Keeping your company at the top of the list   

Predicting the future is hard, but keeping up with trends and modern technology can certainly help you prepare for what’s next. This is important with regards to every nearly aspect of digital marketing, and especially website maintenance and search engine optimization. Looking forward to this upcoming year it will be important to refine your current process and adapt to the changes going on around us in the digital world. Here are some early observations of what may change in 2021 regarding how we understand and implement proper SEO mechanisms.  

SERP ANALYSIS: We predict that as Google’s algorithms continue to adapt and become more complex, there will be less focus placed on writing a meta description for all pages on a site, but rather more of a focus on SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) / Searcher intent. This is because over time Google’s search engine is becoming increasingly better at truly identifying what a user is searching for. This will favor sites that render & stabilize quickly, and avoid sites that force pop-ups, registrations, & immediate payments. Rather than only focusing on your product, Google is will focus more on what exactly the user is looking for. For companies to best adapt to these aspects of the evolving algorithm more focus should be placed on the on-site journey of organically gathered leads and the keywords on the pages that the most time is spent on.  

BEHAVIORAL ANALYTICS: One of the shifts we are seeing from the Covid-19 pandemic is that a landscape that is constantly changing renders traditional keyword patterns useless. Rather than keyword research, we may see more resources allocated towards first-party user research. This is collected directly from your audience made up of customers, site visitors, and social media impressions. More specifically, data in your CRM, surveys, chat bots, and customer feedback will become more important for optimizing the user’s experience. Strong customer support services, relevant post content, and a highly functional FAQ page will get customers the information they are looking for and boost your SEO.  

**we should put an emphasis on adding more FAQ-esque content to blog posts and media we publish** 

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Keyword frequency and ramping up quantity is becoming more outdated by the day, and quality content that is more in accordance with what users are actually typing into the search engine is moving to the forefront. Increasing and optimizing pages readability will become increasingly more important to create separation from your competitors. In a similar realm of thought, higher quality images will be rewarded with better SEO results. Using images that are at least 1200px wide will boost your ranking on Google discover, because they have a higher click-rate than thumbnails.  

CORE WEB VITALS AND PAGE EXPERIENCE OPTIMIZATION: With a heavier focus on user experience for SEO in 2021, it would be foolish to continue overlooking page experience metrics. There will be a shift towards utilizing tools such as Crux API & Lighthouse to identify what aspects of your page has the most influence on the users experience. There will be a shift towards creating with features such as scroll trigger animations or high quality media to better engage users.  

LONG FORM CONTENT: Publishing longer content not only links more keywords to your site but when you appeal to Google’s E-A-T guidelines, you will be outranking your competitors in no time. E.A.T is an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (or Page Quality), and it boils down to creating content that your audience loves. This is much easier to do when your blogs are closer to 2,000 – 3,000 words rather than 1,000. It is important to keep the content digestible so we would further recommend breaking it down with subheadings. Reevaluating your target audience and observing trends relevant in that focus group and industry is crucial for creating content your base will read.  

LINKS & LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS: There will always be rumors of backlinks being a figment of the past but as of this year, Google still sure seems to care a lot about them. To further coincide with Google’s acclaimed E-A-T guidelines, including more links to relevant websites and citing sources is always a good thing. The hard part is getting other sites to link to yours, so a bit of industry research will go a long way for those regards. Perhaps guest writing blogs for companies adjacent to yours is a good starting point. Long tail keywords are becoming increasingly more important too because of their high conversion rate and the fact that almost half of the searches on Google are local. Increases in voice search queries are also longer and more conversationally driven, so making use of conversational content would also be a good thing to be mindful of. A good source of long-tail keywords is Google suggestions and it’s variations.  

In general, the trends are shifting more from industry relevant SEO to consumer centric SEO and will come to benefit the best user experiences and most relevant information. Make small incremental changes to your SEO management and develop process plans that lay out an efficient system. No need to tear down the old process, but rather shift the balance in where you spend your time making updates and changes. 

First impressions are everything. With your website and other marketing materials, it starts with a great font. Use a curvy font like Lucinda Handwriting and information might be hard to read. Go with Arial and you might seem unoriginal. Fonts are serious business. In fact, one study suggests there could be an ideological meaning behind the style you like best. Yes, you heard that right.

Whether you go bold or curvy, make sure your font choice fits the personality of your brand, is easy to read and looks great on any platform (mobile, desktop, billboard, or any custom swag you want to create later).

The Choices Can be Overwhelming

Be prepared. There are hundreds of fonts out there. To help those who are unfamiliar with the twist and turns of letters, there’s a great guide from G2 Learning Hub about typography. This guide breaks down the four categories of font types: Serif, Sans Serif, Script and Decorative. And, even those have multiple categories!

If you want to cut to the chase and find out what’s popular, online resources like LogoMaker provide a list of the 10 most popular fonts used for logos.

For those who want to be unique and stand out among competitors, an experienced designer (we have a few at Fuel VM) is the best option. Even if you hire an agency or freelancer to do the heavy lifting and create that perfect logo and style for your brand, it helps to understand typography. You will appreciate why that specific font was chosen for your brand – and have enough information to reject the choice if you disagree.

Our Picks

Because of the high volume of websites and branding projects our designers at Fuel VM tackle each day, fonts are part of the fun that comes with creating. Two of our designers share their most popular font choice right now.

Poppins font is popping!

Sloan, a designer at Fuel VM, calls this font her new Helvetica. It’s super clean, modern, and easy to read. Poppins looks great in any format and comes in various styles.

Wide open to Open Sans

Open Sans is a standard font for websites. Cassi, a designer at Fuel VM, considers the style a great go-to font for marketing materials. The classy, elegant style of Open Sans looks great on desktop and mobile layouts.

Digging Didot 

Taylor, a designer at Fuel VM, likes Didot. He says it's a font that has withstood the test of time and even adapted to it. It is a hairline serif but somehow maintains legibility. Didot is able to preserve elegance and keep up with the modern trends through minimal modifications. Headlining many of our fashion magazines today, this elegant, hairline serif will remain a favorite.

Let’s make some magic together. Partner with Fuel VM for your next design or branding project.