Top SEO Trends to Leverage in 2022 for Growth
Investing in SEO for your brand will boost your presence in relevant search results. SEO is going stronger than ever since most marketing professionals see it as an essential part of their marketing strategy. It guarantees good performance and total success, so it should be a priority.
Per Impact Plus, 61% of marketers named SEO a top marketing priority in 2021. Without a presence on Google, your brand faces a digital uphill battle. Hence, be sure to prioritize optimizing the visibility of your website or page in search engines.
SEO and How it Works
SEO or Search Engine Optimization, expands a brand’s visibility in organic search results, driving more website visitors and increasing chances for higher conversions that lead to more customers and revenue. It works by optimizing a website’s content, earning inbound links to improve the content’s ranking as well as the website’s visibility, and conducting keyword research.
2022 SEO Trends
As search engine technology advances in 2022, here are the top SEO trends you should pay attention to this year to keep your keyword rankings and traffic trending upward:
- Voice and Mobile Search
Approximately 44% of all internet users in the United States use a voice assistant, such as Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa. Without a doubt, voice search is now a part of the daily lives of many people from across the globe. Thanks to innovations like this, about 55% of households own a smart speaker to help search for something online quickly.
So how do we optimize content for people searching with ears and not their eyes? The answer is simple—optimize your website for mobile. Most voice searches happen on mobile and smart devices, so Google prefers mobile-friendly websites with fast speeds. Another effective way is to rework your content to include common questions users may ask, like identifying long tail question keywords and adding them in your headers.
- Emotionally Charged Headlines
According to research, emotional titles had a higher click-through rate (CTR) than neutral ones. Titles with positive sentiment had 7.4% CTR, while those with negative take had 7.2% CTR. It means that emotionally charged titles drive more clicks. However, there is a huge difference between emotionally charged headlines and clickbait content. The use of power words, such as insane, unbelievable, and crazy, can hurt your organic CTR. Thus, you have to use them sparingly.
- Video in Search Results
With several online video platforms emerging on the Internet over the years, it is crucial to have an SEO strategy that includes video. As per research, video constitutes 82% of all global IP traffic by the end of 2022. These YouTube videos in a Featured Snippet usually appear for how-to searches where someone is looking for step-by-step instruction.
Google will continue to add videos to search results, that is why it is essential to optimize your videos for search. All you have to do is add chapters to your YouTube videos and include closed captions (ICC) to help Google and YouTube understand every word in your video. Furthermore, you can optimize your titles, tags, and descriptions using SEO best practices and embed videos into your website or blog posts to improve bounce rates.
- People Also Ask (PAA)
Google’s People Also Ask feature shows up for approximately 48.6% of searches. You may have noticed that this new feature has a prominent placement at the top of the SERP. Everyone wants to get their content ranking in this highly-coveted feature. Fortunately, you can up your chances by tweaking your content.
Most PAA boxes start with question words, like when, why, and what. With this, it is a good idea to include questions and answers in your content. Use a keyword research tool to determine long-tail question keywords and then incorporate these into your page headers. On the other hand, you can add a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section at the bottom of your web pages.
- Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (E-A-T)
The growing importance of E-A-T will continue to be a trend in 2022. It still has more traction to gain with SEO practitioners since more agencies prefer content freshness. You must learn to demonstrate the level of E-A-T in your content, technical SEO, online PR, and link building. This way, you can have more useful quality content that ranks on SERPs.
SEO Strategy
An SEO marketing strategy often referred to as the SEO approach is a comprehensive plan to get more visitors to your website through search engines. It is the process of organizing a website’s content by topic to increase the chances of appearing in search results. Having an SEO strategy is critical in helping you stay on track when creating content.
Moreover, a content marketing SEO strategy is crucial because it is how your content will be seen in the first place, especially in SERPs. If your content is unorganized, search engine bots will have difficulty indexing your website, ranking your site pages, and identifying your area of authority.
How to Get Started with Your SEO Strategy
When pulling off an effective SEO strategy, it can help to have a process to follow. First, benchmark your current SEO performance, then analyze your competitor’s SEO strategies and set your goals and KPIs. More so, define your primary keywords and pillar pages, find long-tail keywords, create a list of keywords, get your on-page SEO right, master off-page SEO, and refine your strategy.
Keep an eye on various trends and follow the best SEO practices to help you navigate the changing world of SEO. More than advertising and marketing, SEO is painstaking work that needs to consider current trends that may impact your business. So, don’t forget to take into account these trends and strategies to make your brand more successful. For help with your own SEO strategy, please contact our team.