SEO Trends For 2022

Few other industries change at the speed that digital marketing does. And that marketing, along with the quality of your search engine optimization, can make all the difference in how your potential clients and customers find you in the year to come. While your digital marketing is the most essential and effective way of attracting new customers and keeping old ones, your SEO must be used in the right way and kept updated considering changes and trends in the marketplace.

Getting to Number One

Statistics are clear. Google processes approximately 3.5 billion searches each day. And most searchers never stray from the first page, with only 0.78 percent of them bothering to go to the second page of the results. The number one result on any Google search can expect an average click-through rate of 31.7 percent.

These numbers are what propel all professional search engine optimization today. The big question is always, “How do we get our clients to number one?” The monkey wrench, so to speak, is that the rules are always dynamically changing. In 2018, Google made approximately 3,200 changes to its search system.

Watching Trends is Essential When it Comes to SEO

The SEO arena can be unpredictable and, depending on the skill and talent of your SEO team, set you up for either upturns or downturns in business depending on their adherence to changes. A downturn can happen swiftly if your SEO team sits on its laurels or is nothing but glorified salespeople. Consequently, the most skilled SEO professionals watch trends like hawks to ensure that their clients and rankings are always under control.

Google keeps its ranking factors very close to the bone. So, while SEO is part data-driven and part speculation, paying close attention to trends and how they may or may not affect real-world rankings is critical.

For 2022, these are some of the new trends that we anticipate will make a difference in our client’s website rankings and what we will be closely optimizing for.

• New Video Structures -- Video has become an important tool in website marketing, with Google expanding on its video key moments feature, potentially boosting user engagement and their rankings.

• Making Greater Use of Artificial Intelligence -- Natural language models allow Google to better analyze data in multiple languages and through spoken searches. This enables more human-like understanding of context and allows for more natural conversation capabilities.

• Passage Indexing -- Instead of Google indexing pages by the content of the entire page, through passage indexing, it is hoping to provide the searcher with the best possible answers from a wider variety of legitimate sources allowing it to take a more fine-tuned approach to page relevance.

• Content Structure -- While SEO professionals understand the need for multiple and subject-specific sections, passage indexing will require it to determine the depth and relevance of the content. This makes it even more essential to organize content with specific heading tags.

• Core Web Vitals -- User experience is the cornerstone of Google’s business model. It already uses Page Experience Algorithm, and Core Web Vitals will be an addition to that. It adds another three variables to how Google will index for user experience.

• User Intent -- With the ever-changing dynamic of how people use the internet, the focus is being directed to user intent and behavior. When site owners understand what their users are looking for, they can develop a website and content that benefits from this knowledge.

• Analytics, Customer Retention, and Value -- The quantity of web traffic does not always equate to conversion. Google wants to focus more on the analytics of behavior and less on keyword data. This helps business owners understand their customers to better serve them and make their website more actionable.

• Branding Optimization -- Business owners must always deeply understand their own brand, what they offer of value, and who their audience is. There will be enhanced analytics to help businesses understand this to enable them to better craft their digital presence and influence how Google ranks them.

• Increasing Mobile SEO -- While this has been critical for some time now, it’s amazing how little attention business owners give their mobile presence. Now and for the foreseeable future, all SEO must give a great deal of focus to mobile-friendly websites and optimize for mobile searches.

• Changes in SERP Functionality and Layout -- With passage ranking, Google will need to change the layout and functionality of its results pages. This will require a stronger structure for websites, making it easier to be evaluated by Google.

• Content Form -- While long-form content has been strongly suggested for a while, with guidelines suggesting 2,000-word long content, as page passage relevance becomes more important, that guideline may shift to even longer content requirements.

• Automation -- We are all busy, and the more digital marketing tasks that we can automate, the better. New automation availabilities will allow SEO professionals more time to concentrate on site performance and the things that matter most.

Right Brain Meets Left Brain

As Google becomes more adept at focusing rankings to the needs of its users, it will require much more skill, creativity, and work on the part of the website owner and the SEO professional.

The old-school and spammy methods are dying out, and newer, more human-like and natural methods are taking their place. While keywords and link-building will probably still have their place for a long time, website owners and their SEO managers must look to the future and adapt now to head off the competition.

Getting Highly Experienced SEO Help

For most business owners, talk about Google algorithms can make their eyes glaze over. At Fuel Web Marketing, digital marketing is our passion.

Our skilled team of experienced SEO consultants and engineers offer tested strategies coupled with out-of-the-box creative thinking. Today, your digital marketing is more important than ever before. Contact us online or call (888) 375-3835 to speak with one of our experienced SEO consultants to learn how we can help make you stand out from your competition.