The 12 Top SEO Trends and Techniques for 2022

Why You Need to Pay Attention to SEO Trends

In 2022, investing in SEO for your brand is vital to guarantee good performance and total success. More than a necessity, it’s a priority. It allows you to optimize the visibility of your website in search engines, making it easier for your consumers and potential audience to find you on the web.

Today we will be showing you some projections and trends for SEO in 2002, so you can see why you should start investing more time and money in SEO for your company.

SEO is Constantly Evolving

In the span of a few years, SEO trends have changed dramatically. In addition, algorithms are constantly evolving due to innovation in emerging technologies.

Search engines, like Google, demand your curiosity and undivided attention all year round. Needy, eh? However, with the rise in popularity of AI-powered voice ecosystems, voice search is changing the landscape of SEO.

With 2022 just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about what SEO trends you want to consider implementing in 2022. Digital marketing professionals, marketing agencies, and businesses alike will need to be prepared for 2022, arguably more so than ever before.

Lucky for you, we have compiled some essential SEO techniques and strategies to help you prepare for what is coming!

Voice Search

The popularity of voice search is continuing to rise. Studies show that around 58% of consumers use voice search to find local business information.

We already have Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant that play a crucial role in people’s daily lives. Many people now use a smart speaker in their homes. With the introduction of voice activation in everything from televisions to medical devices, it’s only a matter of time before voice search is the primary form of search.

There’ll be an increased need for businesses and marketers alike to focus on their “conversation marketing” skills – translating written content into natural language. This change in vocabulary could also allow brands to connect with their customers on a more personal level.

How to create conversational content

Voice search encourages you to create more conversational content with no formal structure and less emphasis on keywords.

To stay ahead of this trend, you must know what conversational content is out there on the Internet to come up with new ideas for your website.

One place to start would be Q&A websites like Quora and Reddit – both platforms have a lot of resources to get you started. Also, things like FAQs or how-to articles will be more critical than ever since people will be asking questions and expecting Google to provide answers through its voice assistant.

How You Can Benefit:

Adjust your target keywords to cater more to specific conversational-based searches. You can and should even spin long-tail keywords into queries. You’ll then be able to shape content around answering such questions, which could be in the form of a blog article or even an FAQ page. Remember to include the search query as you normally would as an H1, H2, or H3.

AI Will Have Greater Impact on SEO

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way people interact with online content. This intelligent algorithm that we all know shows us the things that we like the most and facilitates our searches on the network.

AI allows you to analyze a website’s performance and create more effective SEO strategies by comparing data to competitors and industry benchmarks. In addition, AI provides suggestions on the most critical topics for your business and how to make your website content more effective and make research and text creation faster.

How You Can Benefit:

Machine learning or deep learning is helpful in the strategic planning and implementation process and in improving content over time. To benefit from this, you need to captivate and engage readers with valuable and well-organized content.

Tools can help content creators and businesses create optimized content. For instance, RankMath has just released its AI Content Creation Tool.

Long-Form Content

To ensure that you captivate and engage readers who visit your website, you will need to shift to a long-form content strategy. Long-form content of 3,000 words or more gets more traffic and shares than short-form content. Shifting your focus to creating quality long-form content can then significantly improve your search rankings. However, for long-form content to be successful, it must be able to keep readers engaged.

How You Can Benefit:

To keep readers engaged, you must break up your content into multiple sub-sections using H2 and H3 subheadings, as this will make it more scannable. The goal is to make your content easy for readers to browse, particularly on mobile devices. Long blocks of text can intimidate many readers, and it can overwhelm a small screen.

You should also make sure that your content is easy to share to improve SEO further. For example, include obvious sharing links at the beginning and end of your content so that readers can share it with a click of a button.

Google EAT

Google states once again that the quality of content is essential for success in positioning. These factors help determine if a web page has helpful quality content. This principle is especially relevant in business niches that fall under the “your money, your life” label, such as healthcare and finance.

How You Can Benefit:

There are a few ways to ensure quality content. First, create a profile of your ideal client, which will allow you to understand the type of content that your clients value. Second, conduct search intent research to help you map out the consumer journey. Third, use this information to create content that conforms to the format your users prefer.

Website Accessibility

The number of people who have internet access is increasing. However, estimates show that almost 73% of Internet users will access the Internet only through mobile devices by 2025. So, being able to be seen and found by everyone – including those with visual impairments or other disabilities – is going to be critical.

