Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results, often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results. SEO is ever evolving. What you you need to know about SEO in 2022? Let’s talk about that.
Among various other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Firefox, the most used search engine is Google which covers almost 94% of the search engine traffic.
As per some rough estimates, Google receives almost 63,000 queries per second! This effectively means that Google processes about 5.6 billion searches per day.
So how can you make your website stand out in this miscellany of information? Well, simple and short – SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s optimizing a website to rank higher on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. The goal of SEO is to make sure that your site appears at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
How does it work?
Search engines use algorithms to rank websites based on their relevance and popularity. These algorithms consider factors such as keywords used in the content, links from other websites, how often your content is shared/linked on social media etc.
Why is SEO important?
Do you know that only 5-7% of the total websites can grab some traffic, and the rest 93-95% get absolute zero traffic? Yes, it might be shocking, but it is the reality. That 5% of websites are getting traffic and visits only because they have invested in some marketing strategies.
It is not easy to stay ahead of Google’s algorithm changes and updates, but you can still do your best to keep up with the latest SEO trends. This article will discuss how SEO has changed over the years and what you can expect in 2022.
1. Core Web Vitals.
According to a new Google update on Core Web Vitals or what we call’ ‘Page Experience”, the website owners have to focus on making the visitors’ experience better on websites. It can be done by improving the page experience factors like loading speed, site stability (visual stability), and interactiveness (responsiveness), which includes the following metrics:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): This metric measures the loading performance. For websites to provide a great user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): This measures the site stability, and the optimal range should be 0.1 or less to provide an efficient user experience.
- FID (First Input Display): This measures interactiveness and should be around 100 milliseconds or less to provide a great user experience.
Improving these three factors will surely maximize your chances of being seen often on the results page. But the most important thing to keep in mind while optimizing the website for this update is to keep the quality intact, as improving the user experience also includes bringing up the website quality. Core web vitals should be your prime focus when executing SEO in 2022.
2. Keywords and Phrases.
When it comes to SEO, keywords are crucial. It is the foundation of your website’s content and the first thing that search engines use to determine the relevancy of your pages in relation to user queries. Keywords also help people find your services via search engines and social media platforms. The goal of SEO is to have your site appear at the top of a Google search for relevant searches by users around the globe.
By understanding keywords that people use when searching for content like yours, you can optimize your site and its search engine listings to increase traffic.
Try to use keywords that best replicate the user’s search intent and more conversational ones, as nowadays people mostly use voice search when they are looking for something.
3. Content.
SEO in 2022, SEO in 2023, SEO in 2024, it does not matter , content is always the king. Google may roll out new algorithms, but what remains the most important is content, be it in any form written, videos, or audios.
The acronym E-A-T has been important while framing out the website’s content. The more expertise, authority, and trust your website’s content has, the more likely you will rank higher on search engine results pages.
This is because Google is always trying to provide the best user experience for their searchers. Therefore, they want to show the most relevant websites that people are looking for on their search results page.
Google also wants to avoid showing websites that may be misleading or even dangerous for their searchers. That’s why they use ranking factors like expertise, authority and trust to determine how high a website will rank on search engine results pages.
If you want your website to rank higher on Google’s search engine results page, you need to ensure that it has a lot of expertise, authority and trust from its readers and visitors.
4. Link Building and Citations.
Link Building is one of the key ranking factors, and there is no way this will change for SEO in 2022.
Link building is an integral part of the SEO process and is critical to building the website’s trust and reputation. In addition, citations have the same role when local businesses are considered.
Link building helps SEO by providing a natural way for users to find your content and helping other websites rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPS). One way that link building can help with SEO is by including anchor text. When you use keywords as anchor text, you tell Google what your page is about and invite people to click on it.
Google recently rolled out a new update called ‘Link Spam Update’, according to which the new algorithm will closely monitor all the inbound and outbound links for identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly across multiple languages.
