I recently did a masterclass for the lovely Lucy Griffiths and was asked what I thought the top SEO trends for 2022 would be. Here’s the thing though the SEO landscape is forever evolving and changing and as entrepreneurs we have to be able to evolve with it.
Because as long as you have a website you need to not only understand SEO but you need to evolve with it as well unless you want your website to be forever languishing in Google’s no-man land.
However, before you pull your hair out and scream in the general direction of your laptop here’s the good news, this doesn’t have to be super complicated or tricky.
So if you want to grow your business using Google then you just have to try to stay ahead of the game, so with that in mind let’s dive into the top SEO I think you need to know in 2022
SEO Trends For The Year Ahead
The following SEO trends should play an important part in your SEO strategy for 2022, not all will be relevant and you may have to prioritise if you don’t have the time or funds to work on them all, but let’s take a look at what is likely to be shaping SEO in the year ahead.
Site Speed
This isn’t just an important trend for 2022, the truth is the speed of your website has always been important and that’s true now more than ever.
This year the speed at which your website loads will play a big part in the success you will have within the search engine rankings.
For every 0.5 seconds, it takes your website to load you lose traffic. People just won’t wait on a slow site to load, they just move on to the next week.
Often slow site load speed can be to blame for a high bounce rate and with google’s new core web vital role out, site speed will play a major role in your SEO success.
This means that you will want to do everything you can to ensure your site loads quickly.
If you use WordPress as a platform for your website there are plugins that can help you ensure a quick load time, including caching plugins and plugins that will “smush” your image size. Or you can use a CDN. The hosting company you use will also play an important part when it comes to your website speed.
Platforms like Shopify, Squarespace or WIX are slightly more restrictive when it comes to speed and your website SEO but they do have SEO tools that can help you and the general rules about image size, links etc will apply to all platforms.
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Long Form Content
Now more than ever your content will be vital to how well your website performs in the search engines.
This year will see the importance placed on long-form content. This means content on your website that is at least 1500 – 2000 words long (the closer you can get to 3000 the better it will be)
Long-form content has shown to be more engaging and it gets more shares than short-form content. You will want to create blog posts that really answer the searcher’s questions.
However, for long-form content to be truly successful, it needs to offer high-quality information, it has to be of value to the person doing the searching.
Content should be at the heart of the best SEO strategy campaigns in 2022 and long-form content should be the priority.
Content Clusters
Following on from the importance of long-form content is content clusters. Where you create one piece of long-form evergreen content and create 3 or 4 supporting blogs.
So for example if you were a brand photographer your main piece could be “top tips for your branding photoshoot” and your supporting pieces could be “using Pinterest to prepare for your brand shoot” what should I wear to my brand photoshoot” “the benefits of a brand photoshoot”
All of those supporting blogs will have an internal link to your main blog post and in return, your main post will link to some of those supporting posts and they will link to each other as well.
This is all to help establish your site as an authority in your niche.
Mobile Friendliness Will Be Vital
In all truthfulness, the Mobile-First Index has been in play since earlier in 2017 when it was first rolled out.
With one thing or another, it’s been a slow burner, in terms of rolling out to all sites but while it was important last year too, this year making sure your website is mobile-friendly will be vital if you want to rank well in the search engines.
So what is mobile-first? Google used to deliver 2 separate search results depending on what device you were using. So you would either be ranked in a desktop index or a mobile index
In 2017 they were going to be merging the 2 with preference given to the mobile-first index so not a mobile-first index as such but just that google uses the mobile-friendly version of your website to decide where to place you in the rankings
The main impact this can have on your site is preference will now be given to sites that are mobile-friendly over those that aren’t.
So what that means for SEO in 2022 is that websites that are fully mobile-friendly will feature higher in the search rankings.
So if your site doesn’t yet pass the mobile-friendly test, now would be the time to get it up to speed. If you aren’t sure if it passes the test then Google has a free test you can run on your website by using the link below https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.
Voice Search
We are all so used to now searing by asking our devices a question, think about it when was the last thing you asked Alexa or Siri or OK Google a question?
I know I am using asking Siri or Alexa more questions now than ever before, and just what is the time or the weather, we now regularly order things we have run out of via our Alexa, my kids have moved on from using it to ask rude questions that get funny easter egg answers to having it help them with their homework!
My 15-year-old daughter used it the other day to find a hairdresser to get her hair dyed. While my son often uses it to find out relevant info for whatever school project he has coming up.
Our use of voice search is growing year on year. In 2020 more than 40% of adults were using voice search at least once a day and that number is increasing each year. Searches using Where, When and What has risen significantly in the last year and a big part of that is due to the rise in voice search.
How relevant voice search is to your business will depend on a number of factors. These factors include asking yourself “how are consumers going to find your brand”. Is localised search important to your brand? If so then look at whether you need to create more query-based content for your website.
Featured Snippets
With the increase of voice and Image search, the featured snippet is taking on more importance than ever before. As a result of this Google and Bing are aggressively pushing the featured snippet in the results as they want an easy and clear answer to a query so if it’s of huge importance to them then it should be to you as well.
Zero click search results were higher than ever before in 2021 and as a result, Making sure your website is set up for featured snippets will play a pivotal role in your SEO Success.
And The Rest
There are other things that will play an important part in your SEO Success, SEO fundamentals that will be important when it comes to helping improve your SEO but each deserves more time and possibly their own blog to explain them.
These include: Onpage SEO, internal linking, keywords and indexing strategies, Google updates such as E-A-T and of course core web vitals but all of these will be covered in their own blogs as well.
If you have questions at all about these predictions please pop them in the comments below and if you could give this post a share on social media I would be really grateful!
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