More than 70% of marketers consider that SEO is a more affordable, effective, and sustainable digital marketing strategy than Adword or PPC campaigns. Google consistently updates its ranking factor and algorithm, so guest posting service experts and SEO professionals need to be always on their feet. Some new SEO trends have come up, which you need to understand and implement to stay ahead of the competition and rank high on SERPs. In this post, let’s discuss the general, local, enterprise, e-commerce, and keyword trends to look out for in 2022.
General SEO to consider in 2022
Artificial Intelligence in SEO
AI is modernizing every sector from healthcare to hospitality. SEO is also not indifferent. There are reports that marketers are using AI to identify customer habits, drive productivity, and develop solid content strategies. When compared to manual assessment, AI-based analysis is quick, more accurate, and actionable. AI-SEO is a new concept, which will ponder on –
- Understanding the purpose behind the user’s search query
- Defining the query intent
- Offering the most relevant results for better search satisfaction
Voice Search will influence search engines
Smart assistants like Google Home and Alexa as well as voice assistants like Siri and Google have made voice searches popular. More than 30% of search sessions were screened less in 2020. By 2020, more than 50% of homes are projected to buy a smart speaker. These figures say a lot about how much the voice search will dominate search engines in 2022, so marketers need to adjust their SEO. How to optimize content for the voice search? Longer phrases are used while speaking to the voice assistant. So, for voice search optimization target long phrases that sound natural.
Mobile SEO is here to stay
Internet traffic from mobile is not going to decrease because usage of smartphones is bolstering. Therefore it becomes necessary for marketers to make sure that their website design is responsive, loads faster, uses a large font, applies moderate images, and the CTA buttons are large. By default, mobile-first indexing is applied by Google!
Video ranks better
Users are interested in watching rather than reading text. It is visible in the increase of video platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Reels, and TikTok. Video content is most probably believed to rank 50 times higher, and thus gain more traffic than text content. Marketers can leverage video marketing in 2022.
EAT principle’s significance is rising
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness or EAT principle was introduced by Google for ranking. Traditional SEO is effective but the shift is significantly towards credibility and quality. Authoritative websites publishing high-quality content are chosen for guest post campaigns to gain more visibility and quality traffic. Connecting with high domain sites enhances your URLs credibility in the eyes of Google and visitors.
Local SEO to look for in 2022
Consumers’ need to gain information has increased and the local markets are becoming more competitive, so Google has decided to fulfill these needs. Due to the pandemic situation, Google rapidly responded to consumers’ changing buying habits. Searches in 2020 have increased by 1000%, which means NOT to overlook the local SEO. Understand local search changes and update to adjust for 2022.
Google My Business rebranded
With new GMB features, there is no need to browse the platform or app to correct or update their listing. From Google Maps and Google Search update details or add images to your Google Business profile.
Finding & creating the latest local news is now made easy on Google
Google made it easy to find and create the latest local news. Journalists can use Census Mapper Project and Common Knowledge project to enrich their stories using local information and data. Updates like top stories carousel, local news carousel, local Tweets, more news in search have helped local news to gain top SERPs.
Bing added extra visual elements
Bing rolled 5 updates emphasizing a rich local search experience by integrating more visual elements. It includes expandable carousels, Info graphic-like results, intuitive highlights, and integrated visual search. Just displaying text-based facts or image carousel, Bing delivers SERPS that are visually rich for local searches. It consists of relevant resources pulled from visitor reviews, top images, Bing Maps, and more.
New attributes
Google is consistently releasing new attributes. Attributes offer proactive answers to search queries and GMB features it prominently. It is because Google wants to help businesses and users alike. For example, business attributes like women-owned or African-owned make a difference.
It helps seekers who want to support companies with shared value connect. During a pandemic, health and safety-related attributes were added to GMB profiles. The local businesses shared their changing service patterns like no-contact delivery or curbside pickup based on safety protocols.
Mobile-friendliness, pointy integration, and local SEO tools are some 2022 local search strategies for maximizing visibility and conversions.
Enterprise SEO to consider in 2022
Enterprise SEO involves handling large brands with extensive infrastructure and a wide range of products or services. It incorporates stakeholder management as well as planning, strategizing, and aligning with the corporate goals.
Keep aligned with updates and changes
For enterprise SEO professionals, algorithmic changes and updates is a major challenge. It includes –
- Responding, fixing & optimizing
- Translate impact to your company
Last year, large roll-outs like Core Web Vitals and Page Experience update brought technical SEO into the picture. EAT principle emergence massively affected online enterprises. Google introduced Multitask Unified Model [MUM], which is focused on identifying poor quality content and intent queries.
Enterprise SEO experts were forced to concentrate on proving that their content is credible and trustworthy. To enhance keyword intense analysis use keywords that align with the right content and right audience.
Automation is crucial
Automation is already helping organizations and industries to keep pace with frequent changes and plays the role of a reliable virtual SEO partner. In 2022, automation will stay important for enterprise SEO. Technology will help to identify, pre-determine, and adjust where and when appropriate, so you don’t need to chase the algorithm. In 2022, automation is assumed to help in –
- Monitoring & detection
- Manual SEO
- Insights & automated action
Data – a source of Business Intelligence
The ways searches occur define the trends in customer behaviors and preferences. In the same way, content creation and digital innovation trends are echoed in search. Consequently, there is an increase in the use and significance of search data. It is a source of business intelligence. Data compiled and analyzed offers marketers an insight associated with consumers’ interests, needs & frustrations, product preferences, urgency, etc. Search Business Intelligence helps enterprises accurately determine what matters most. They can identify trends at the category level as well as industry level.
