Although the core principles of SEO stay the same, Google Core Updates and search trends evolve and affect how we optimize our web pages.
Search engine technology advances every year. But what exactly does it mean for your SEO strategy? Below are the top SEO trends to pay attention to in 2022 to keep your traffic and keyword rankings upward.
Passage ranking will override keyword ranking
Google's page ranking update is an efficient method for ranking long-form content.
It checks material to identify its context as well as return more significant results to the searchers. Google uses flows that are directly related to what individuals have actually searched for.
For instance, you looked for “how to set up google home”. Initially, the leading results would certainly be some short articles, but after the passage ranking algorithm, you will see the result that briefly solves the problem.
Passage ranking is Google's campaign to assist you to discover precisely what you are seeking. If we would state Google's very own words, “by understanding passages in addition to the relevancy of the overall page, we can find that needle-in-a-haystack information you’re looking for.”
So below's what you can do:
- Firstly, do a strong evaluation of your target audience. Ask yourself "Is that my audience?", "What are they searching for?", and also "Why are they searching for it?".
- Don’t compromise the quality and uniqueness of the content. Any update by Google aims to make the search experience for users more relevant.
- Focus on composing headings with long-tail keyword phrases since headers are extremely critical for helping Google to understand the context of the material.
The importance of structuring your content
The structure of your text will become just as important as its quality when Passage Indexing is live. It is essential to separate the content into numerous sections as well as each area should review a sub-topic.
By doing this, you offer Google a heads-up about the deepness of your content and exactly how it will certainly fulfill the search intent of the users. So, at this stage, we advise you to use Heading tags to organize your web content and get maximum profit.
However, if you are creating short pieces of content, the chances of covering sub-topics as well as smaller-sized passages are much less, which means Google will rank you for the core topic, but not for queries that require solid answers.
If you inspect the top-ranking web pages on Google for highly competitive search questions, 9 out of 10 are long-form content that exceeds 2000 words.
Video content
One of the leading SEO trends of 2022 is to include video materials in your content strategy.
Video advertising has the power to make your clients stay tuned with the content it presents. The best video content includes a storyline of the incidence and situations that can be linked to your audience.
Videos are one such tool that can assist you in revealing your products and services in action to your site visitors. Although a video clip is not one of the most inexpensive types of content out there, but it is absolutely more engaging with a potentially high ROI.
Core Web Vitals
Among the biggest trends in 2022 is the enhancement of ranking signals to Core Web Vitals to improve the page experience.
The only priority of Google is to boost the customer experience with every passing year.
Thus, it requires its webmaster to provide content that is relevant and information-rich at the same time. But this year providing stupendous content won’t be enough.
According to the upcoming update, the list of below aspects will certainly matter:
- Page design
- Page weight
- Media inputs
- External embeds
Everything will certainly be counted as ranking signals and also will belong to Core Web Vitals.
BERT update for matching search intents
Provide your audience with the content that matches their search query.
As an example, if someone looks for “home remedies for cold”, after that the customer has to see web pages that have some tips for treating a cold at home.
Start concentrating on your context rather than keyword phrase density.
The days are gone when search engines could be fooled by stuffing keyword phrases.
They have actually grown much smarter as well as just appropriate web content is what attracts them for ranking.
BERT update checks the web content for sentences and phrases, which means that the site owner must fill the site with relevant content-specific questions of the searcher.
Better focus on user intent
When discussing SEO trends for 2022, it is additionally important to talk about enhancing your website's focus on customer intent.
While that could seem like a cliché, it really comes down to this: individuals searching the internet are trying to find an extremely particular solution to a very specific issue, question, or problem.
Our task as digital marketing experts and SEO specialists is to think about:
- How these people are going to try to find that solution
- How you can build your web content to provide what they require
Focusing on just how to make your site the best for their requirements will bring much more organic traffic, ensure clients stay longer on your website and help to build trust with your target audience.
Content quality
The possibility to create similar material as your competitors has actually created a certain problem — Google does not like such content that is not one-of-a-kind enough. This trend also created so much similar content on the web.
Considering the MUM update, it is necessary to publish unique content covering particular topics that are not covered by other websites.
Rather than adding hundreds of generic content to the website, research the interests of the target audience, organize those entities by the subject and prioritize them by their significance to business objectives.
In other words, concentrate on the details that are distinctly different from others and highlight your professionalism in the topic area.
Localization of SERPs & SERP changes
Google will certainly be focusing more on the localization of content over the next year, including Google My Business optimization.
In 2021 we saw even more sites with country-specific content, which outperform those that used to be top of the SERPs but are more globally focused.
