Is SEO Still Relevant in 2021?

Cormac Ryan

Search engine optimisation (SEO), has been a widely talked about and well-known practice for online marketers for years now. While you might hear of newcomers to the industry or people who simply may not how SEO works proclaim that it is dead, this definitive proclamation is far from the truth. 

Is SEO Dead? Why or Why Not?

Think about what the average web surfer does when they open up the web browser on their computer, smartphone, or tablet. Unless they have a specific website or platform they would like to visit already committed to memory or saved to their online bookmarks, they are likely heading to their favorite search engine to look something up. 

How many times a day do you have a random thought or question go through your mind? How many times do you pull out your phone and look the question or thought up to gather more information on the topic? 

Millions and millions of people search billions of different topics every day. 

If you’re an internet marketer or a blogger looking to get their latest product in front of potential customers, or share new content with readers, you need to get your stuff on the front pages of search engines. Your content being ranked high in search results means that more people will visit your site. 

In short, as long as people are looking up topics and keywords using Google and similar search engines, SEO will never be dead. 

SEO vs. Paid Search

Another popular way used to get content seen quickly online is putting money into paid search options like Google Ads, Facebook Advertising, or Twitter Ads, but that is no reason to shrug off good SEO practices. 

Think of it this way: Good SEO practices are a simple way to get free traffic, and more sales. 

Who wouldn’t want more eyeballs on their content with zero financial investment and using just a few easy practices that almost anyone can incorporate? It is true that SEO can be a bit of a learned art, but its basics can be easily grasped with some research and practice. And if you aren’t confident in your SEO skills, you can hire done-for-you services to give you a hand in boosting results on Google and other search engines. 

Search and advertising brings in billions annually for Google and other search engines – and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. Remember that when considering questions like “is SEO still relevant” or “is Google dead”. Your business can’t afford not to rank high on the world’s largest search engine. 

With search and advertising being such a big part of Google, right along with other search engines, the best overall marketing approach is to combine SEO and paid search efforts to make sure your marketing efforts are covered on several bases. 

You can get eyes on your site through your advertising efforts, along with hopefully getting some free, organic traffic through ranking your content highly on the front pages of search engines like Google, Bing, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, and more. 

How Everyone Can Practice Good SEO Techniques

Obviously, you should plan to use high-ranking keywords that are relevant to your product or niche when making content or promoting products. It can take awhile to get your sites to the front pages of search results, but once you get there, you can reap tremendous benefits from all of those extra clicks. 

Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to find keywords that are searched frequently by people all over the world. You will be able to see the highest ranking keywords as well as similar keywords also searched for in your niche. Using these creatively are the simplest and some of the most essential ways to make sure your site is seen and ranked highly. 

There are several other practices that you can utilise to build onto quality SEO for your website, too. When you are making content, keep some of these tips in the back of your mind that could come in handy for you as you work on getting your page highly ranked.

• Have engaging, regular content

All of the search algorithms out there like to see regular content and prefer content that is of high quality. Your sites will be ranked according to relevancy with keywords and readership, along with factors like the amount of time people spend on your pages. 

You want to be putting out quality, engaging, and regular content to make sure you keep readers, viewers, or buyers engaged, and try to stick to a schedule if possible.

• Try to have quality links on your page

Make sure your content links to authoritative and quality websites. If you need to expand on information or cite sources on a piece of content, using informative links to help readers out is always preferable to linking them to spammy sites that are obviously only trying to sell them something. 

• Know your keywords, but don’t stuff them into the content

Knowing keywords relevant to your content is so important in making sure that it is found and ranked by search engines, but you don’t want to practice keyword stuffing. This is where you place keywords in areas that may not make any sense, or overuse the keywords in an effort to make the content. This can actually work against you, as it might turn readers off to your content.

Don’t feel out of your element if you don’t consider yourself an SEO wizard. You can research the practices of SEO in your own time, or even take courses online to give you a hand in grasping the basics. 

You Can Do It!

With time and some practice, you can get some SEO techniques of your own down and get your site ranking higher in relevant search results so that you can get yourself some free views. With billions of searches going on every single day for so many topics all around the world, on so many different devices, search engine optimisation isn’t going to be a dead practice for a long time to come.