• For essential businesses, SEO is important for standing out and getting chosen over competitors, look for example at local businesses like food deliveries, courier services and online retailers 

• For non-essential businesses and those temporarily closed such as restaurants, and clothing stores, SEO is not so important as they rely on customers walking in the door 

We all know that governments and Big Pharma are working hard to deliver the vaccines and stop the pandemic so this trend cannot, and will not, continue for ever.  

But it’s not just this one the reason. There is more to it.  

First of all, in terms of search volumes, Covid-19 is trending at the moment. As you can see below, this graph reminds us that Covid-19 is a trend and it’s fading. I am not minimising the global issue; my point is that it’s just a trend and it will stop at some point.  

Research shows that “SEO leads inbound marketing conversion rates, netting 15% above the average conversion rates.” 

This means that SEO is about gaining trust from search engines, consistently delivering accurate and informative results over time. Another study shows that only 1% of pages that ranked in the first position on Google are less than 1 year old.  

An Ahrefs study showed a positive correlation between page age and position (on the first page of Google). 

In 2016, 42% of the entire global population was using voice search on their mobile phones. In a more recent research in 2019, 72% of 2,000 people surveyed by Microsoft answered that they regularly use voice search on their devices.

So, we can safely say that the trend between 2016 and 2019 has already increased. If you look at the sample of people interviewed, it’s very small, but it’s a trend, nevertheless. 

Now here is the thing, because voice queries expect one very specific answer, differently from desktop/mobile based searches where the number of answers is up to 10 per page, most of the queries are long tail and, obviously, very specific.  

You wouldn’t ask Alexa or Siri about “car insurance” but you would type it in to Google to assess your options. That’s why when using voice search, you become laser-focussed on the best answer. 

This means that searches with voice will be restricted in options and provide only the first source in the top 10 standard results. Imagine Google or Bing with only 1 result, that’s voice search. 

The search veteran Rand Fishkin, former CEO of Moz and Co-Founder of SparkToro, believes that the value provided to a website from a search query is inversely proportional to its ability to be answered by a voice: 

1. Featured Snippets, which we have seen being important for voice search 

2. Site links, displayed below the standard result for a page 

3. Website searches within Google search results 

4. Carousels 

5. Image packs 

6. Videos 

7. Reviews 

8. Recipes 

9. Breadcrumbs 

10. And many more… 

This list of elements is called Structured Data because it provides extra information (data) in a structured way (an element) and it requires lots of coding in the backend of a website for Google to understand it and display it.  

Why is Google doing this? It’s because it is deliberately trying to keep users on Google to drive less and less clicks to websites. Study shows that more than half of Google searches now result in 0 clicks. 

Others say that’s because Google’s mission is, and it will always be, to provide users with the best possible answer and this mission hasn’t changed since Google was born back in 1998.  

Google's mission statement is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” 

As always, the truth lies in the middle. Structured data not only informs voice search, but also have other tangible benefits, in fact experiments show that one particular Structured Data called “Breadcrumb” improved CTR from 2.7% to 2.8%, clicks by 43% and average position by 12%. 

That said, structured data is becoming more and more important for SEO because it really provides the best answer to the user, which is something that Google will always reward, and it increases brand trust and often results in extra clicks and better positioning.

Core web vitals are a metric for measuring User Experience (UX) and, as we have seen above, user experience is a very important factor for search engines.  

That’s why from May 2021, Google has set Core Web Vitals to become an official ranking factor, which ensures that there no annoying pop ups on the website, for example.  

All the elements like page load speed, how fast the site becomes interactive, how stable it is are all concurring to improve the UX. So, when visitors are using your web page on a mobile or desktop device, what’s the experience in terms of speed and interaction? We at Dare put lots of focus and attention to the technical aspects of websites, as when we perform audits for clients, we go into the deepest details thanks to our own 25 items checklist, where no stones are unturned.  

However, while it’s not clear yet how big the impact will be on search rankings, let’s not forget that search engines have hundreds of signals to consider and when one signal is not optimised this is generally not a big deal. That said, if a site is particularly poor in one or two ranking factors, it could make a difference in rankings.  

Google's own studies show that for pages that meet these thresholds of Core Web Vitals, visitors are 24% less likely to abandon the site. 

These SEO trends for 2021 show some important strategical aspects:  

1. Search is obsessed in serving the users, which has been the core focus since it was invented over 20 years ago, so focussing on the user is always a good strategic action. 

2. Voice search is unlikely to take off despite the billions of search devices being sold worldwide, simply because they don’t provide exhaustive answers to users, thus showing limitations that search engines cannot seem to overcome, at least in the short term. 

3. SEO success lies in a strategy that looks to gain visibility across all aspects of search engine landscapes and snippet strategy and position ‘0’ are a must, as gaining the standard search results are no longer the wiser strategy to go after. 

4. With so many SEO tactics and goals to pursue, a good SEO strategy will require experts who are able to pick the winners from a variety of actions and interests. SEO strategy is at least as much about what an expert decides what not to do as it is about what it does.