2021 Digital Trends According To Semalt SEO Agency

Let's face reality, all the future trends we all planned on using in our digital marketing strategies have become obsolete. Think of the coronavirus like another big bang. It had a rippling ring bigger than anything we've ever seen with our eyes. 

Like many things, digital trends had their own portion of the pie. Everything we SEO professionals had previously planned now looked like bugs to the 'unexpected eventuality.' All we're left with is an outdated digital marketing strategy. 

Learn what you should be preparing for; here is how we've prepared our clients for the new trends that matter today. 

In the past year, we've witnessed digital transformations like never before. These transformations include digital efforts became a necessity for businesses of all kinds to catch up to. This was demanded on a global scale for both consumers and companies to survive. 

The future trends you depended on for your digital marketing strategy became stale and ineffective. In your current market, new issues are what you must tackle if you plan on surviving. The need of customers and their behaviors has drastically changed and continues to do in highly unpredictable patterns. 

In this column, we will be discussing what the current trends are. We will also be giving you what you should expect so you can plan better in the upcoming quarters so you can stay ahead and hopefully overtake your competition. 

Sadly this is one of the questions not many SEO professionals are able to give an answer to. However, we believe so. That means you need to do everything possible to catch up if you want to remain No1 in the minds of your readers. 

A study by McKinsey found that there was an accelerated ecommerce adoption by ten years as a result of the pandemic in just three months. In fact, we believe that there was about 60% of companies across industries experienced new buyer behaviors in the past year. 

There is a high demand for your company to pivot and keep up with the demand for swift and convenient online inventory search, ordering, and curbside deliveries. Contactless deliveries have now become the standard way of getting things done safely. 

This has caused several companies to look towards building security and resilience for future possibilities. The truth is, the plans you put in motion before the pandemic had to be reevaluated and reprioritize, which most likely pushed it further down the list. 

Timetables had to be scrapped and redrawn. The company's budget, scope, and the order of its priorities change. For most of the ten years to come, "plans" became needed immediately. Now you need to think not just about 2026 will be five years from now but also five years from COVID-19. 

We've mentioned this before, and we will draw your attention to it again. Search insights are the real-time voices of your audience. Nanalyzing search inputs alone will give you more than enough data on what next you should do. 

Many SEO experts and brands still don't understand that customers are constantly telling them their needs, wants, and requirements in search queries and through their on-sit behavior. 

Semalt equips your organization with the ability to listen to these queries, analyze them and activate this information with real-time personalizations. This, on its own, is a massive opportunity for your brand to connect and engage with your audience. 

With Semalt, you have the people processes and platform needed to pull this off. 

Sometimes, more isn't better, and this applies to content. This is why we must factor in velocity and quality in equal measures when developing a strategy to scale content. If you're currently putting in all your best effort but producing just one content per month, you're missing out on several other opportunities to appear in search, social, email, and other channels. The more high-quality content you publish, the more opportunities you come across. But like links, fewer high-quality contents do better than high volume low-quality content.

Expertise plays an important role in EAT, so there is no point in having 100 useless content on your site. Instead, you should be looking for ways to improve the number of high-quality content.

This was something most professionals didn't see coming. Today, consumers demand that a brand should be able to deliver connected digital experiences. SalesForce, in its recent State of the Connected Customer Survey, found that about 80% of consumers now consider the experience they get from the company as important as the experience they get from its products and services. 

Consumers could be chatting with an AI or a human customer representative and still require top-quality services. This is the same expectation from every mode of communication. It could be via phone calls, social media, or mail. Consumers expect that the agent assigned to their case is knowledgeable enough about the problem. 

They expect brands to be smart enough to facilitate the flow of interactions. After a user interacts, the brand should be able to recall the previous interaction the next time they meet. The study mentioned above also found out that about 62% of consumers confess that their interaction with one company in an industry influences their expectations when discussing with other companies. 

Like many other smart SEO professionals have realized that simply automating tasks to reduce redundancy has become ineffective. The volume of data we have to analyze has also skyrocketed. 

These drastic changes have resulted in an increase in demand for new and efficient ways to analyze data. We now rely on deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, and robotic procession automation to help understand the large volume of inbound data. 

With intelligent automation, we relinquish some roles, so we don't have to make every single decision. We create and teach machines how to take actions and learn/understand every customer in ways we as humans are unable to do at scale.

These machines have also been programmed to take actions in real-time when the consumer is most accommodating to personalized messages, deals, contents, and recommendations. 

As a result of the pandemic, many international and interstate routes were closed off. This taught a lot of businesses and consumers the supply chain as well as the importance of your local community. 

Consumers began to hold brands responsible for what happens around the world with the belief that brands need to change the world positively. Buyers began searching for brands that shared similar interests as them. Now brands and marketers are forced to clearly state their positions on matters to attract a particular set of audience. 

PPC and SEO have done a fine job in finding a way to work hand in hand. It is no longer enough for PPC and SEO teams to just know what the other is doing. Today, both teams must work hand in hand and complement each other. PPC and SEO team must not just be under the same roof but in the same room all the time. 

Both teams must now work collaboratively to keep spending to a minimum and overall improvement on the increase. SEO and PPC combined can facilitate proactive planning and a shared commitment to providing the best answers to every consumer's needs. 

2020 was a year like no other. We were forced into a future we thought was still far away. While this may seem like an unusual circumstance, we chose to believe that it's for the better. We can now work from home, save resources and get things done. 

Semalt can help you catch up with the current trends. Our experts are always getting an update and learning new ways to improve your site. Get in touch with us today.