Ensuring your website content, services, products, and more are accessible for people with disabilities will help you in the rankings and provide a better customer experience. Web designers will continue to incorporate features that do not depend on keyboard input, such as voice commands, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc.

The bottom line is that if you want to rank higher on Google search, this is one of the SEO trends you need to heed. You need to provide a fantastic customer experience for everyone – which means improving your website’s accessibility now more than ever.

How You Can Benefit:

When it comes to accessibility, there are many things you can do – and maybe some that your company has already done. It helps if you focus on the following:

• Make sure all images have ALT tags, so they’re readable by screen readers.
• Ensure your website is WCAG compliant. WCAG compliance means it meets a certain level of accessibility requirements for people with disabilities. Making minor adjustments to color contrasts and adding subtitles to videos could be an excellent place to start.
• Add in ARIA attributes to make sure screen readers can read text, widgets, and more.

Featured Snippets

The search results that typically feature at the top of Google’s organic search results come in many forms in featured snippets. Including answer boxes and ‘People also ask,’ which Google deems to be relevant based on the original search query.

The purpose of such boxes is part of an ongoing effort by Google to answer questions as quickly as possible and further enhance the user experience. In many cases, it removes the need for the user to search click-through. Regardless, this is an excellent opportunity to increase organic impression share and establish your brand as an authoritative and helpful source.

How You Can Benefit:

You can also apply the techniques previously suggested for optimizing voice search to featured snippets. But, of course, you are also answering a query.

While there is no hard and fast way to appear in featured snippets, we know that Google favors numbers, steps, and lists alike. For instance, have you ever searched for a recipe on Google? If yes, you will likely notice that ingredients appear in a clear and concise list form.

If you have figures and intriguing stats, then be sure to include them when creating content designed for rich snippets.

Page Speed

Improve your mobile and desktop page load times, or get left behind. While it’s no secret that page speed is one of the critical SEO trends, lately, page speed has become more critical than ever before.

Google’s recent algorithm update has made page load speed a much more significant factor in the ranking than it once was. As a result, a fast-loading website will help your chances to optimize for featured snippets, voice search, or even to appear on page one of Google search results.

Google wants to return answers as quickly as possible, and studies have shown that 1 in 4 users will bounce from a page that loads slower than 4 seconds. High bounce rates will seriously damage your reputation with Google and lose customers.

Plus, back in July 2018, Google announced to the world that they would be using page speed in mobile search rankings too.

The bottom line is this: if your website takes longer to load than others on the same network connection, you will likely rank lower and have fewer visitors.

How You Can Benefit:

To improve your page speed across desktop and mobile, you will first need to understand how your website is performing. To start, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Not only will you get a score out of 100, but you will also get some top recommendations that you can follow to speed up. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. First, ensure you are following Google’s guidelines for faster web pages. These guidelines include reducing the size of images and adding content to your HTML using CSS or Javascript instead of server-side languages such as PHP or Python.
2. Secondly, use a Content Delivery Network to serve your website content from the closest server to the user location.
3. Third, use caching for static resources like images and CSS files. That will save bandwidth for both you and your users.
4. Lastly, ensure all of the scripts on your site are GZIP compressed, as it can make up to 70% of the difference in page speed.

Be Mobile Friendly

Mobile-friendliness has been a cornerstone of SEO ever since Google officially made it a ranking factor in 2015. Many SEO professionals will know that, as of March 2018, it’s been an increasingly important ranking factor after the rollout of the mobile-first algorithm.

However, it is more critical than ever that you optimize your content for mobile devices, as Google rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2019. The fact is that as more internet use comes from mobile devices, you will need to ensure that you optimize your content with these users in mind.

The search engine looks primarily at the mobile version of a website when ranking content, as this is considered the “primary” version instead of the desktop version. This switch was not a surprise to many people. Estimates indicate that nearly 75% of internet users will access the Internet solely via mobile devices by 2025.

How You Can Benefit:

Optimizing your online presence for mobile users increases the likelihood that you will rank higher on search results. In addition, Google makes it easy to check how effective your mobile site is with their free mobile-friendly test.

You can also use Google’s Mobile Usability Report to find out if there are problems with your mobile website and what you can do to fix these issues. Using these tools can be critical in helping you find and fix mobile usability issues in your website that could negatively affect your SEO.

