Guest Cyrus-Shepard Posted January 14, 2021 Posted January 14, 2021 Posted by Cyrus-Shepard Happy new year, readers! We're back with a brand new season of Whiteboard Friday episodes for your viewing pleasure. First up: Moz SEO expert Cyrus Shepard shares his top 21 tips for successful Google SEO in 2021, including what to prioritize and what to look out for in the year ahead. He's also included a bunch of helpful resources for your reference in the transcription below! Watch and enjoy, and as always, leave your questions and your own suggestions in the comment section. http://moz.com/cms/blog/WB-Fridays-21-Smart-SEO-Tips-for-2021-Whiteboard.png?mtime=20210107141247&focal=none Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today, so glad that you can join us. We are talking about 21 smart Google SEO tips for 2021. We're getting ready for a new year, a new year of SEO strategies. These are 21 practical tips that you can implement that should, hopefully, move the needle on your organic traffic. These are some of the best tips that I've collected over the past year. Many of them that I'm going to use myself in my own SEO strategies. Now we have four categories: increasing clicks, content/on-page SEO tips, technical SEO, and a little bit of link building. There are 21 of these. These are going to go fast. We're trying to do 10 to 12 minutes, so we don't get to spend a lot of time on each one. But don't fret. We're going to link to appropriate resources in the transcript below so that we can keep along and explore a little bit more. All right. Ready to dive in? Increasing clicks Let's start with clicks, specifically earning more clicks from Google without actually ranking higher, because that's one of the great things about SEO. You don't actually have to rank higher to get more traffic if you can get more clicks from the rankings that you already have. So let's talk about some specific strategies for getting more clicks without increasing rankings. 1. Favicon optimization First, favicon optimization. Now I'm surprised more people haven't talked about this in 2020. Google displays favicons in mobile search results, and they can influence your click-through rate if they're high contrast, if they're visible or not visible. Having a good favicon can make a few percentage points difference, very minor, but it does make a difference if you can get it right. Aaron Wall, SEO Book, wrote one of the very few posts about that. 2. Breadcrumb optimization While we're optimizing our favicons, let's take a look at breadcrumb optimization. Google displays breadcrumbs in both desktop and mobile search results. They can be keyword-rich breadcrumbs, which can influence your click-through rate. Now Google gets their breadcrumbs from a lot of places. That can be your URL, your schema markup, your actual breadcrumbs on the page. What you want to do is make sure Google is displaying the breadcrumbs that you want them to display, using those keywords that you choose. The best way to do that, make sure that you have breadcrumbs actually on your page with links, that you're using schema markup. Ideally, it would match your URL structure, but that isn't always necessary. So a great breadcrumb optimization audit. 3. Meta descriptions Let's optimize those meta descriptions. This is so old-school SEO. But a recent study shows that 30% of websites don't even use meta descriptions. Now that's understandable because another study shows that 70% of the time, Google will rewrite the meta description, usually because it's not using the keywords that the user is searching for. But if we write a well-crafted meta description, it can compel users to click, and that means using keyword-rich descriptions that people are actually searching for, so when Google does use your meta description, it's encouraging those clicks and acting as marketing copy for your website. 4. Numbers in titles Along with meta descriptions, titles. Just shared a study recently showing that dates added to titles increased rankings for a particular brand. Numbers are generally one thing that I always test in title tags that usually produce pretty consistent results. Specifically, dates in title tags are often a winner, January 2021. Don't be spammy about it. Don't include it if it doesn't make sense and don't fake it. But if you can include a number, it will often increase your click-through rate for any given query. 5.
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