SEO TRENDS 2022

As you know, search engine optimization (or SEO) is essential to attracting consumers to your site. However, SEO is constantly evolving, so it’s crucial to stay on top of the latest trends to ensure your digital strategies are effective.

Is your site stagnating on the second or even the third page? Don’t stubbornly stick with the same tactics; it may be time for you to switch to the latest SEO strategies.

The problem with the old strategies is that not only are they primarily ineffective, but some of them, like keyword stuffing, can even hurt your ranking.

Overall SEO trends

Artificial intelligence will play a more significant role in SEO

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to change the way people interact with content online, it will also begin to play a vital role in your SEO strategy. Of particular interest is Google’s RankBrain AI algorithm, which will likely become one of the most important ranking factors for Google results pages in 2022. Since Google revealed it in 2015, many businesses have wondered how it will affect their SEO.

How do you adapt your content strategy to artificial intelligence?
While Google hasn’t shared details about the inner workings of how RankBrain learns and analyzes content, experts believe that user experience is one of its main ranking factors. This means that click-through rates and the number of time users spend on a website will be critical factors RankBrain uses to prioritize content. When re-evaluating your SEO strategy, it is then essential that you write well-organized and valuable content to captivate and engage readers.

In 2022, don’t miss out on user intent.

With the launch of the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) algorithm in 2019, Google improved its ability to understand the relationship between words and the intent behind a search.

BERT is a new approach that allowed Google to better respond to users using voice assistants. Because yes, now people don’t type their searches; they speak. And since in real life, voice queries are much more conversational and fluid, Google had to adapt its algorithm using artificial intelligence technologies.

But BERT was just the beginning. At Google’s 2021 conference, the company announced a new interpretation model called Multitask United Model or MUM.

According to Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Google:

Google’s new natural language processing model is “1,000 times more powerful [than BERT] and can multitask to unlock information in new ways.” MUM can parse videos, images, and text in 75 languages that answer complex search queries like “I have a trek planned to Mont Blanc; how should I prepare?”

Content must respect Google’s EAT principle.

Google has repeatedly stressed that quality content is critical to ranking success. However, businesses often wonder what Google means by “quality content.” When trying to improve the quality of your content for SEO purposes, it is vital to refer to the EAT principle.

EAT? It stands for Expert, Authority, Trust. Google uses these factors to determine if a web page provides quality content, which is something you need to be aware of when implementing your content strategy.

You are still wondering how to achieve quality content? For starters, you must develop personas that can help you better understand your target audience’s type of content.

Keep “EAT” in mind when developing your content. Be sure to back up the claims you make with statistics and facts and link to reliable sources. Having authoritative links in your content is a great way to meet all the criteria of the EAT principle.

Your content will need to be even longer.

In 2021, articles that ranked on the first page averaged 1,447 words, according to a Backlinko study published in 2020.

To ensure that you captivate and engage the readers who visit your website, you will need to switch to a long-form content strategy. It has been shown that content that is 3,000 words, or longer, generates more traffic and more shares than short content.

43% of blog post readers only skim the article rather than read it thoroughly. So it would help if you captivate your users.

And to achieve this, it is crucial to divide your content into several subsections using subheadings (H2, H3, etc.), as this will make it more readable. The goal is to make your content easy to navigate for readers, especially on mobile devices, as large chunks of text can be considered intimidating and can quickly overwhelm a small screen.

You also need to make sure your content is easy to share to improve SEO further. Include obvious share links at the beginning and end of your content so readers can share it with a click.

Is it complicated to rank an entire page? Rank an excerpt!

Ever since search engines came into existence, the most sought-after goal of any SEO expert has been to rank their page in the top position on those keywords. This feat has become more complicated due to the “zero position” and the increased number of snippets vying for the top spot.

Fortunately, Google has created a solution for SEO experts frustrated with not always seeing their keywords at the top search engines. In late 2019, Google announced the creation of “passage indexing,” which allows a page to rank for a specific passage instead of the entire page. In February 2021, “passage indexing,” as they now call it, went live.

Mobile friendly, an essential factor for Google

Mobile friendly has been the cornerstone of SEO since Google officially made it a ranking factor in 2015. However, it’s more important than ever to optimize your content for mobile devices, as in 2019, Google rolled out mobile index first.

Fortunately, Google makes it easy to check your mobile site’s effectiveness with its mobile optimization test. You can also use the mobile usability report on Google’s Search Console to find out if there are any issues with your mobile site and what you can do to fix those issues.

Using these tools can be essential in helping you find and fix mobile usability issues on your site that could negatively affect your SEO.

Be careful not to confuse a responsive, adaptive, and mobile-first site!

An effective SEO must include video.

If you haven’t already done so, you must develop an SEO strategy that includes video.

As you may have already noticed, online video platforms have exploded in the last few years, and you may have even seen for yourself how many businesses have started using platforms like YouTube and TikTok to interact with their customers and expand their reach. YouTube alone has nearly two billion users worldwide. That’s a lot of potential targets.

But, how do you optimize video content? Think about optimizing your video channel’s description by including an overview of the topics covered on your channel. Keywords will also play an essential role in optimizing your video content. Mind you; there is no need to stuff your descriptions with keywords; a few proper keywords and hashtags can help direct your content to its target audience.

Google also announced the arrival of new structured data for video, including the “Clip” type. With this data, you can highlight a specific moment in your video, highlighted on Google’s SERP (search page).

SEO trends in eCommerce

More than 2.1 billion people are expected to purchase goods and services by the end of the year. With the meteoric growth of online shopping, Google is increasingly improving the online shopping experience.

Seasonal Landing Pages

Creating landing pages specifically for significant seasonal events like Christmas and Black Friday is an excellent strategy if you want to compete on Christmas and Black Friday-related keywords. Even if you’re a small business and ranking for these terms doesn’t seem realistic, these types of pages can still be attractive to customers searching for your brand name + Black Friday, for example.

Creating these pages should not be a temporary thing. If it is deleted after the target period, then all the SEO value and link weight that the page gained during that period will be lost. The best thing to do is remove the page from the navigation and keep it online all year.

The Shopping Graph for even more visibility

The Shopping Graph is the most comprehensive real-time data set of products, products, and merchants possible. This Shopping Graph works thanks to artificial intelligence and brings out relevant and updated results with available products that match the user’s search.

A final word about SEO trends

SEO continues to play a vital role in ranking your content. However, it is continually evolving and becoming more complex. The year 2021 has been an exciting year for SEO experts. While most of the changes come from announcements made in 2020, the shifts show a growing focus towards AI-based results that blend both content, videos, and other media.

To keep up with current trends, you’re going to have to do more than just stuff your article with keywords. You will have to take UX into account and create quality content that appeals to both the algorithms and the users.

You may be asking yourself, “how on earth can I make this work for our business?”

That’s where we come in! At WebsiteTool, our talented marketing experts are constantly on the lookout for the next innovation in SEO. We’ve been preparing for many of these trends for months!

The best time to prepare your business to explode with SEO? It’s now!