SEO in 2022. Strategies, trends and mistakes

SEO is an important part of digital marketing. More than half of all website traffic comes from organic search. SEO focuses on making your website searchable to improve its position in organic search results. While certain features are always considered important processes, certain SEO trends come and go.

Let’s take a look at the main SEO trends in 2022 and consider what strategies will continue to play an important role in 2022.

Page speed improvement

Page speed is both the present and the future of SEO.

As more and more users access the internet on the go, businesses need to keep their websites up and running quickly. That’s why Google launched Core Web Vitals, one of the latest ranking factors.

With Core Web Vitals, Google analyzes:

• How long it takes to load the largest element on your page

• How many elements on the page move while loading

• How long it takes for elements on the page to respond to clicks

Essentially, Google looks at how long it takes people to start interacting with your content. Once they reach your site, how quickly can users access the information they need to answer their question.

Page speed will continue to play a key role as a ranking factor, so check as often as possible.

This way you can find and deploy updates regularly – and avoid being overwhelmed by what needs to be fixed.

Content quality is still the most important

Yes, Google is still interested in quality and original content. Creating and publishing quality content should always be your top priority in ranking your site at the top of the search engines. Quality content has always been one of the main pillars of SEO trends.

A lot has changed in creating quality content and combining it since most search engines changed their algorithms. Google has its own unique content quality guidelines that you should always follow if you want your site to be on top.

Here are some tips to follow when creating quality content for your website:

• Accuracy – You should always try to deliver information that resonates with your target audience. You want to make sure that the content you post on your site is accurate, relevant, and relevant to your audience.
• Readability – Create content that is easy to read and understand. It’s important to use plain language, choose your words carefully, and make sure the information you provide is verifiable.
• FAQ – When coming up with content, you should always focus on answering some of the common questions most users might have about your brand or product. Create an FAQ page on your website and populate it with answers to some of the questions people are asking about your business.
• Blog – Develop a content marketing strategy that includes blogging. You can have a content calendar publishing at least two articles per month. Create high-quality content that you can share with your customers.

Include some internal links

Always include some internal links to relevant content. Google crawls every page and wants to see you link to more articles around the article you write.

Connect with intent and remember to search, especially when choosing anchor text. This means that instead of using phrases like “Read this article”, you use anchor text that uses the main keyword that the article is based on. This will give search engines more information about where the link leads.

Google doesn’t give you the number of external or internal links to include, but as a general rule, base this on the length of the content. The most important thing is to make sure that all internal links are relevant.

There are no hard and fast limits on how many to include, but if you’re linking to a lot of irrelevant content, it distracts the reader and confuses search engines.

Prepare your link building plan

As a business, you should always focus on quality links. Link building is one way to increase your website traffic and gain authority.

The main purpose of link building is to have other sites link to your site. When choosing link building to improve your visibility online, you should also focus on quality and relevant content.

Make sure you only post content that others can use as a reference. When other sites use your content, they are more likely to refer to or link to your site. You can also ask some of the authorities in your industry to link to one or two of your articles or website.

Optimize all images

You want your pages to load as fast as possible, so make sure you optimize your images to keep their file sizes as small as possible.

Optimization services can help reduce media file sizes, but most CMS also offer some optimization features to allow you to edit directly in the post.

The easiest way to avoid having to downsize multiple image sizes later is to follow best practice in growing images to look their best at the smallest possible size.

This is because Google considers user experience in its search ranking algorithm, and if your page loads slowly but a competitor’s page that contains the same information loads quickly, especially on mobile devices, Google will serve the faster page to users first .

SEO errors

Poor quality content. The length of content on a page is related to SERP rankings, with more words resulting in higher rankings. Remember not to overdo it the other way too, so that the user doesn’t run away from the page. It is worth filling the page with interesting content for the user.

Duplicate content. Google looks very badly at content that is repeated from other pages. Your website content should be original.

You have not secured the HTTPS website. Google has stated that HTTPS sites will be preferred over HTTP sites in situations where the two sites look similar in other ranking factors.

There are no optimized images on the page. Remember that the photos should be optimized in terms of their size (px) and size (kB).

Your site speed is too slow. Many users leave the site when it takes too long to load.

Your bounce rate is too high. Search engines have one job and that is to make sure they provide users with the most valuable answers to their queries. If users leave your site immediately, then Google considers your site uninteresting for them.

