Are you still using SEO techniques from a decade ago? If so, you might want to update your knowledge.
It’s important to understand the importance of SEO for businesses. Great search engine optimization (SEO) can help build authority while attracting more customers to your website.
While SEO can make a big impact on your business, however, it’s always changing. It can be tough to stay on top of the latest trends and best practices.
Fortunately, we’re here to help. Here are nine important SEO trends you need to know about for 2022.
1. Increased Emphasis on Site Usability
One of the trends in SEO right now is a larger emphasis on website usability and performance.
While great performance has always mattered for SEO, core web vitals and other performance metrics are becoming more important to pay attention to. Google may begin to penalize sites that don’t keep an eye on core web vitals and provide a great user experience more and more as time goes on.
To have great performance, ensure that your site is fast, accessible, and works properly at all times.
2. Prioritizing E-A-T Principles
It’s also becoming even more important to focus on E-A-T principles to ensure that Google can trust your site and that it will send more web searches to it. E-A-T stands for experience, authority, and trust, and focusing on these factors can help ensure that your website is trustworthy.
To do this, you should make sure to create great content that really delivers value to your target audience and customers. You should also back up any facts and claims with authoritative external links and sources.
Focusing on building trust with your content will help Google understand your site better, and the search engine will be more willing to send visitors to it.
3. Passage Indexing
Passage indexing is a new feature that is utilized by Google’s algorithm. It allows the search engine to rank specific passages on a page and show them to searchers as needed.
This update means that Google isn’t relegated to only showing pages as a whole. Google is starting to understand how different passages in your content are relevant to users rather than only taking note of the overall page relevance.
As Google digs deeper into content, it’s likely to change the landscape of search in 2022 and beyond.
4. More Information Delivered on SERPs
More information is being displayed at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) with the help of featured snippets and Google’s Knowledge Graph. Passage indexing features aim to provide the most useful information to searchers at all times.
These improved search features can actually make things more difficult for businesses that want searchers to click through to their content. Many potential visitors will be satisfied with the information they find on the search results page.
Because of this, you want to make sure that your business content has great titles, headings, and meta descriptions and has been optimized to improve your click-through rates. This will make it more that they’ll click through to your website to learn more.
5. The Rise of AI Content Writing Tools
One of the interesting types of SEO trends to be aware of in 2022 is that artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way that content is created online.
While it still has a lot of limitations, AI content generators are helping to create online content. Currently, it mostly serves as a tool for writers to prevent writer’s block and help them to come up with ideas.
More content writers will likely start using AI tools to create great content as the year goes on and as they become more advanced over time.
6. Wider Usage of Video SEO
Another trend to be aware of is that video SEO is becoming more important. If you create video content for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or other online platforms, then you need to make sure that they have been optimized fully.
To improve video SEO, you should ensure that you add keywords to the title, the video description, and the URL. You should also fill out all video details and should use additional features to highlight key points of the video and provide captioning.
7. Continued Mobile-Friendliness
It’s important to realize that these days Google has a mobile-first indexing policy, and it has an effect on the order in which pages are ranked.
As part of improving SEO, it’s important to make sure that a website works well on mobile devices. It should be easy for visitors to navigate your site on a small screen, and the site should be easily understood by anybody who accesses it.
Improved mobile-friendliness will help to improve rankings and will help ensure that visitors to your site have a better experience overall.
8. Even Longer Content
In 2022, there’s a growing trend toward creating even longer forms of content to encourage more website traffic and to provide more value to searchers.
While it’s been clear for a while now that content that is at least 1000 words in length is best for ranking, even longer content is becoming the norm. Many content creators are routinely writing posts that are 3,000 words or more.
Long-form content has been shown time and time again to do a better job of getting more website traffic, and it gets shared more often when compared to short-form content. Especially with passage indexing, there’s never been a better time to create longer content.
9. Prioritizing Local Websites
Another trend to be aware of is the increased localization of SEO. Local SEO has been around for a while, but it’s expected that Google will continue to prioritize local search results over national and international results whenever possible.
For a local business that wants to find local customers, it’s more important than ever to use local SEO techniques. This will include claiming a Google My Business page, getting more online reviews, and adding more localized keywords to website pages.
As always, it will also be important to get great backlinks as well. Be sure to check out https://blog.justreachout.io/how-to-get-backlinks/ to learn how to get great backlinks for your local website.
Keeping Track of the Latest 2022 SEO Trends
While there’s already a lot to know about SEO, be sure that you understand the SEO trends listed above as well. The addition of passage indexing, an increased emphasis on video, and AI content writers will all continue to play a role in SEO during 2022 and beyond.
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