The Google algorithm itself changes constantly, sometimes with multiple changes happening within months. On top of that, the technology available to SEO professionals also constantly evolves, allowing us to stay abreast the seemingly daily changes of what it takes to dominate search.
While 2017 has brought about the dominance of Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages), the rise of HTTPS, the importance of backlinks, the precaution of the overuse of 301 redirects and reformatting of rich snippets to accommodate the increasing popularity of voice search, some of these trends will continue into 2022 and some will fall away.
On the other hand, we expect many new trends to emerge in 2022.
While Google makes it near impossible to completely crack its page ranking algorithm code, constantly adjusting to accommodate a thousand different nuances will be the challenge for SEOers in 2022 and many years to come.
Whether you want to do away with 2017 and start anew or you want to build on the success of your 2017 SEO campaigns, here are some SEO trends to be on the lookout for in 2022:
Page Speed
In today’s fast-paced, on-demand society, people want things, including information, immediately.
Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a website that appears to answer your question exactly, only to have to wait for the page to load. If the page doesn’t load in 5 seconds, you’re off onto another website that can hopefully give you the answers you need.
People don’t like slow web pages. If your page is slow, your site traffic will suffer. Page speed is a user experience feature that is expected for all websites.
If you’re wondering how fast is fast enough, take Google’s recommendation of 3 seconds or less.
To see how the speed of your website stacks up, you can take Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Speed has been a critical component for years, but moving into 2022, we’re going to see even more emphasis on it in the future.
|Get a free website report to see how your site is performing.
Increased Page Relevance
Google continues in its quest to provide the best web browsing experience to users. Besides offering users websites that are safe, Google searches for sites that best match the user’s search intent – even if that’s a little different from their actual query.
This means that search engines will evaluate the relevancy of the content on your website. One of the ways that Google assesses the relevance of a website’s content is with Latent Semantic Indexing. Through Latent Semantic Indexing Google can gather content from billions of websites and parse through the content, scanning for related terms and words.
Latent Semantic Indexing also enables Google to determine whether the content on a website is “comprehensive” and flows well.
Google also has the ability to analyze top-ranking pages and identify similarities and shared features among them.
How can you make your content relevant and comprehensive throughout 2022? You can start by researching the content of the top websites in your industry and looking for commonalities among them. This, however, can take a long time, especially if you’re looking for particular terms or words. To speed up the process, you can make use of some of the free trials available with different website auditors.
Rich Snippet Will Need Careful Structuring
There are rich snippets and regular snippets. Both include a clickable title, a URL, and a meta description. Rich snippets have more condensed titles that include “|” instead of a dash (-), reviews and an image. How you structure the data, however, is important in how search engines will display the information.
While the difference may seem insignificant, it has been shown that search results with properly formatted rich snippets receive more clicks and have a higher click-through rate, which in turn increases potential sales.
If you’re not sure what properly structured rich snippet structure looks like, you can check out Schema.org which features a step-by-step data structure guide.
Increased Search Engine Results Page Features
It is the goal of any SEO professional to achieve and maintain a high volume of traffic to a given website. Ideally, this would be the result of reaching the top spot on a search engine results page. Not only is it important to achieve this coveted position, but to also maintain it as long as possible.
However, with the latest developments in search engines, achieving this #1 ranking may no longer be enough to get the traffic you desire.
Gone are the days of the ten search results listings, highlighted in blue hypertext, and a couple of clearly marked ads. Now, when you look at a SERP, it is cluttered with images, videos, links, social media mentions, in-depth article listings, various widgets, and ads. It has become easy for a #1 result to get lost in the busy jumble of other page features.
While keyword and key phrase optimization are still important, you now have other offsite elements to consider.
Popular search engine results page features include AdWords, news block, featured snippets, local packs, reviews, tweets, video, image pack, shopping results, and site links.
How can you rank and monitor your rankings for all of these? There are tools such as Rank Tracker that allow you to track your ranking and to show you possible keywords that are holding back potential traffic.
Voice Search is More Real Than Ever
Just like in 2017, voice search will continue to pick up steam. Many consumers prefer the convenience of speaking over typing. Not only is it faster, but the queries can also be more detailed.
More importantly, voice recognition software has reached the point where users are comfortable trusting it to understand their normal speech.
The increased detail of search queries means you’ll need to go beyond the simple keyword and phrases to rank and focus more on terms and phrases people are naturally going to say out loud. People speak differently than they type, so your SEO strategy should try using conversational terms and sentences.
Mobile Will be Even More Important
Smartphones dominate the landscape and more and more web browsing is occurring on mobile devices. In fact, the number of people using their smartphones to browse the Internet is higher than the number who browse on a traditional desktop computer.
It is no longer optional to have a mobile-friendly website. It is now required and expected by the search engines and the users.
In fact, mobile-friendliness is now a search ranking factor.
This is nothing new, and something you’ve probably heard about in many other years, but as each new device comes out and includes some kind of voice search function, you are going to have to really think about it going into 2022.
