Top 5 SEO Trends for Your SEO Strategy in 2022

In order for brands to survive and grow in 2022, they will need to innovate. Although SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization," we prefer to call it "Search Engine Outsmart." Outsmarting the competition through unconventional techniques is critical to achieving and maintaining success during this unusual period.

1. Quality Content and On-Page SEO

What exactly does "high-quality content" imply? To various people, excellent content implies different things, but in SEO, what counts most is how Google defines quality content. Google gives pages a rating depending on how well they meet the page's demands (or NM). Google always says to create for people, and they describe "High-Quality Content" as content that serves a useful goal and accomplishes it well. Furthermore, high-quality pages have the following features:

1. Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness at a high degree (E-A-T).
2. A sufficient amount of high-quality Main Content (MC), as well as a descriptive or useful title.
3. Website information that is satisfactory and/or information on who is responsible for the website. If the page's primary purpose is to facilitate shopping or financial transactions, it should provide helpful customer service information.
4. A website with a good reputation is one that is responsible for the MC on the page. If not the same as the webpage, the creator of the MC has a good reputation.

As a result, each website should perform the following:

1. Have a goal that is in line with the user's intentions.
2. Be written in accordance with the model of competence, authority, and trustworthiness. Add credentials, testimonials, material sources, and/or customer reviews. You could perform the following to create pages for E.A.T.
3. At each stage of the funnel, provide compelling material that piques users' attention.

Beyond its content restrictions, Google is considering a number of issues, particularly as the year 2022 approaches and a cookie-free future approaches. To understand customers' journeys, marketers will have to rely increasingly on first-party data. It's also a good idea to stay up to date on all of Google's algorithm changes. For example, the hummingbird update targeted low-quality or thin-content pages with poor user behaviour metrics and no obvious purpose. It's critical to develop and optimise your content for relevance utilising a natural language processing model generated by SEO tools that can help you categorise popular themes and search queries into keyword groups.

2. Understand Google's Algorithm Changes

Last year, Google released Core Web Vitals as a ranking criteria, which had a big impact on mobile page experience. Next, in February 2022, we expect a fresh deployment for the Desktop page experience, so we should be aware of Core Web Vitals for both Desktop and Mobile.

Other past Google Algorithm adjustments to be aware of include:

1. Hummingbird Update 
2. Rank Brain Update
3. BERT Update

Make careful to include explicit subject modelling in your writing. This isn't exactly new, but it's more critical than ever as Google's algorithms become more complex thanks to AI improvements like BERT.

Metrics for judging the quality of content:

1. Rankings and traffic have improved.
2. Increased time spent on site, more pages per visit, and a lower bounce rate
3. Increased conversion rates

3. Keyword Analysis of Competitors

This is unquestionably the most important place to begin. It's possible that your competitors aren't who you think they are. Examine the keyword rankings and domain authority of your top three or four competitors.

To establish the framework for a successful SEO strategy, you'll want to understand how your website compares to the competition.

• Consider comparing your site's Domain Authority (DA) to that of your competitors.
• The history of your website's rankings
• Rankings and keyword strategy of your website's competitors

Don't forget to check your own website's keyword rankings. Several pages on your site may be cannibalising keywords by attempting to rank for the same terms, causing search engines to become confused. In 2022, it's critical to prioritise this and assess which sites you want to rank for specific keywords and which pages should be merged or eliminated and redirected.

4. Search Engine Optimization and Indexing Techniques

All of your hard work will be for naught if Google can't crawl and index your site efficiently. It's crucial for SEO to make sure your site is technically sound.

To check for technical health issues on your site, go to the Google Search Console and verify your web property.

Consider the following:

Observations on page speed:

Check your page for page speed insights by scanning it. Use the results of this investigation to improve the speed with which your pages load.

Security:

Check to see that your site has a current SSL certificate and no mixed content. On your HTTPS pages, for example, keep an eye out for images with an HTTP protocol. Your padlock will be broken, and your webpage may be removed from the index as a result.

Structured Data:

Google has been emphasising the importance of including structured data on your pages so that their spiders can better grasp what's on them. They're now delivering messages through Google Search Console, as we've discovered.

Schema Markup is a type of structured data. Rich snippets are more likely to appear in search results if your site has structured data. Site links in Google text ads are similar to rich snippets.

Canonicals that are incorrect:

Over the last year, we've seen a lot of this. This strategy is useful for eliminating duplicate material caused by paginated series, but it can be detrimental to your site's rankings if the canonical tag on a core service or product page is incorrect. For example, if you recently upgraded your SSL to HTTPS but your canonical URL is still HTTP, that page will be removed from the index.

5. Image and Video Search

This year, a growing number of people are using Google's video and image search results. According to recent video consumption statistics, video is the primary source of information for 66% of people, and YouTube has over 2 billion users. Using specific image alt tags and structured data to annotate your images will continue to be a big opportunity and emphasis for optimising for visual search.

It doesn't matter if you have a beautiful website if you don't have an SEO strategy in place. Because your website is the focal point of all your digital marketing activities, it's critical to design it with SEO in mind. Before you put out your web pages and overall digital marketing plan, get to know your clients and understand their buyer's journey. Write high-quality content that is relevant to your consumers' needs, and optimise it for relevancy and customer connection.

The more SEO evolves, the more it remains unchanged. There will be no more keyword stuffing or shady link-building techniques. It's all about getting back to the basics of creating high-quality web pages that are written by humans and connect the dots of your customers' requirements.