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.
Shopify SEO: The Power of Digital Marketing in E-commerce
During COVID-19 pandemic, E-commerce is the safest form of retail available since you can do it at the convenience of your own home. This has resulted in its growing popularity. Today, Shopify is one of the biggest names in the E-commerce industry, and there are numerous reasons for this popularity. For instance, this platform has excellent shopping cart security, 99.99% uptime, and 24/7 available support.
Shopify is also entirely SEO optimized. In order to see the full significance of Shopify SEO, all you need to do is take a look at some of the most interesting statistics and facts on this list. This will also reveal the full impact on merchants’ success on this platform. You can also see how various digital marketing methods and principles can be applied in E-commerce.
In May 2020, Shopify Had 66.6 Million Visits
The first outcome of excellent SEO services is growing organic traffic. In 2020, Shopify.com had record traffic of 58.84 million visits. The number of vendors on Shopify is growing simultaneously with the number of potential customers. This means that while there is a bigger potential customer pool, the competition is also getting more challenging by the minute. For this reason, vendors are researching how to optimize Shopify SEO more than they ever have before.
Shopify is The Most Popular in English-Speaking Countries
The vast majority of Shopify’s audience comes from the largest English-speaking countries, according to some of the latest surveys. Let’s take a closer look at Shopify SEO in numbers to see the breakdown of their audience.
As many as 36.62% of all Shopify users come from the US alone. Other audiences include the UK at 5.78%, Canada at 5.74%, Australia at 3.92%, and India at 3.38%. While English is not the primary language in India, it is a second language in the region.
The Average Conversion Rate from Organic Traffic is 3.6%
To increase conversions, merchants use these Shopify SEO tips in order to drive more organic traffic. According to a survey from 2020, the average conversion rate on Shopify is merely 1.3%. However, this is all conversions across the platform. In terms of the conversion rate on organic traffic, the number goes up to 3.6%. This is almost three times the value. The main reason for this could be the fact that the majority of these people already qualify as easy pickings (in terms of marketability).
Average Time Before Full-Page Loads is 4.9 Seconds
The average time before the full-page loads on Shopify is 4.9 seconds. However, the delay until the content becomes available is just 2.3 seconds. Why is this so important? First of all, people online have a very limited attention span. Loading time can drastically improve with the help of technical SEO. Onsite optimization of your marketplace is counted amongst some of the Shopify SEO best practices. According to some estimates, you have between 2 and 9 seconds to capture someone’s attention online. Other surveys indicate that your audience might start leaving if the page fails to load in 4 seconds.
Image Optimization Is Still Relevant in 2021
All E-commerce platforms rely on images to enhance their categories. However, high-resolution images and images in some uncommon formats may slow down your loading speed. This is why one of the rules of Shopify SEO for beginners is to always optimize images. Factors which matter are:
- Dimensions and product angles
- File size
- File type
- Thumbnail optimization
- Proper use of sitemaps
- Testing images before use
The thing worth keeping in mind is that this effort is a combination of making the product presentable and not allowing the size of the image to slow you down. It’s about achieving the same effect by using fewer resources.
Shopify Struggles with Duplicate Content
One of the toughest challenges that Shopify faces is the problem with duplicate content. Why is this such a big issue? Well, by default, Shopify allows each product page to be rendered in two different URL paths. These URLs can be canonical and non-canonical.
- Canonical URL path: /products/
- Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/
Still, this is not interpreted as duplicate content. There are three reasons why a page is classified as duplicate. First, it can be an actual duplicate of a product page. Second, it has an identical description of a product. Lastly, the platform can get ‘confused’ by two different versions of the page.
Optimizing your site structure for SEO is always a high priority. However, the Shopify URL structure for SEO requires a bit more finesse. First, the content on pages needs to follow a logical hierarchy of categories. Characters used in every URL need to be standardized. When making internal links, anchors need to be descriptive. The same goes for file names of images. At the end of the day, every Shopify merchant is responsible for their own store’s navigation. This way, search engines will have an easier job of finding all of your content.
The Importance of Meta Descriptions
Writing a meta description isn’t exclusive to the SEO on Shopify, but it is still relevant for driving organic traffic. There are two hard rules to writing a good meta description on Shopify. The rules are – it needs to be shorter than 155 characters, and it needs to contain a focus keyword of the page. This leads to superior SERP, better traffic, and a higher conversion rate.
As far as some useful tips for writing these descriptions go, there are two or three things to pay attention to. First, you should start with a question or a dilemma that the visitor has. Second, you need to promise an answer and increase its trustworthiness by using an authoritative title. Examples of this are expert, specialist, or veteran. You can also imply or mention that the answer is a result of a survey or an elaborate scientific process. Since this is a matter of technical SEO writing skills, hiring professional writing services can drastically improve your SEO effectiveness.
Electronics and Technology Are the Most Appealing Categories on Shopify
From the standpoint of Shopify SEO, it’s also relevant to mention that the majority of Shopify users show interest in the category of computers, electronics, and technology. As far as subcategories go, the most popular ones are programming and developer software, as well as graphics, multimedia, and web design. Due to their popularity, these categories are also the most competitive and the hardest to rank in. Therefore, merchants interested in joining these fields need to invest more heavily in their digital marketing strategies.
Making Your Pages Quicker to Index
SEO experts use structured data (schema markup) to make their pages easier to crawl, organize, and display content. Any page online has two types of audiences – humans and robots. In order to be understood by websites, you need to use language that these bots understand. By communicating to them via the proper form of data, you can get indexed quickly and get ranked a lot sooner.
This, however, can be a double-edged blade. While working on their pages, people often restrict access to the site through the robots.txt file. Sometimes, if they forget to revert the process, their pages may remain invisible to Google bots. As you can see, some examples of bad Shopify SEO are merely a result of a mistake rather than a faulty or inefficient SEO tactic. This is also why the approach to onsite SEO needs to be thorough and systematic.
Shopify SEO Takes Patience
One of the biggest problems that those new to Shopify SEO encounter is the lack of immediate results. Search engines index sites regularly; however, your site won’t be indexed right away. The simplest way to speed up this process is to independently submit a sitemap to Google Search Console, thus saving everyone’s time and effort.
There are some other factors that may explain why your store isn’t indexed already. So, before you just assume that your efforts aren’t giving results, you need to make a Shopify SEO checklist with some potential complications. For instance, you might have recently migrated from another platform. While it’s not impossible to keep your rank even after the migration, this requires a lot of work involving technical SEO processes that you may have failed to complete, such as a 301 redirect plan. Having a password on your online store may be another obstacle.
In Conclusion
As this platform keeps expanding, staying competitive will keep getting harder. This is why the only way to remain competitive is to learn how to use and utilize Shopify SEO properly. The rules of technical SEO are quite similar to other platforms.
The biggest technical difference is the one regarding canonical and non-canonical URL paths. The rest, consisting of a proper meta description, adequate image optimization, and SEO outreach, is the same as any other E-commerce platform.
If you are not sure how SEO can help your Shopify website thrive – we are happy to help! Contact us today and schedule your consultation.