This will get even more noticeable in 2022 also for simply online companies without any physical presence.
For sites that are not just targeting one country, it will certainly be necessary to develop local-focused content.
Consider your key search terms that reveal some local intent. For example, [online service] in the USA — if you are seeing search results being served that have evident keyword targeting for the United States you might be in an industry where Google is showing extra localized SERPs.
In that case, you will certainly require to consider developing US-specific web pages where you possibly had globally-focused ones previously. You will need to reveal local relevance in your material, as well.
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
Our team believes that the expanding relevance of E-A-T will certainly be a trend to consider in 2022. No matter your approach to SEO, understand just how to demonstrate an ideal degree of E-A-T in your on-site content, link building, online PR, and even technical SEO.
This doesn't indicate you require to be a professional on the topic with 10 years of experience to write top-notch blogs. But being or hiring a subject matter expert who creates, edits, or consults on content is no longer mandatory.
For example, once we see the types of pages/content ranking for a huge number of associated queries, we can examine those pages at scale and also compare them to other websites' pages.
The difference between the ranking pages and those that don’t rank often a specific type of content (e.g., reviews, phone numbers, videos, topics, etc.) can illustrate what content searchers, and therefore Google, find useful. There we can scale it to the whole content marketing strategy to get better results.
Brand SERP optimization, knowledge graphs & entities
This year, keeping a close watch on brand SERPs and knowledge panels will become very important. Understanding who you are, what you offer, and what audience you serve will hold a lot of value for other businesses.
We might even start to see individualized knowledge graphs in 2022. Google has a lot of information about you, including your search history as well as habits, email, and social media, it might be able to scale up the procedure of personalizing knowledge graphs.
What does this mean for search engine optimization in 2022? It implies optimizing a brand name's entire electronic existence like its social media profile, Youtube channel, and so on, in order to affect Google to show them the means they desire.
Today, it's not just about your site as well as what it showcases, however it is about your brand's entire digital presence as well as exactly how they engage with each other on SERP.
SEO professionals should comprehend how NLP (natural language processing) and entities play a role in Google rankings.
Long-form content
One pattern that will help you outrank your competitors in 2022 is consistently releasing long-form and appropriate content on your website. The material should stick to E.A.T guidelines and to be at least 2000-word long or more.
As long-form content continues to garner importance in 2022, well-written long-form content can even cross the 2000-word threshold and aim to standardize a 3000-3500 word mark.
People also ask blocks
A current research study of 2.5 million search inquiries showed that Google's "People also ask" feature now appears in approximately 48.6% of searches.
With its noticeable placement at the top of the SERP (and often above position one), everyone wants to get their content ranking in this coveted SERP feature.
To get there, you need to offer responses to common questions and concerns in your content.
Look to the SERPs or use a keyword research tool to identify long-tail question keywords among your audience. Then, provide comprehensive answers, including the questions in your H2s, H3s, and H4s, or add a FAQ section. This strategy will be a great way to gain more visibility at the top of SERPs in 2022, even if the web page where you provided the answer ranks lower on page one (or even on page two!).
More structured data & rich snippets
Schema markup is a vocabulary of microdata that assists Google in much better comprehending and extracting web content from your web pages, enabling them to show up as rich snippets, which are more attractive and clickable for users.
Google likes rich snippets because it helps its crawlers better show users the specified content they’re looking for, meaning a better user experience. And with Google supporting new schema markups year after year (including video schema and education sites), it’s not going to be going down anytime soon.
Businesses that take advantage of schema markup are currently far ahead of their market competitors, as numerous digital marketers still don't utilize make the most of the markup possibilities.
Have a look at Google's full list of abundant results to see which relate to the content on your site, and afterward make it an objective to include the proper schema markup in 2022.
Good old-school SEO
To see SEO success in 2022, the basics still apply:
- Content quality: Create accurate, up-to-date, original, and in-depth articles on keywords relevant to your audience.
- On-page SEO: Make sure your meta titles, meta descriptions, header tags, images, body text are optimized so Google can better understand the content on your pages.
- Backlinks: Focus on doing high-quality linkbuilding from other sites through content marketing, guest blogging, and public relations.
- Technicals: Create fast-loading, responsive web pages with high-quality UI/UX and make sure they are indexed properly.
- Industry-specific ranking factors: Your content and SEO strategy should align with what is common and works best in your industry or niche, whether for local business, credit lending, legal services, healthcare, and more.
We hope this was helpful and now you can use these tips to better rank on Google in 2022 and beyond. Idea Digital Agency has 10+ years of experience in SEO, so we definitely know how to make your SEO strategy work. Contact us today to get a free quote on SEO services!
