SEO trends you shouldn’t ignore in 2022

For marketers, keeping up with digital marketing trends is critical, and SEO is no exception. If we look back just a few years, we will see how the landscape has radically changed. New algorithms with artificial intelligence, voice searches, enriched results … The world of SEO does not stop changing, so we have to change with it so as not to be left behind. To give you a cable, in this article, we will review the SEO trends that you cannot miss in 2022.

12 SEO trends for 2022

Algorithms with artificial intelligence

In 2022, we believe that RankBrain, Google’s artificial intelligence algorithm, will be one of the most critical factors in deciding how to rank a web page in the SERPs.

Since Google launched RankBrain, there has been a lot of speculation about the effects of artificial intelligence on SEO strategies. Although not much detail has been given about the algorithm’s internals, user experience is believed to be one of the most widely considered factors. This means that the click-through rate and the time users spend on a website will be determining factors for positioning.

Accessibility

When we think about making our site more visible, we have to think about all kinds of needs, including those with visual or hearing problems. As marketers, we are increasingly aware of the importance of accessibility, making it one of the most important SEO trends for 2022.

Ensuring the content of your website, your products, and your services are accessible to people with functional diversity helps you climb positions in search results and offers a better user experience and can even positively influence your reputation as Mark.

In conclusion, the time has come to do an accessibility audit of your website and review all those aspects that help more people use it without problems.

Also Read: A Comprehensive Guide to SEO Meta Tags

The experience on the page and the Core Web Vitals

Google increasingly attaches more importance to aspects related to user experience, which has made it a significant SEO trend.

With the latest update of its algorithm, Google has announced that it will consider the user experience of a web page to position it. The key on-page experience metric for marketers will be  Core Web Vitals, which measure the quality of a website in terms of user experience. You can see them in the “Top Web Metrics” report in Search Console.

These are the 3 essential metrics that make up Core Web Vitals:

• LCP  (Image Processing with Larger Content). Measures perception of loading speed. The web is considered a good experience if the most important content takes less than 2.5 seconds to load.
• FID  (first entry delay). Measure the user experience when interacting with the page. Ideally, it should be less than 100.
• CLS  (cumulative design change). Measures visual stability through the number of unexpected changes to the visible page layout. It is recommended that it be below 0.1.

Voice searches

The popularity of voice searches continues to grow. It is estimated that around 58% of consumers use them to find information about local businesses, mainly through assistants such as Google, Siri or Alexa.

According to experts, voice searches will become the majority of search engine queries in the future, so it’s time to prepare for them if you haven’t done it before. The first step is to “translate” the written content into natural language, thinking about how users speak and not how they write.

Google’s EAT principle.

We know that today in SEO, the quality of content is valued before the number of keywords or other similar factors. To assess this quality, Google uses the “EAT” principle:

• Expertise (experience): the content must provide the point of view of an expert on the subject at hand.
• Authoritativeness (authority): this factor focuses on the authority of the content and the domain of the web through signals such as external links from other quality websites in the sector.
• Trustworthiness: the website should focus on publishing trustworthy content. It is similar to expertise, but it works more generously at the global level of the entire website and not of specific content.

The contents of great extension

Introducing “filler” words will not help us improve positioning, but it is true that long content is a trend in SEO and tends to rank better. The reason is that articles of more than 3000 words tend to share more and generate more traffic.

To keep the readers’ interest, it is essential to divide the content into smaller sections using  H2 and H3 headings, making the content easier to read and understand.

Also Read: What Does “Quality Content” Really Mean?

Video as a fundamental part of SEO

If you haven’t included videos in your SEO strategy yet, 2022 is the time to do it.

The popularity of the video format has skyrocketed in recent years, thanks to platforms such as YouTube or TikTok. To increase the visibility of your video content, be sure to optimize the description of your channel and each of your videos, using keywords and hashtags relevant to your content.

Enriched results

One aspect of SEO that has changed the most in recent years is the search results pages or SERP. We have moved from organic text and link ads and results to a much more complex ecosystem, with elements such as images, reviews, extra links, or even ready-to-buy products with just one click.

For this reason, the maximum objective of SEO has gone from being “the higher, the better” to “the more visible, the better”. We have to be strategic when introducing content and markup elements on our pages to make Google show more information about us at first glance.

Also Read: Different Types of SEOS You Need To Know

Zero position

Another result of the revolution of search results pages is that the most privileged position has become the featured snippet or “zero position”, which not only appears first but is also more visible than the rest.

The result that appears in this position shows an extract of the information sought by the user, the title of the page where this information is found, a URL and, sometimes, an image. Since it takes up more space than the rest of the results, it attracts many impressions and clicks.

There are three main types of featured snippets: text paragraphs, numbered or unnumbered lists, and tables.

Ethical link building

One of the “classic” SEO techniques was exchanging or even buying links, but those times are long gone. Google now penalizes strategies like reciprocal link exchanges, paid links or other techniques of link building not organic. Even large-scale guest posting campaigns have come to be considered bad practice.

The bottom line is that we have to rethink the strategies to get inbound links, focusing on creating quality content and distributing it in ways not perceived as spam. You can contribute a guest article to our sister site.

Also Read: Most Common Backlink Myth

Google Shopping Graph

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online shopping became the main or even the only option for many consumers.

Until recently, the search capabilities of Google Shopping could not be compared to those of ecommerce giants such as Shopify or Amazon, but recently the search engine has decided to give more importance to this aspect with the launch of the  Shopping Graph. Shopping Graph is a dynamic model with artificial intelligence that can understand a constantly changing set of products, sellers, brands, reviews, and product and inventory information provided by sellers and the relationships of all these attributes with each other.

With this launch, Google wants to offer users a system to discover and buy products in real-time. Without a doubt, Shopping Graph is one of the most important SEO trends for the ecommerce sector.

Semantic searches

Search engines can increasingly understand user intent and the relationships between different terms rather than focusing on optimized keywords. Therefore, it will be increasingly important to focus on the relevance of information and primary and secondary keywords rather than optimizing for specific keywords.