SEO is important for your business as it ensures that potential customers can find you. However, the problem is that SEO is an ever-changing industry. You need to keep up with all of the latest SEO trends so that your site can be as visible to potential customers as possible.
This will not only help you remain competitive with others in your industry, but it can also give you a competitive advantage if they aren’t keeping up. This article will help you understand some of the latest SEO trends in 2022 that you should be aware of to make the most of your SEO efforts.
Voice Search
Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri have made voice searches even more popular today than ever. It is estimated by Google that 4 out of 10 adults in the United States at least use a voice search once daily. This is expected to grow even more in 2022. What this means for you is that you will need to take some time to optimize your content around it.
To optimize for voice searches, use keywords that are longer and more conversational. You should also think about adding a FAQ section to your page. Voice assistants like Google Home tend to take answers from the FAQ pages for search results. You should also make sure that you create little snippets (typically around 30 words) of content that are meant to specifically answer any questions that someone may ask a voice assistant.
User Intent
User intent has also become a major focus in 2022 SEO. It shouldn’t just be about “SEO” content, rather you should have a greater focus on the user. This means creating content and keywords that are centered on the user and their intent. You need to know what the intent is when they are using these keywords as well as the stage of the buying journey the customer is in. This information will help you create content that is focused on the user and their intent. This is important no matter what type of content you are creating.
What does this mean? You need to look at the different keywords to learn some valuable insight. This could mean breaking down the different keywords to try to determine what their intent is.
Interactive Experiences
The trick to SEO and getting customers interested in your brand is customer engagement. One of the best ways these days to engage the customer is by offering interactive experiences. You have a few different approaches to this, but the primary goal is to give users the information that they are looking for in a way that is both memorable and easy to navigate. It’s not typically possible to create all of your evergreen content into something that is interactive, but interactive elements are absolutely important to include.
Google Discover
Optimizing for Google Discover is another trend to watch out for in 2022. Google Discover is a new offering that collects relevant information about a user based on what they typically search for, then places that at the top of their search page. This improves a brand’s visibility when they learn how to optimize their site for it. To optimize for Google Discover, you want to make sure that you not only
create great content but also have a high-quality but relevant picture included as this would appear on the Google Discover feed. A picture will make it more likely a user will click on your page.
Video SEO
People spend a lot of their time watching videos online. Just look at how popular sites like YouTube are today. According to YouTube, they have over a billion active users. Not only do they have a lot of active users, but these users also tend to spend a lot of time on their website. However, the issue is that this means there are a lot of users spending time on this website. This means that it can be hard to get attention for your videos. But making videos can be great for your business.
What this means for you is that you need to spend time on video SEO. SEO for videos follow the same principle as traditional websites and content. This means a focus on keywords. You can find keywords to use for your videos by using the autocomplete feature on YouTube. What this means is that if you have an idea for a topic, you should type that topic into the search field on YouTube. By doing this, you can get a list of keywords of what people are checking for.
From there, you will want to use the keywords in the tags, titles, and description of the YouTube video. It could be especially useful to use the keyword as a shout-out within the video.
AI Algorithms (Google)
Google revealed a new AI a few years ago, known as “RankBrain”. It has been confirmed by a Google engineer that this is among the most important ranking factors used by Google. If you want to rank high on Google, you will need to be able to adapt your company’s SEO strategy for the AI search algorithms.
There are a couple of things to consider here. First of all, the Google algorithm started measuring how often search engine users click on your site on the first page of results. If your page happens to have a higher amount of organic click-through rate that what Google expects of your site, your page will get a significant boost. This means that you should put a lot of time and energy into ensuring that the title tags for your page are optimized for on-page SEO.
Google is also looking to make sure that the people visiting your website get the information that they are looking for on your page. So, if a person clicks on your site after searching for one keyword and immediately jumps back to the search engine, this shows Google that your website isn’t giving these users what they are looking for. This has a negative impact on your search engine rankings.
Quality Content
One thing that has remained the same for many years is quality content on your website. This is an SEO trend that may not be new, but it also doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. What makes content “quality”? The first thing to take a look at here is indexing. Pages may be considered by the Google console as “Discovered, currently not indexed”. Google has been very open about the fact that people should ensure that published pages that are indexable, should be. This is a strategy that you should focus in on in 2022.
Why does this issue happen so frequently right now? A lot of businesses are focused on short-term SEO strategies in order to gain awareness and links from digital PR. This way, take on any highly specific and technical SEO fixes. These are great for getting a bit of attention in the short-term, but this isn’t the ideal solution if you want a more long-term solution.
An issue here is that with these short-term solutions, there is a lot of similar content that you can find online. You shouldn’t just great hundreds of different types of generic content. You should take the time to research what the interests of your target audience is. Then, organize these interests by topic and begin to organize them by priority for your business goals.
