Believe it or not, my experience in SEO qualifies me to give calculated guesses on what’s to come.
After having conducted over 400 SEO tests over the years, I can confidently say that we can boil down Google to a science.
And in this post, I’ll be putting my lab coat and goggles on to give you my SEO prediction for 2021 which I recorded for Authority Hacker.
So What’s My Prediction?
I predicted two things to happen this year.
The first is the growing competition from low-end sites.
With the effects of the pandemic not going away anytime soon, more businesses will focus more efforts towards ranking their websites on Google. So this year we will see an exponential increase in SEO competition within many niches.
And if your business is just starting out, you’ll be competing with others on the bottom of the totem pole, making your climb up the Google index slower and more difficult as you try to leapfrog your competitors on your way to the top.
My second prediction has to do with Google’s continued hostility towards low-quality affiliate sites. This can be traced back to the Medic Update in 2018 which devalued sites that offered inaccurate, misleading, or just plain low-quality information on their topic.
This year, sites fitting this bill will continue to see their traffic being degraded across more and more niches and sub-niches.
Conclusion
From my predictions, there are two things you need to keep in mind:
- If you’ve been delaying getting your SEO house in order, now is the time to act. As competition is expected to exponentially increase this year, those without an SEO strategy are going to be left behind. If the big, high traffic search terms are out of reach, don’t let that intimidate you. Build and optimize content to focus on the lower competition, long-tail terms around your product.
- Quality, well researched, well structured, semantically rich content will reign supreme this year. Focus on this as well as your E-A-T (expert, authority, trust) signals to reduce the risk of your site being devalued.
To watch my SEO prediction for 2021 on Authority Hacker, click here.
