SEO Trends to Watch in 2022
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component of your marketing success. If your company doesn’t have an SEO strategy, customers are not very likely to find you online. Or, you may have an SEO strategy, but you realize you’re not ranking very high in search engine results.
As a business owner, you don’t need to set aside time every week to stay abreast of what’s working in SEO. But you should keep your ear to the ground and work with a team of experts that can advise you on best practices – and implement them for you.
Experts predict that Google will release more updates in 2022 that will affect SEO, your website’s ranking, and user experience.
Here’s a brief overview of the expected SEO trends for 2022:
1. Google Discover
Although not a new feature, Google Discover has not yet had a huge impact on SEO. This feature is similar to the Discover feature on Instagram. But in this case, Google curates personalized content for you based on your past search behavior.
Experts predict that Google Discover, a type of hub for articles, will take more precedence this year, which could have the potential to drive much more traffic than even an organic search.
MarketingProfs recommends that you generate a focused site, use click-worthy titles, and ensure your site is fast to encourage getting featured in Google Discover. Other factors that can increase your chances of appearing in Discover include having a mobile-friendly website, using unique high-quality images, publishing long-form content about popular or timely topics, being strategic with content distribution to create buzz, and embedding YouTube videos into your website articles.
2. Core Web Vitals
Another function of Google that prioritizes the user’s experience, Google will prioritize Core Web Vitals as part of their algorithm this year.
Core Web Vitals are basically a set of metrics that Google sees as vital to creating a good user experience. These metrics include loading (or largest contentful paint), interactivity (or first input delay), and visual stability (or cumulative layout shift).
In short, Google plans to use “page experience” as part of its official ranking algorithm, including factors such as security, mobile-friendliness, lack of popups, and lack of malware to gauge the user’s experience.
While page experience is just one of the approximately 200 ranking factors Google considers, focusing on page experience only won’t get you to the top of page 1. However, it should be something your business considers, especially as Google prioritizes the Core Web Vitals more and more in the coming months.
3. Title Tag Rewrites
Titles are one of the most significant indicators of ranking on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), so Google loves to change the game with title tags or H1 tags since they are critical to creating a good experience for the user.
Google has been rewriting titles to create better titles for readers. But in the past, they would have made minor edits to the title, such as adding your business name to improve the user’s experience. Now, however, you may find that Google significantly rewrites some of your site’s titles to either eliminate keyword stuffing, lengthening title tags, or adding brand names. The search engine will take information from the web page and add it to the title.
The problem? This could make your site’s rankings worse. However, the good news is that you can prevent Google from changing your title tags by writing very good titles in the first place. And good title tags make users click on that search result, driving more traffic to your site.
For more help on making your site SEO-friendly in 2022, give us a call!