SEO TRENDS

Guessing the user’s thoughts

The points below relate to how best to guess the user’s intent when searching for a query. Both voice and written.

Algorithms. Goodbye BERT, hello MUM

With the launch of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) in 2019, Google’s algorithm has become more capable of understanding the relationship between words and the intent of a search query.

BERT was something new that allowed Google to support users of voice assistants. People didn’t type in queries anymore, they just said them right away. Google had to adapt its algorithm accordingly using NLP and AI technology.

But BERT is just the beginning. During the Google conference in 2021, the company announced a new model of voice translation and service for its users; they called it MUM (Multitask Unified Model).

MUM is an AI model that can understand the user’s feelings, context, abstractions, and intentions, based on which it provides relevant answers that are unique to the user’s query. With MUM, users will not have to make multiple queries until they find the right keyword that will provide them with the desired answer. Instead, Google will provide them with the results they want with a single conversational query.

As of August 2021, MUM is still in the testing phase. However, we should expect it to start working soon. Until this happens, we cannot be sure of its power and effectiveness; we don’t know how this will affect search results.

But if it’s supposed to be similar to BERT, we can imagine an even stronger emphasis on authority signals (EAT) and a response-centric approach to content.

Focusing on user search intent

The next SEO trend focuses on the search intent of the user. This trend has been popular for years and is still valid in 2022. Creating pages that focus on user intent in search engines is critical to SEO success in 2022. helping you rank in search results. People conduct searches for specific information. If your page doesn’t contain the information you need, you won’t rank well in the search results. If you want to meet a user’s search intent, look at what is already ranking for your pages’ keyword.

Voice search will affect queries

With innovations like Voice Assistants, voice search technology has come a long way. As technology has gotten better, it has also become more popular.

To optimize voice search, consider your keywords. Identify longer phrases that people use in everyday conversations. Voice search does better with longer, more natural-sounding phrases.

Content on the website

The next trends are related to the quality and length of content.

Write long content

To make sure you attract and engage the readers who visit your site, you need to have a content strategy. Longer content has been shown to generate more traffic and share more than short content. Focusing on creating high-quality long-form content can significantly improve your search rankings. However, it needs to be able to keep readers engaged.

To keep your readers engaged, it is important to divide your content into multiple subsections using H2 and H3 subheadings as this will make it easier to scan. The goal is to make the content easier to view for readers, especially on mobile devices, as large chunks of text may be perceived as intimidating to many readers and may overwhelm a small screen. You should also make sure your content is easy to share to further improve your SEO. Include obvious shareable links at the beginning and end of your content so readers can share it with a single click.

Content that meets the Google EAT policy will rank higher

Google reiterated that content quality is critical to ranking success. Refer to the EAT principle: expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. These factors help determine whether a website contains useful, high-quality content. This principle is especially relevant in business niches that fall under the “your money, your life” (YMYL) label.

Keep EAT in mind when creating content. Having authoritative sites linking to you is another way to prove that you meet the EAT criteria.

User Experience & User Usability

Trends in 2022 will also be related to the user experience related to page speed and readability. User Experience and User Usability will have to be taken into account even more.

Providing a good user experience

You need to focus on a positive user experience. As more and more people shop online, it’s crucial that your website provides the best possible experience. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are staying safe by shopping online and getting products delivered to their homes. More and more consumers are switching to online shopping to get what they need. To prepare for this trend, you need to ensure that your website provides a positive user experience for your audience.

Mobile friendly is crucial for Google rankings

Mobile friendly has been a cornerstone of SEO since Google officially made it a ranking factor in 2015. However, it is more critical than ever to optimize your content for mobile as Google implemented mobile-optimized indexing in 2019. This means that when ranking content, the search engine primarily looks at the mobile version of the site, not the desktop version.

Fortunately, Google makes it easy to test your mobile site’s performance with a free mobile test. Using tools can be crucial in finding and resolving mobile usability issues on your website that may be negatively impacting your SEO. The fact is that as more and more people access the internet via mobile devices, you need to ensure that your content is optimized for these users.

SEO still plays a key role in content ranking, but it is constantly evolving and becoming more complex. Keeping up with current trends will require more from you than just stuffing your content with keywords. You need to create high-quality content that will rank well in Google’s algorithms. If keeping up with the latest SEO trends seems overwhelming, contact Greenlogic for advice on how to best optimize your content for SEO.