Video Content

As well as mobile and voice content, people are becoming much more visual when they access the Internet. YouTube alone has over a billion users. And with the rise of apps like Snapchat, TikTok, and many other social platforms adopting stories, it’s no surprise that we see an increase in video content.

The use of videos is hugely beneficial, not just as one of the best new SEO trends. In addition, video content also helps you to appear as an authoritative and helpful source. They do well on social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, which have adopted the latest updates from Google algorithm changes.

How You Can Benefit:

If you are ready to take the plunge, start by making a list of your video content ideas. Ideas can include tutorials, informative videos such as how-tos, and product demos too. Once you have this list, it will be easier to create small pieces of content designed with short but enticing snippets. More concise content will encourage viewers to watch your content, click through to your articles, and help you appear in the video section of Google search.

User Experience

One trend that’s been growing among online businesses for a while now is user experience. UX goes hand in hand with the page experience requirements that Google mentioned in their latest update.

The update means that Google will consider the user experience of a website to rank them appropriately. For example, UX includes factors affecting your page’s load time, such as how many redirects you have,  the number of images, and the pages’ length.

The core web vitals checked by Google include website usability and navigation both on desktop and mobile. Google also considers the placement of buttons, how dynamic content, such as pop-ups, appears, and more. The new update also means that using the AMP format for content is no longer a necessity.

How You Can Benefit:

The best way to ensure you are providing a great user experience is by making your website as simple and easy to use as possible. It would help if you were also mindful of how many ads or unnecessary content you have on each page. Make sure your site has a valid HTTPS certificate, isn’t full of clutter, and is generally easy for your users to navigate.

User Intent

When choosing an SEO strategy in 2022 and beyond, you want to focus more on your target audience. Know your audience; be in their shoes, and think of what they are likely to look for when searching your brand online.

What keywords are customers likely to use when searching your businesses on Google? Always think of the users’ search intent and pick phrases and keywords that match what people are asking Google.

How You Can Benefit:

The simplest way to review user intent is to type a specific keyword on the Google search box and analyze the results. Once Google gives top results, you should go through them to determine brand-focused pages and blogs. Please take note of this, and next time you come up with content, ensure you give it a similar approach.

Ethical Link Building

Link schemes are also now seriously penalized by Google. These penalties are why you must be wary of any strategies that include reciprocal link exchanges, paid links, or other non-organic link-building techniques.

The latest update, exchanging money for links, excessive link swaps, or even large-scale guest posting campaigns are all considered black hat SEO techniques.

Suppose your business wants to rank higher on Google’s search results page. In that case, it’s time to focus on more ethical means of getting quality backlinks. The best way to do this is by producing helpful content which will attract links organically.

How You Can Benefit:

Once you’ve got your high-quality content, make sure to distribute it on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But remember, when sharing the link, don’t spam! Make sure that any posts are relevant to what you’re trying to promote to get the best results possible.

Thoughts on Future SEO Trends

SEO today is more than advertising and marketing. It is detailed work that takes into account current trends in other areas that may impact your business. So, of course, SEO is essential.

SEO is more interconnected every day. You must be the one who invests in SEO to guarantee a good presentation for your brand or company. So do not hesitate and make your consumers find you and connect with you more quickly and efficiently.

Overall, the future of SEO is changing and evolving. We must embrace these changes now to stay on top and be ready for what comes next year. So, it’s time for your business to start thinking about how they can implement some (or all) of these principles into their current marketing strategy.

Don’t get left behind, whether you want to help build an ethical link-building campaign or improve your mobile usability. Start adapting now with the best SEO strategies for 2022 and beyond. We are here to help!

Here at PixoLabo, we offer a full range of website and e-commerce web design, support, consulting, and search engine optimization services, including website design and development, e-commerce solutions, search engine optimization, and WordPress optimization.

If you are unsure how to implement these SEO trends on your website or e-commerce store, let’s talk! Our team can help you determine which of these emerging SEO trends for 2022 will benefit you the most. In addition, we can help you grow your online presence over time and help you stand out from your digital competitors.

Do you have anything to add to our SEO trends for 2022? Please leave your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And help other business owners get noticed by their target audience and share this post with them!

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By PixoLabo
Not Your Average WordPress Web Design Agency
@pixolabo