down versions of the desktop site, to make a more seamless experience and view for visitors. Now, Google’s change with mobile first means that mobile versions of websites should contain all the same content as the desktop version and nothing is left out. Mobile versions of the site should contain primary content(the content you want to rank with, or the reason for users to come to your site). Googlebot may not be able to fully understand the page if it hasn’t been optimised properly for mobile devices.

SEO for Visual, Video & Audio Searches

What are Visual, Video & Audio Searches?

When each of the mediums (visual, video, audio) are used as the stimuli for online searches, this is known as either visual, video or audio searches. The mediums are analysed by AI (artificial intelligence) technology and it returns a list of related results making it more timely for users to perform searches.

Studies show that in 2020 over 50% of users made searches online using these alternate mediums. This is predicted to increase over 2021 with more users turning to visual, video and audio searches as a convenient way to browse online.

As this shift is happening within the online space, it’s important that businesses guarantee that their online content is optimised for these alternative search methods.

How do you optimise for Visual, Video & Audio Search?

Name Your Images

Appropriately name images based on the content.

Add Titles

Add title attributes instead of having key smash.

Use Alt Tags

This is very important. Alt tags need to be detailed where possible and contain appropriate keywords.

Easy to Consume Content

This is a basic but very important factor to consider as there is an overabundance of content online. In addition to this, users’ attention spans are constantly shortening. In order to make certain that your product or service will not be overlooked by consumers, their user experience needs to always be a positive one. This means providing content that is easy to consume. Using the following guidelines when creating content for online and social media platforms will establish it as easy to consume.

Visuals

Try and increase the amount of visual/graphic content

Interactivity

Try and incorporate some form of interactivity within the content

Short Clips

When creating video content, ideal duration is no longer than 20-30 seconds

Concise

Try make any text as concise as possible or include a summary option for consumers to read

Incorporate these features when creating content and you’ll have users coming back for more.

High Increase in Ecommerce Website Traffic

Over 2020 there was a drastic increase in website traffic for ecommerce businesses, this is predicted to continue to increase over 2021. This trend is one that needs to be considered when any strategy is being developed especially for small businesses. There will be a strong need to guarantee that your business appears in the top results of a Google search. This high position can be secured by considering the trends mentioned above as well as re-evaluating SEO strategies and the overall look/feel of your website.

For ecommerce businesses, it’s important to make the necessary changes to ensure that you capitalise on this increase and improve your conversion rate. Here’s a quick checklist of ecommerce must-haves to help you get started.