Business Intelligence insights help organizations enhance their brand awareness, build effective lead generation campaigns, gain insights for future promotional campaigns, create intent content types, and stay ahead of trends.
Integrate SEO and PPC
Today, more than 80% of the search traffic is attained from PPC and SEO. SEO insights can be used to make an informed PPC campaign. Use PPC to fill the short-term gaps for valuable pages and keywords. Boost mobile-first and local performance with PPC and SEO. Ensure that your enterprise SEO and PPC are strongly aligned to increase visibility and discoverability on search engines.
Enterprise SEO goes beyond optimization. It develops cross-departmental management, business insight use, and result managing across the enterprise.
E-commerce SEO to consider in 2022
E-commerce SEO is responsible for 70% of online traffic, so never ignore it but consider it seriously for 2022.
Lay the strong business foundation
For effective eCommerce SEO start with designing or revamping your website to ensure that it supports every kind of device. Create an automated customer care desk to quickly resolve customer queries. Before launching your eCommerce site install an SSL [Secure Socket Layer].
Study your audience and niche
Identify your audience and research your niche. Research is crucial to understanding the strengths and vulnerabilities of your business. To know about your buyer persona helps to explain the target customer’s interests. Competitive research is also crucial to help fill the gap between strengths and weaknesses.
Keywords will need an upgrade
Keywords are important for SEO as the online competition is getting tougher and tougher. Keyword research can help to enhance your keywords. Choose primary keywords that attract high traffic and even make a list of long-tailed keywords because they too are appealing and effective.
Onsite optimization
On-site optimization is a process, where you augment your web pages in such a way that Google bots find it via keywords. Your content, images, title tags, description, links, and keywords must be improved for easy visibility during the on-page optimization process.
Keywords SEO will matter in 2022
The SEO community for years has been infatuated with keyword rankings. It is seen as one of the feasible metrics to prove SEO value. Rankings are crucial but only if they can drive your business value like leads, conversions, and revenue.
Google bots are getting smarter and smarter in understanding the user intent. The algorithms have a better sense of meaning and context, so the keywords chosen must always connect with the content.
What are keywords?
Keywords are the main phrases people commonly use to find things online. The search bar in the web browser is used to type the terms, which includes more than one word describing the product or service they desire.
Keyword types
- Branded
- Non-branded
- Brand + Geography [location]
- Local & Global
- Brand + Product
- And more
How do keywords help?
- Identify the right target audience
Competitive research helps to identify keywords they use that attract more traffic towards their website. You also can identify a content gap. It means they have content that does not rank or doesn’t have content suitable to the topic.
- Drive traffic
First page results on search engines gain 28.5% of clicks, so if you enhance visibility and rank top then you gain a significant amount of traffic that improves your chances of conversions and sales.
- Indicate user intent
Search bots receive a direction to the content type searcher tries to retrieve. There is still a vocabulary issue between end-users and the index system. Therefore search engines have advanced query expansion [QE] technologies. The search engine evaluates the user’s input and expands its search query to blend with extra documents. It includes finding synonyms, semantic-related and morphological word forms, fixing spelling errors & searching for corrected forms, etc.
- Discovery striking difference opportunities
Striking distance keyword means a target keyword phrase that is not anywhere on top position but between 11 and 20. Because the keyword is relevant and ranking well, a small adjustment can have a huge impact. Look for keywords that rank on the 2nd page but need little optimization to move to the first page. Optimize header tags, title tags, add internal links, build backlinks, and new landing page.
From the above points, it is visible that keywords certainly offer value by delivering prime position, traffic, visibility, conversion, and sales. However, enterprises and e-commerce businesses having plenty of products can find it costly to keep track of keywords as there will be hundreds and thousands of keywords they need to monitor.
It is sensible to keep a list of golden keyword terms that bring it the most brand value that is traffic, conversions, and revenue. They also need to maintain a blend of brand + product and non-branded keywords crucial for first-page ranking.
Guest posting best practice – do it right in 2022
Guest posting is also an effective digital marketing strategy that businesses need to explore in 2022. Writing and publishing high-quality posts as a guest on high domain blogs and websites helps to –
- Expand professional network
- Establish online authority
- Generate qualified backlinks
- Increase referral site traffic
- Enhance lead generation.
When you prepare guest posting guidelines concentrate on mistakes to avoid and adopt best practices. Here are the best practices that the professionals at guest post service follow.
- Include just 1 or 2 target keywords in one guest post.
- Embed keywords naturally across the blog post.
- Include target keywords in blog headings and titles.
- Keep content readable, scannable, and error-free.
- Explore ways in building external and internal links.
- Never post content on suspicious or low-quality websites.
- Write well-researched and innovative content.
- Avoid paid guest blogging opportunities.
- Monitor guest post-performance regularly.
SEO plays a huge role in increasing visibility, brand awareness, generating leads, and driving sales. Look out for the 2022 trends because Google bots are getting smart and you need to stay aligned. Add the elements mentioned above and stay ahead in the race!