A new year means the chance to start over and make positive changes in our lives. As SEO trends are constantly adapting, the start of the new year is a great time to reassess your SEO strategies and find new ways to help improve your website’s rankings. It’s not enough to optimize your website once and expect these changes to continue to provide results on their own in the future. SEO is about constantly monitoring your website and the latest trends to ensure you’re offering what users and search engines are looking for.
After two extremely challenging years, you don’t want your website to fall behind the competition in 2022. Here are the SEO trends you’ll need to follow in the coming year.
Artificial Intelligence Will Become More Popular
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has affected the way many people do their jobs, including those in the digital marketing industry. Today’s digital marketers need to understand the impact that AI can have on websites and how they rank. Search engines use AI to find the best results for a user’s search, and this technology is constantly advancing. This means that marketers need to stay on top of the way search engines and AI rank websites, even though they may never explicitly state their exact criteria. One way that search engines use AI is by understanding the context behind a search, rather than only the keywords. In addition to searches that use text, AI also makes it possible for users to search using only a picture or by using voice commands.
While search engines use AI to help provide users with the most relevant results, marketers can also use it to improve their websites and make their jobs more efficient in areas. One of the main purposes of AI is to make our lives easier, and with so much work being required to keep websites performing well, this isn’t an opportunity anyone should pass up. There are many AI SEO tools available that can make optimizing websites easier while providing better results. AI tools make it easier for us to find the right keywords and perform audits to understand where websites are lacking and what we can do to improve them.
Include Videos in Your Content
In 2022, you don’t want to have only written content on your website if you want it to rank well. While you might already have a long list of blog posts that bring in a good amount of traffic already, you can appeal to users even more by producing quality video content. According to Statista, 27.2% of online users watched over 10 hours of videos each week in 2020. This isn’t to say that you should abandon other forms of content in favor of video. You still want to include other forms of content on your website, but you can’t forget about videos.
People have different preferences regarding how they consume content. While long blog posts will interest many, there are still plenty of others who don’t want to read that much and would prefer the same information in a video. Good videos can increase the amount of time that users spend on a page and boost engagement to help improve your SEO. As videos are extremely popular, they can help you increase your chances of earning backlinks if more people find them valuable. There’s no denying the place that videos have on the internet today, and 2022 is the time to start implementing them for your own website.
Optimize for Google’s Core Web Vitals
Google’s Core Web Vitals became ranking factors this year, and if you haven’t started optimizing for this already, this should be a top priority in 2022. This is a set of metrics that helps Google understand more about a user’s experience on your website. You want a website that’s easy and pleasant for people to use, and doing so is also important for your SEO. Many things go into creating a positive user experience, but Core Web Vitals focuses on three important aspects of this. These metrics include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – This metric measures a page’s main content loading performance. According to Google, loading should occur within 2.5 seconds. Hopefully, page speed is something you have already prioritized on your website, as it’s been a ranking factor on its own now for quite some time.
- First Input Delay (FID) – This metric measures a page’s load responsiveness. For example, when you click on a button or scroll down a page, you expect the site to respond to your input immediately. Google states that a good FID score is 100 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – This metric measures a website’s stability. If you’ve ever been on a website that shifted out of nowhere, causing you to lose your place reading something or forcing you to click on something you didn’t want, you know what a poor experience this is and why stability is important.
Websites Need to Be Mobile Friendly
Mobile-friendliness has been important for SEO for years now. Google first started mobile-first indexing in 2019, but many websites still neglect to adapt to mobile devices. As anyone can tell you, mobile devices are here to stay. In fact, mobile devices are taking over desktops as the most common way to perform online searches. In the 2nd quarter of 2021, searches from mobile devices accounted for 61% of organic search engine visits.
With mobile devices accounting for over half of all organic search engine visits, no one can afford to leave out mobile users. As so many people are on mobile devices when they use search engines, it’s likely that your audience will be using one as well. This data is impossible to ignore, and if you do, you’ll be excluding a huge amount of your audience. These are people who could benefit from your business, but might change their mind if your website isn’t meant to be viewed on a mobile device.
More People Will Use Voice Searches
In the past few years, you may have used a popular digital voice assistant such as Alexa or Siri to get information. (Alexa, what’s the weather today?) If this is true, you’re not the only one. Voice searches have become extremely popular, thanks to how convenient they are. You don’t need to use your hands with a voice assistant device, making them perfect for anyone busy with more than one task at a time, which is many of us.
However, while this makes most people’s lives easier, it can complicate things for marketers. When we use voice searches to find information, we often speak to them the way we would speak to a person. This is different from how we would type something into a search bar. Voice searches are much more conversational, so this needs to be considered when optimizing your website. Long-tail keywords are commonly found in voice searches, making them an even more important part of SEO than they have been. The trend of using voice assistants to search online is likely to continue, so this is one area to focus more on in 2022.
Chatbots Can Improve User Experience
As I’ve already mentioned above, user experience is extremely important in SEO and isn’t something you want to overlook. There are many ways that you can optimize your website to improve user experience, but one that’s increasingly popular is the use of chatbots. Regardless of the industry that you’re in, it’s understandable that many of the people who visit your website are bound to be coming to you with questions. A great way of fielding questions and concerns is with chatbots.
When users have a hard time finding the answers they’re looking for, they can get frustrated and leave your site. Chatbots can help reduce the risk of this happening. With a chatbot on your website, users can easily get the help they need without needing to speak to a real person or wait for a response. This can keep them on your site longer and leave them with a better impression of your business. Not only can chatbots help users, but they can also make other people’s jobs easier. Chatbots can take on the work of answering basic questions and concerns, which means that someone on your team doesn’t have to. Even if a user has to contact a real human for further help, they’ve hopefully already received some of the information they were looking for from the chatbot.
Make E-A-T Content a Priority
Many know they don’t only need content on their website – they need quality content. Various factors go into determining whether or not content is of good quality, but one way Google determines this is if the content meets its E-A-T guidelines. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, all of which are factors Google looks for in content. We know that Google wants to give users the best results possible, which makes it easier to understand why its E-A-T principle is important to consider in content marketing.
When you create content, you want to be sure that you’re giving people accurate and reliable information. In other words, you need to know what you’re talking about if you’re going to share it with people. While E-A-T is important for every website, it’s especially important for those in specific industries. This includes websites for businesses in the legal, medical, and financial industries, due to their importance and the impact they can have on people’s lives. E-A-T has been a ranking factor for a while, but it’s never too late to start prioritizing it.
SEO Experts Who Know the Latest Trends
Algorithms change all the time. When you run a business, staying on top of these updates and implementing them yourself is too much work to manage on your own. If you’re overwhelmed at the amount of work that goes into SEO – don’t be. ENX2 Marketing is here to handle all the work for you. Our award-winning SEO team always knows the latest trends that can help websites rank, and we’re here to help your business, too.
Make a resolution to improve your website in 2022 and contact us today for SEO services that can help!!