You need to have more of a focus on the quality of content, as this carries a lot of weight with users. It’s important to focus on creating content that is useful and factual. This shows users that you are an authority on the topic, which can help you build up your online reputation.
Mobile-First Index
Back in 2019, Google successfully and completely rolled out the Mobile-First indexing. What does this mean for your website? This means for the first time, Google is starting to consider the mobile version of your website is the “main” version of the website, rather than the desktop version of this page. The mobile crawler from Google needs to have the ability to completely index the content on each page of your website. It’s also important that your website is optimized for mobile devices, so that it works properly on these devices.
There are things that you can do that will help you optimize your website for these purposes. You may think that everything looks fine when you are looking on the browser, but you might not be seeing your content in the same way that Google does. To make sure that you see your website through the same lens as Google, you will want to take a look at the Google Console for the “Mobile Usability” report.
To use this tool, you will need to take some of the URLs from your website and input them into the Mobile-Friendly test. This test gives you the answer as to whether or not Google actually considers these pages to be optimized for mobile users. The test will give a basic “Yes” or “No” response. Then, you can go onto check the mobile page speed of your various website pages using an online tool. If your page doesn’t load within a few seconds, usually the user will just move onto another website.
Core Web Vitals
By now, you’re probably aware that Google has been pushing websites to make sure that their pages are offering a great experience for the user. The reason this was such a priority for Google is that there had been far too much time that people would go to a page and leave instantly because it either lacked quality content or just wasn’t an appealing website. Google decided to put an emphasis on rewarding websites that offer a positive user experience. Their Page Experience Algorithm was released last year, and the point of this is to help rank websites today.
A key aspect of this these days is considering the Core Web Vitals. These vitals include:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
- FID (First Input Delay)
- CIS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
Long-Form Content
There is evidence that long to read website posts of upwards of 3,000 or more words can get at least 3x the traffic and over 4x the amount in their tax shares. These posts also manage to get 3.5x more
backlinks than other articles that are nearly half as much as those up to 1,200 words. However, you should never lose sight of the fact that you do need to check the readability of the website. If your website doesn’t have the quality content that it needs to succeed.
One way that you can increase the readability of a webpage includes breaking up the content into various sections that have both H2 and H3 subheadings. This is particularly important if you have someone that may not have as much experience in this area. This makes your website more readable by offering a more complete look over your website. You should also make sure that you are linking to reputable services.
The next move is to make sure that you are able to optimize your content for sharing. When people read content that they love or come across a website or service that offers something they possibly need now. You should be making sure that no one is accessing your information. Sharing looks that are obvious should be located within the headline and during the contention.
There are SEO template tools that you can access, which can help you optimize your page. These tools can be particularly important because it can offer a wealth of valuable information including how long your content should be, what search engine keywords that you should be focused on, other keywords that are semantically able to see, and to look at other pages to see how good these items can be.
Featured Snippets Will Play Bigger Role
Featured snippets are something that many businesses try to stay away from for their own business purposes. This isn’t something that requires you to go backed on age. This is about featured snippets, which can give the website a prominent standing in Google. These are very brief but important things to consider.
When you have a featured snippet featured on Google, you are guaranteed to get to the top of the first page results. This can help you steal traffic from your potential competitors. But what have featured snippets?
Featured snippets display a decent chunk of information, typically in the forms of a how-to guide, short bullet points, and/or a Q&A. There is also the type of featured snippets to consider. These include product prices, star-based reviews, similar pieces of valuable information, and images. In order to properly create snippets that will work for your website, you need to first focus on relevant keywords and question-based queries. To help, you could just use the search function on Google “people also ask” to get some inspiration.
Keyword Research
You may think that keyword research is already important, but it is expected to become even more important in 2022. It is estimated that Google sees zero-click searches in about 50% of searches on their site. This means that about half of searches performed end without any user clicking on them. This occurs because there are things that appear on Google searches that make it no longer necessary to actually click on links. This includes featured snippets that have answers to a user’s questions or Google business listings having menus to easily look at. The user gets the answers that they need without having to click on any page.
This matters because if your content contains and covers any keywords that are associated with the user’s intent, they can get the answers that they need without as much effort. But you want to make
sure that they are getting this information from you. This is why it’s especially important to focus on keyword research.
You need to have keywords that can attract traffic to your website. This is especially important because there have been many advancements to SERP and because you do have a lot of competition within your industry across the country. It can be a good idea to start finding long-tail and target keywords. It can take a bit of creativity and experience when it comes to keywords to accomplish this, but once you do, you will notice a significant difference in your website.
Conclusion
If you want to get the competitive edge for your brand, utilizing these SEO trends in 2022 can make a significant difference to your website. Many of these trends don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. It’s crucial that you stay constantly updated with the latest trends to make sure that your business gets the attention that it deserves.
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