Future of SEO in 2022: SEO Trends to Know
SEO is constantly evolving, and to be successful with your SEO strategies, you need to stay on top of the latest trends in order to ensure your content strategies are effective. Search Engine Optimization is extremely critical to attract consumers to your online platform. If you are still relying on SEO strategies and tactics that you’ve used for years, it’s probably time to evolve to better understand the environment today.
Many of the older strategies aren’t as effective in the landscape of SEO today, and some of these strategies can even negatively impact SEO. This is why it is imperative that you continue to adapt to the future SEO trends. To ensure that you will be able to make the most significant impact in 2022, here are the future SEO trends.
Shift to Long-Form Content
In order to create relevant content and a strong digital content strategy that captivates website visitors, you will need to shift to a long-form content strategy. Long-form content has proven to be the most popular, drawing in the most traffic and shares compared to short-term content. Long-form content is about 3000 words or even more. By moving your focus to developing quality, long-form content can greatly improve your search rankings. Long-form content does, however, need to keep the reader engaged to be successful, which is a lot more challenging with more words.
So how are you supposed to keep readers engaged? To accomplish this, it is very important to break your content up into sub-sections, utilizing H2 and H3 subheadings that make your content easily skimmable and scannable. You want to eliminate big chunks of text that is usually pretty intimidating for readers to look at, especially if readers are viewing your blogs on a small screen. The goal is to basically make your readers browse through the article. It should also be very easy to share with a clear call-to-action which will improve your SEO even further. To do this, include sharing links that are easy to follow with a click of a button.
Accomplishing this task isn’t easy, and many companies tend to hire a high-quality content writing service to develop this long-form style content.
Refining page speed
Page speed is one of the biggest factors in successful SEO and determines core web vitals. More and more users are using the Internet on their smartphones or laptops. Therefore, it has become very important that businesses provide a fast and seamless website experience. Google recently launched its Core Web Vitals as its newest ranking factors. This new technology analyzes how long it takes for the largest element to load, how long it takes for elements on the page to respond to clicks, and how many elements move on the page while it loads.
Google is basically looking at how long it takes for users to start interacting with your business’s content once they land on the site. Since page speed will be a prominent factor in site rankings, it is essential to audit your page speed often. By consistently checking your page speed, you will be able to implement any needed updates and avoid feeling overwhelmed if your page speed is dragging your content down.
Artificial Intelligence Will Play a Bigger Role in SEO
Artificial intelligence, otherwise known as AI, is continuing to change how users interact with content online. Because of this, artificial intelligence will play a large role in how to create relevant content strategies and future SEO trends. AI will begin to dictate how content is ranked in the future. A prime example of this is Google’s AI algorithm that is called RankBrain, which is set to become the most important ranking factor in Google’s search engine results pages in 2022. This new release from Google left many wondering how their SEO would be affected. What is the best way to cater your SEO strategy to work with this new artificial intelligence algorithm?
Google hasn’t shared a lot of details yet on how RankBrain exactly works, but it seems that user experience is one of the most defining factors in ranking content. The amount of time visitors spend on your website and the click-through rate will be telltale signs of how RankBrain will prioritize your content. This means that it is critical that you develop extremely well organized and helpful content for your users so that they are left captivated and engaged, and therefore the click-through rate and time spent on your website will increase.
Mobile-Friendliness is Critical
Now more than ever, it is very important to make sure your content is mobile-friendly. According to Google, it is a large ranking factor and has been since 2015. Today, it is best to optimize your content for mobile devices as it is the most prominent way of looking at content online for users. Google even rolled out mobile-first indexing back in 2019, which basically means that the search engine prioritizes the mobile version of a website when it ranks the content in order. The primary version is the mobile version over the desktop version, as it is estimated that 75% of internet users access the internet solely through mobile devices.
Google makes it very easy to figure out if your mobile site is effective with its free mobile friendly test. This test will help you figure out what issues you should fix with your mobile site, which will help you rank higher. Tools like these are extremely helpful in fixing mobile user issues that could be negatively impacting your SEO. You need to ensure that your mobile content is optimized to be successful in creating a mobile friendly site.
Future SEO Trends Should Include Video
Video is so prominent in effective SEO. Online video platforms have become increasingly popular over the last couple of years and will continue to become more and more popular. If you haven’t already, you should develop an SEO strategy that incorporates some kind of video aspect. Many businesses have already begun using platforms like TikTok and YouTube to involve consumers and users. Voice search has even become a popular way of searching for content online, and appealing to these future SEO trends will give you success in your SEO strategy.
By developing optimized video content, you can have a successful and effective SEO strategy moving forward. To optimize your content, you can focus on the video channel description by adding an overview that is user-friendly to your video content. Don’t necessarily cram your video descriptions with a bunch of words, but a few user specific keywords or even hashtags can help push your content to its intended audience.
First-party data hub with SEO traffic
Companies like Google are beginning to retire the third-party cookies, which means that it is crucial for businesses to build out their first-party data hubs. By building out first-party data hubs, your company will be able to obtain and create tailored marketing initiatives to drive company revenue without relying on cookies. Search will play a significant role in building the data hubs as your business can create its online presence through search engine optimization. Then, you can utilize those attracted users and turn them into leads using email newsletters, remarketing techniques, and other digital marketing initiatives.
With cookies coming to an end, it is essential not to wait to develop your first-party data hub, as it will play a massive role in the success of your SEO strategy.
Fulfilling Google’s EAT Principle
Google continuously emphasizes that content quality is crucial for successful ranking, and this won’t change for future SEO trends. Many are still left wondering what exactly quality content means and how to achieve it. The easiest way to improve the quality of your content to match SEO strategy is to follow the EAT principle, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. According to Google, these factors determine a web page’s quality, and businesses need to be aware of how to utilize these effectively while developing their content.
The biggest thing you can think of while creating quality content is thinking about the user. Who is the user, and what are they looking for? What is the user search intent? Who would most likely be your target audience? This will help you better understand what kind of content you should be creating to appeal to your target audience’s values. By fully understanding exactly what your target consumer is looking for, you will develop content that is intriguing to your readers and will encourage more clicks. Don’t forget to also focus on the trustworthiness aspect of your content by backing up your facts with reputable sources.
Successful SEO in 2022
By following these future SEO trends, you will be set up to have a successful search engine optimization strategy. Ensuring that your content is thoughtful and beneficial to the user while creating a seamless and simple user experience will bring you more traffic in 2022.