- [Neil] 2020 was a crazy year,
especially because of COVID.
But a lot of things have changed, from algorithms
to people going after companies like Facebook
from being a monopoly,
to voice search controlling roughly 50% of the searches
in the United States according to Comscore.
But 2020 is over, what's going to happen in 2021?
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down
how digital marketing will change in 2021.
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Now before we get started,
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If you're looking for the holy grail of digital marketing,
I hate to break it to you,
but there really isn't a holy grail anymore.
The digital marketing landscape is saturated,
especially due to COVID, everyone's coming online,
and what would have happened five years from now
has already happened due to COVID.
In essence, it's pushed all these businesses online,
made it super competitive
so nowadays everyone is leveraging digital marketing.
So how do you get a leg up on the competition
and win in 2021?
Well, the first trend I have for you is page speed.
It's going to be more important than ever.
Yes, there's 5G out there right now,
but go around out there and look at how many areas
that there may be 5G, 4G, or whatever connection there is,
and it still takes a long time for a website to load.
Just because your connection is fast,
it doesn't mean A, the website loads fast,
and B, it doesn't mean that you're in an area
where the reception gives you that high speed.
We're not there yet.
And for that reason,
you need to make sure that your website loads super fast.
Not only are we seeing it with an increase in conversions
that is causing sites when they improve their page speed,
but we're also seeing that it increases their traffic
and their rankings.
So if you have a website,
you need to make sure it's optimized and super fast.
One trick or hack that you can do
and we do this with the Neilpatel.com website
is load your non-static files from CDNs.
CDNs are also known as a content delivery network.
Most people are like, Yeah, I already use CDNs.
But you're using CDNs for your static images,
your static texts, what about your non-static files?
And by doing that, by putting your non-static stuff
on a CDN, it can boost your load time
and increase in all of your SEO rankings,
your overall traffic and your conversions.
We're seeing conversion increases for up to seven percent.
Now you may see a conversion increase higher than that,
but if that's the case, that means your traffic or more,
so your speed was really slow
in the first place and it needed to be improved.
The second trend that we're seeing is
content length won't matter as much.
And I'm talking about text-based content.
Everyone's talked about, oh if you want to rank
on the top 10 of Google, you need to have 2,000 plus words.
Well Google, how to tie a tie,
do you think Google wants to show you 2,000 words
on how to tie a tie?
Let's face it, they don't, why?
Because you, as a user, don't want to see 2,000 words
on how to tie a tie.
You want to see an image or animated gif
or video that breaks on how to tie a tie
and as quick as possible
so you can get on with your day.
And that's what's happening with a lot of text articles.
Everyone used to create content
based on the length being like,
oh if we want to rank at the top,
it needs to be super long, we need
to have all these keywords in there, this percentage.
That's over with.
Text-based content length doesn't matter as much,
it's the quality and Google is using more user signals,
but here's the kicker.
In 2021, I want you to make your audio length
and your video length longer.
We're seeing audio and video length
that's over 10 minutes perform better
than shorter versions that are only three,
four or even five minutes.
On the flip side,
if you make your audio and video length 20, 30 minutes,
we're not seeing it have as big of an impact
compared to just having it 10 minutes.
So anything around 10 minutes or more is good enough.
If you need to make it 30 minutes, you can,
but going less than 10 minutes,
around like two, three,
four minutes is really hurting your reach
when it comes to video and audio based content.
As I mentioned and this is the trend number three,
as I mentioned earlier,
there is no Holy grail of digital marketing
because it's super competitive.
That means one thing, one hack will not get you
that silver bullet
that just helps you beat your competition.
It's about getting those little marginal gains.
There's this British cycling coach, Dave Brailsford,
and his whole theory was, hey,
if you want to win the Tour de France,
you're not going to win by pedaling harder
and training harder and eating right,
everyone already does that.
But it's a lot of the little things
that no one's doing
that can really give you a leg up and your competition.
