SEO Trends for 2022 – Everything You Need to Know
With each year that passes, new SEO best practices and trends continue to develop. Your business needs to continue to adapt to changing times. Here is a look at the top SEO trends for 2022 and everything you need to know to meet today’s standards.
- Voice Search is a Game Changer
SEO changes fast and that is primarily due to how user behaviour changes. Google has reported that 4 out of every 10 US adults now perform at least one voice search per day. Additionally, 85% of consumers consider voice search to be the future of web searches. Considering these facts, optimizing your content to be focused on more conversational keywords can help how you are received with search. Voice searches are expected to sound more natural as opposed to keyboard searches.
Action Takeaway:
Much of the key voice search inquiries made are related to a website’s FAQ section of its content. Therefore, consider making this section more voice search friendly. Secondly, your content snippets should be approximately 30 words and designed to answer voice search queries.
- Growth of Video SEO
As video content expands from YouTube across various social media channels, user consumption of video is also growing. YouTube has reported having more than 1 billion currently active users. Users are spending more time on sites like YouTube than ever before, rising competition and focusing optimization of video content to become a priority for many companies.
Action Takeaway:
Keywords are key even in video SEO. Use YouTube’s autocomplete feature to easily find relevant keywords. Insert the topic in the search field and choose your suggested keywords from that list based on what people are searching for right now. Apply these keywords to your video title, tags, and descriptions. Say the keyword even in your video.
- The User Intent of Search
One thing Google is currently doing is making the search intent of the user a top priority. The better an individual page on your website can match the user’s intent, the higher the page will generally rank. This can range from a page being informational, transactional, commercial, or navigational.
Action Takeaway:
Analyse the page intent by looking at the keyword itself. If your page is intended on being informational, then having an e-commerce styled product page with that keyword is not going to convert a user or serve their intended purpose. Commercial keywords can be the most challenging, having to consider both the aspect of a purchase being made as well as information being communicated about that product or service. Navigational queries are focused on easily taking a user to a specific page such as a login page.
- Keep in Mind Google’s Algorithm and Mobile-First Index
In recent years, Google unveiled its new artificial intelligence algorithm known as RankBrain and more recently confirmed its importance to ranking factors. Adapting to these new standards means the website must put a larger emphasis on User Experience. Additional measurements include how often users click on the first page and if it has a higher organic click-through rate. Additionally, Google now considers the mobile version of your website as being the main version of your site.
Action Takeaway:
Title tags should be optimised for on-page SEO and click-through rate. Content should match what the user is looking for on the page. How your website appears on mobile matters. Make sure 100% of your website is crawled under Mobile Usability on your Google Search Console.
Need help with your SEO? Get in touch with Astro Agency today