Expert Talks About Top SEO Trends For 2021!

ACCESSTRADE MY’s inaugural summit, the Performance Growth Summit 2020 was held on September 12 and successfully brought together digital and affiliate marketing experts across Asia. The summit proved to be a hit among digital marketers, content creators, and affiliate marketers in Malaysia.

In this Expert Talks series, we are going to highlight the major issues brought forward by the experts in PGS 2020.

Yo Le Cheng, SEO consultant in Marketing Signal Lab talked in detail about “Top SEO Trends For 2021 – Latest Forecast You Can’t Overlook”

With 6 years of hands-on SEO experience and a bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science, Yo Le Cheng is now an SEO consultant and focuses on various niches such as Beauty Niche, Property Niche, Travel Agency, Body & Health Niche, Software Niche, and Payment Gateway Niche.

What is SEO and how can it help your business?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is an act of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Some of the main criteria that should be taken into consideration when it comes to SEO are quality of traffic (search intent), quantity of traffic (search volume), and organic results.

According to SEO expert Yo Le Cheng, Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its algorithm to determine the ranking sequence of different websites.

Ultimately, a well-executed SEO campaign will result in ROI that continues even after your campaign ends and will continuously contribute to your online presence.

What SEO strategies and SEO Trends will work in 2020/2021? 

Apparently, the best SEO strategy that will work in 2020/2021 is one that uses 70% of on-page SEO and 30% of off-page SEO.

It is crucial to focus on search intent while you are setting up your SEO campaign. Moreover, more keywords will result in more traffic which will consequently lead to more potential customers. As a result, you will be able to produce more conversion and hence, more money!

Undoubtedly, keyword research is among the most important things when it comes to SEO. What is the difference between poor and proper keyword research?

Poor keyword research consists of less than 100 keywords per site and is usually generic and short tail. On the other hand, proper keyword research comprises more than 1000 keywords per site, cover all long tails and cover all sales cycle.

Keyword Research – Advanced Recursive Method 

To use this method, you need Ahrefs or SEMRush which are paid tools for keyword research.

Here are the steps to apply the Advanced Recursive Keyword Research Method for your SEO campaign.

Step 1: Type the main keyword in Google Search and choose the top five ranking sites. We use “bus tickets” as an example. Below are the top five ranking sites.

(i) https://www.easybook.com/en-my/bus

(ii) https://www.busonlineticket.com/booking/bus-tickets.aspx

(iii) https://www.redbus.my/bus-online-ticket

(iv) https://www.catchthatbus.com/

(v) https://transnasional.com.my/a-search.php

Step 2: Type these 5 URLs into Ahrefs site explorer and click export

Image courtesy: Yo Le Cheng

Step 3: Combine all exported keywords in an excel file and remove duplicated ones

This is how the recursive keyword research process works:

Image courtesy: Yo Le Cheng

As a result, you will have thousands and thousands of keywords with various variations, long tails and topics.

Apart from paid keyword research tools, there are also some free keyword research tools in the market. For instance,  

1. Google

(i) People Also Ask box

(ii) Related Search Keywords

(iii) Bold Words in the meta description of Results 

2. Keyword Surfer Extension

This is a free Chrome extension that shows an estimated global and monthly search volumes for any query typed into Google. You will also be able to find similar keywords in the search result.

3. Ubersuggest

Just like other keyword research tools available in the market, you will be able to see the trend, volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and cost per click.

On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO

According to Yo Le Cheng, on-page SEO is the optimisation of web pages in order to rank higher and earn organic traffic in the search engine. The most important SEO placeholders on on-page SEO are URL, SEO Title, and Heading 1 which is also the page title.

Apart from that, you should also produce unique and valuable content that fulfils search intent of your audience to make the best use of on-page SEO. On-page SEO also involves single keyword density and related keywords optimisation. Besides, strong page design and UX will also increase time on site, reduce bounce rate and increase conversion rate resulting in better results.

Moving on to off-page SEO…

Off-page SEO involves backlinks, social signal, and traffic. Backlinks are the foundation of the ranking of Google, while social signals are used to justify the occurrence of the link and traffic is the collective number of people who have shared and visited the site.

SEO trends and predictions in 2020/2021

Here are some of the insightful SEO trends and predictions that Yo Le Cheng shared in the PGS Summit:

On-page SEO is expected to become more important especially Keyword Density (Google NLP) and content that fulfills the search intent of the audience.

E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust) Signal. This means it will be increasingly difficult to receive organic visibility for YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) sites such as sites from the health niche. You will also need to build an overall site reputation.

User Experience will be an important factor for conversion.

Link Building will still work in the coming year. This includes links from high authority and relevant niche. It would be greatly beneficial to take note of the link velocity especially for a new site.

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As the leading affiliate marketing platform in Southeast Asia, ACCESSTRADE Malaysia is committed to bring the latest information and insights to affiliate marketers and digital marketers in the region. If you have missed PGS 2020, worry not! You can watch the full session here!

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