In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is absolutely essential in helping businesses attract more customers online.
But much like fashion trends or viral videos, SEO is constantly evolving with new and ingenious ways to help you boost website rankings and garner more traffic. This is why it’s important that your business’s SEO strategy follows suit.
In this article, we list the top SEO trends to watch out for in 2022 that will help you generate more traffic, build brand authority, and improve your website rankings.
Here are the top SEO trends that will have the biggest positive impact on your business in 2022.
1. Expand your online reach with optimized video content
If you’re not already using video, it’s crucial that your SEO strategy includes video content. Video content is no stranger to the online space.
It goes as far back as viral Vine videos in 2013 to Charlie Bit My Finger on YouTube, and more recently — TikTok which has over 1 billion monthly active users as of September 2021
. Videos are the new blog articles.
But how does it benefit your business? Have you ever watched a product or service review? Bingo.
The fact is, people prefer watching other people talk about or use a product or service. It allows them to connect to your business and helps you establish a relationship.
Thus, creating video content plays an important part in any successful SEO strategy, allowing you to engage more customers and expand your reach online. Ways to optimize your video content:
- Include keywords on the video channel name, title and descriptions to help views understand what your channel is all about
- Keywords and hashtags on video descriptions ensure the right audience is watching your videos
- Mentioning keywords within the video will help Google get a better understanding of what’s being said to match what users are looking for
2. Boost your website ranking with high-quality content that satisfies E-A-T
What does E-A-T stand for? Expertise. Authoritativeness. Trustworthiness. This is how Google will be assessing the quality of your content and how well it ranks.
When attempting to improve the quality of your content for SEO reasons, it’s important to consider how Google determines the E-A-T of your page:
- What is the main purpose of the article?
- Is there information from trusted sources?
- Is there information about the website or author?
- The reputation of the website or author of the content
So, as a business owner — what does this actually mean and what do you need to do?
When navigating Google E-A-T Principle:
- Produce high-quality content that is relevant to your audience
- Creating buyer personas can help you better understand what your target audience values the most
- Make sure to include facts and figures to back up any claims and link to credible and trustworthy sources
- Include a quote from an expert or find one online and link to it
- Make sure to include an author’s bio
3. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly by being mobile-first
Mobile-friendliness has always been a core focus dating back to 2015, when Google made it an official website ranking factor. In 2019, Google took it a step first and introduced mobile-first indexing.
This means that search engines will now primarily look at the mobile version of a website when ranking content versus the desktop version. This makes total sense considering mobile web traffic accounts for more than half of global web traffic.
A further study discovered that females (aged 16-24) shop on their mobiles the most, with 63% of them having purchased a product online with their mobile devices Vs males (aged 25-34) at 58.1%.
Thankfully, there are some simple ways to make your website mobile-friendly, as well as free tools you can use to measure your mobile site’s friendliness, such as Google’s free mobile-friendly test and Mobile Usability Report.
4. Become an authority in your industry with longer, better-written content
Want to become an industry leader? You’re going to need content and a lot of it. Longer articles have shown to earn the most organic traffic, but it’s not enough to simply create longer articles (hint Google’s E-A-T).
Written content is what you’ll be using to captivate and engage your target audience, but also an opportunity to introduce your company, establish a relationship and create authority.
Longer, better-written content is also better for SEO as it is more valuable to Google with research also showing that it can greatly increase lead generation. Here are some tips on how to write better, longer content and keep your target audience engaged:
- To make your content more readable/scannable, break up content into multiple subsections, using headings to break up large blocks of text
- This makes it much easier to read on a mobile and mobile-friendly
- Create high-quality content that your target audience finds valuable
- Creating a buyer persona of your ideal customer can help you better understand what your target audience values the most
- Make it easy for readers to share your content with a click of a button
- Include sharing links at the beginning and end of your article
- Make sure to include plenty of facts and figures to back up statements
- Including a quote from the experts or a study can help improve your SEO rankings with Google and create authority in your industry
5. Adapting your frequently asked questions to Voice Search
Voice search is one of the latest SEO trends to emerge out of 2021 and is very much expected to rise even more in 2022 as it becomes more intuitive.
If you could search something up in Google using your own voice would you even type anymore? The impressive accuracy of voice search has led to a spike in SEO as teenagers lead the charge in voice search.
Experts believe that by 2022, voice-based shopping is expected to grow to $40 billion with 50% of consumers expected to be using the technology. So, how do you incorporate voice search into your SEO strategy?
The first and easiest place to start is by making sure your FAQs — frequently asked questions — align with the questions your target audience is asking.
Is your business ready for the SEO trends for 2022?
As you can see, keeping up with SEO trends is going to require more than simply stuffing your content with keywords. The most successful businesses who are ranking well on Google have an SEO agency working tirelessly in the background to ensure they stay up to date with the latest SEO trends.
Thankfully, finding an SEO agency that’s right for you will now be a little easier. Instead of basing your decision on ‘how much does SEO cost’, you can now ask questions about particular SEO tactics and how they will benefit your business.
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Author bio:
Zara Dumayas is a partnership manager at Invicta Agency with extensive experience in on-page and off-page search engine optimization. She works in building brand awareness for different companies in Australia. You can reach her on Twitter: @Zara_Invicta