If you have a terrible night's sleep,
you're probably not going to pedal as hard the next day.
So your mattress, your pillow,
all that can affect how well you do the next day
during race day.
Your shoes, are they comfortable?
Your helmet, how aerodynamic is it?
All these little things add up.
The same goes with your marketing.
Are you using voice search?
Well, if you're using voice search,
have you used Jetson AI to make your site compatible
with voice devices so people can actually buy, right?
You're already getting traffic from voice search,
you probably just don't realize it,
but are you getting conversions from it?
These are the little marginal gains
that can give you a leg up on your competition.
Trend number four, how high you rank will matter
more than ever.
If you look at older data, it shows that,
hey, if you're rank at the top of Google,
you're going to get more clicks
than if you ranked number two, three, four, or five.
But what I believe is going to happen
with Google taking up more and more listings
because they need a hit curling earnings numbers
and they're making all these changes to algorithms
and sometimes the changes they make may affect paid ads,
sometimes they may not, but they got to figure out
more ways to monetize
if they want to keep growing their cash cow.
Whether that is them showing you travel tickets
that you can buy right then and there
on Google or them showing you the weather
or having calculators or mortgage rates.
And they've been making these changes over the years,
but what you'll see
in 2021 is my prediction is they're going to be
much more aggressive on this,
so that way they can hit bigger numbers.
And if you want to rank well on Google
and get the SEO traffic, you can still do well.
SEO is not dead, it's just,
you need to really go after those top spots
Because they're going to matter more than ever.
Trend number five, repurposing
and updating content will be the norm.
Everyone talks about creating new content,
but there's over a billion blogs,
there's tens of YouTube channels.
Everyone's already on platforms like Clubhouse.
If you're not, you can try it out.
So people are already using all these channels
and creating content in many different places,
but are you repurposing, right?
With the billion plus blogs,
there's already enough information out there.
You can just take the existing information
that you've already created and repurpose it.
You can take your text-based content
and make it video, make an audio,
use the same information and create a room on Clubhouse,
talk about that.
So when you're creating content, go super in-depth
and I don't want you to stop with just video,
also look at audio.
Podcasting is booming right now,
but there's not that many podcasts in the grand comparison
compared to blogs out there.
Don't worry about duplicate content.
None of these platforms are penalizing
for duplicate content.
And I want you to update more frequently
than you release new content.
It's an easier way to get more traffic.
For example, we update our old video content.
There's a lot of topics
that have already been beaten to death,
but no one's updating the same ones over and over again,
so they're fresh and relevant.
More people are focused on creating new content
and we see that with our clients at our ad agency,
Neil Patel Digital, versus them just trying to update.
Trend number six, backlinks won't matter as much.
With user signals, does it really matter
if a site has a million backlinks or two million backlinks?
Not really, what really matters to users is
is a site more relevant.
And that's what search engines are optimizing for
and that's what you need to aim for.
Make your content more relevant,
make the user experience better.
It's not about links, it's about experience
and heck, we've even seen if you build too many links
too quickly, it can actually hurt your rankings.
Trend number seven, brands will have more power than ever.
It's not just Google.
With Facebook, with Clubhouse,
whatever platform that you're going to go and leverage,
if you have a brand, it's easier to get followers,
it's easier to get reach, it's easier to get more sales.
There's so much fake news going out there,
there's a lot of corruption with people
just saying whatever online to make a quick buck
that if you have a brand,
you're much more likely to do better in the long run,
so make sure you focus on building that brand
because people trust brands, search engines,
social platforms, they all trust brands more,
and you'll see more as well.
So think about the rule of seven,
how you can interact with someone seven times,
whether it's through email, push, messenger bots,
all this stuff helps you reach that number
which is what creates more loyal followers
for your business or even personal brand.
Now, if you have any questions,
you can leave a comment below and I'll answer it.
If you enjoy this video, like it, share it,
tell the people about it.
Make sure you subscribe to the channel,
and if you just need help with digital marketing in 2021,
check on my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.