So focus on these factors while building links – quality, quantity, and anchor text and the same principle applies for citations as well. Link building works wonders when built on trusted, high-quality sites, in high numbers, focusing on building relevant and diverse anchor text profiles.
5. Voice search.
Voice search is the process of optimizing the information on your website to appear on the results page while users search for queries vocally. This will maximize the chances of your content being seen and read by voice search devices like Alexa, Siri, OKGoogle.
Recently, Google announced the release of voice technology called LaMDA ( Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a solution to users’ rapidly changing search behaviors and is an effort to streamline the search results further.
As the intent behind using voice search is to get instant results, Google mostly relies on rich snippets and knowledge graphs to solve voice queries. So optimizing your website for rich snippets and knowledge graphs means you can answer users’ queries, thus improving the chances of increased traffic and click-through rate.
6. Google’s MUM updates.
To deal with more complex queries, Google recently announced another update after BERT called MUM ( Multitask Uniform Model ), which uses AI’s power to provide answers to more complex queries by assessing information in text, images, audios and videos in multi-languages. Google claimed it to be 1000 times more efficient than BERT.
Google’s Vice President of Search, Pandu Nayak, said in a statement that ‘We’ll bring MUM-powered features to our products which will continue raising the bars in terms of better understanding the search queries, content quality, relevance and utility and more in the months and years to come.
MUM is not something to optimize your website for but is simply a technology that needs awareness.
7. Google’s passage ranking.
Nothing remains constant when using a specific strategy for optimizing your website’s content to rank it higher on the search engine results page. The same got verified when Google rolled out another update to their search algorithm known as Google’s Passage Ranking.
Passage ranking is when Google concentrates on a particular passage from a page and shows them on the results page, which might answer some niche queries. This means that Google will be considering passages as an additional ranking factor.
“We’ve recently made a breakthrough in ranking and are now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages. By better understanding the relevancy of specific passages, not just the overall page, we can find that needle-in-a-haystack information you’re looking for.” – Google.
In response to this, you should make sure that the content on your website, mostly the long-form ones, should cater to both broad and specific questions.
8. SEO Funnel and Keyword Research.
Keywords are the most important part of any SEO strategy. However, deciding on the perfect set of keywords with the highest volume, which will ultimately help in boosting the traffic and generating profit for your business, requires a deep understanding of some marketing principles. When it comes to SEO in 2022, the keyword research strategy requires deeper understanding of crucial concepts of consumer marketing.
The marketing funnel is one such principle whose understanding is much needed while determining the right keywords. It is also important to understand the stage your customer is presently in to facilitate customers’ decision process further.
The marketing funnel generally includes four stages: awareness, interest, desire, and action, which is the conversion stage. For each stage, your efforts should be to choose the apt keywords and create content around it, ultimately guiding your customer to reach the final stage, i.e. the action stage.
It is also important to map the keywords on the web pages based on the intent. This could be understood well with recognizing the above-discussed stages:
- Awareness: This is the first stage of the marketing funnel in which the customer would probably extract information about the product. Like he would search for ‘best phones in 2022’. So the intent behind this search is completely informational, and for this stage, you should map your keywords on some blog posts so that the customers get some reliable information.
- Interest: In this stage, the customer has probably developed some interest in the product after researching. Maybe he ended up selecting the iPhone 12 Max. The best thing to do is to guide the customer to the webpage which has transactional intent.
- Desire: In this stage, the customer would want to research the decided product further, e.g. he would ask his friends, read reviews etc. Again transactional keywords are better suited in this stage and will guide the customer to the final stage.
- Action: Customer reaching in this stage is the core reason behind the existence of every business as this stage would generate sales and revenue. In this stage, the customer is finally set to buy the product and guiding the customers to the web page with commercial intent is best.
Therefore to capitalize on the best business opportunities and make it a complete success, it is important to engage in SEO experts who will help your website to stay current with the latest search engine trends to some extent. Wrapping it up, if you any questions regarding SEO in 2022, don’t forget to contact us.