The majority of business owners recognize the need for search engine optimization. It’s a critical factor in attracting people to their websites and online platforms. But SEO is an ever-evolving component, and to ensure your strategies remain effective, you need to stay on top of the trends.
A lot of previously successful strategies are ineffective today. So, what does the SEO landscape look like in 2022? Check out the 2022 trends you need to know.
Quality and length of content
The quality of your content matters a lot when it comes to indexing. Many businesses are carrying out short-term SEO to boost awareness by adding bulk content or focusing on specific SEO fixes. These are not useless, but they are quick wins that don’t address a long-term strategy.
This SEO trend contributes to creating a lot of similar content. Businesses need unique content that tackles topics other websites haven’t covered. Forget hundreds of blog posts of generic content to keyword stuff.
Look at your target audience and provide them with helpful content. Your content will capture your audience’s attention, but it will keep it when you regularly produce this level of content. It’s worth enlisting the professionals who have the skills, knowledge, and expertise to execute this properly. The focus needs to be on making sure your indexable pages are phenomenal.
The length of content is also vital. Outranking points to the statistic that, compared to short-term content, long-form content is back-linked 77% more often. The average word count of top-ranking articles is almost 2,000 words.
Of course, the longer the content, the harder it is to keep readers engaged. So, it’s essential to break it up into easy-to-read subsections. Just be sure to provide sharing links so it’s easy for readers to share.
It’s worth mentioning visual content. Sites that use unique images will rank higher because user behavior shifts with the younger crowd. They’re looking for unique content, which includes images and visuals.
They can tell if something is authentic or a stock image used to bolster a brand. As Google shifts to reward original imagery, it will become a more common tool businesses use.
Mobile experience
Mobile-friendliness became an official ranking feature in 2015, but it’s more crucial today than ever before. The vast majority of people browse the internet from their phones, which means your site needs to be mobile-friendly for users. It’s believed that by 2025, three-quarters of internet users will access the net solely via their phones.
Google provides a free test to check how mobile-friendly your site is. While once SEO pros looked at bits and pieces, SEO is moving toward a whole approach. And if you don’t approach it holistically, you increase the risk of missing a critical component that could undermine your efforts.
Artificial intelligence
How do SEO and AI go hand-in-hand? AI SEO is the intelligence used to guide website SEO to improve organic traffic and rankings. It assists with SERP analysis, content optimization, and keyword research.
RankBrain, Google’s AI algorithm, is one of the most significant SERP ranking factors in 2022. While we don’t know its inner workings quite yet, what we do know is RankBrain relies on dwell time and click-through rates to prioritize content. If your content is valuable and well-organized, AI SEO is on your side.
User intent
Search engines are working hard to understand the intent behind each search. It’s long past time to think about creating SEO content and time to start creating content with user intent in mind.
“This is where the holistic strategy comes into play. You have a list of desired keywords, but what is the user searching those specific keywords for? Understanding the relationship between intent and keywords will become a bigger driver in creating quality content. It’s all about creating content that users will find useful, helpful, or informative, not just stuffing popular keywords into any old content,” says Richard Perrin, director of Paramark.
Sustainability
The most significant SEO trend of 2022 is sustainability. If you’re constantly chasing algorithm success, you’re going to miss out on traffic. While there is short-term value in easy SEO wins, you need to create long-term strategies to build something better.
There is also something to be said about environmental sustainability and how that shades users’ views of a company. You can start by looking at reducing your website’s carbon footprint. Google provides information about hotels and businesses that are eco-friendly.
The world is moving on to greener pastures, so it’s only natural that this will impact websites. Google also displays flight carbon emissions. There’s no reason to believe this won’t eventually lead to showing a website’s eco-impact. You can make your website greener by improving its performance to future-proof it for tomorrow.
