5 Vital search engine optimization Trends to Observe in 2022

2021 was a pretty challenging year. And it’s not just travel, inflation and health regulations that have changed dramatically.

The SEO landscape – never known to be stable or very predictable – has also seen many changes: some of them were eagerly anticipated, others came as a surprise.

But one thing remains for sure: you will likely stay with us for years to come, so whether you love it or hate it, you have to give it a hug.

Curious about which one SEO trends exactly are we talking here? Continue reading!

Top SEO Trends to Master in 2022

1. Compose and apply any search updates and Google Algo changes that happened back in 2021

It is the job of every SEO to keep up with the pace of the ever-changing search landscape. So a bunch Google something updates is nothing new.

But 2021 brought some game-changing changes that you will need to get used to and adapt to in the year ahead:

  • The Page Experience Update and the arrival of Core Web Vitals

Website speed and user experience. These words should dominate your SEO strategy for the year ahead. You probably knew that before, but now, with that Page experience update and Core Web Vitals metrics that affect your ranking, you must do everything possible to ensure lightning-fast loading times for your pages and to meet the Core Web Vitals thresholds.

Source: Semrush blog

Wondering how you can even check your Core Web Vitals and prepare for the Page Experience update?

this page did a great job optimizing your pages for the Core Web Vitals.

If your website is to incorporate speed and UX principles, then your content efforts should be guided by three additional three: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

These three elements now determine what Google considers a quality page (also known as quality content).

That means it’s getting harder and harder to prove to Google that your pages are worth the top spots. It’s no longer just about keywords or even just (as if it were that easy) fulfilling the user’s intent.

While Google is now taking a more holistic view of determining your rankings, there are still a few things you can do to ensure that you are sending strong EAT signals to the search engine:

  • Link back and get backlinks from trustworthy and high quality domains.
  • Show relevance to your audience by offering content that matches their preferred formats. For example, if you’re targeting teenagers, videos are the way to go.
  • Invest in branding so that your website becomes an It target in a specific niche.

2. Capturing user intent is more important than ever

In 2021 we all said goodbye to BERT and MUM or Uniform multitask model.

This is Google’s updated way of handling users’ searches – all to provide them with the most relevant and holistic information to serve their searches with the most comprehensive content.

MUM simply means that Google is now even better equipped to understand the real intentions of its users, and therefore one cannot “trick” the search engine with keyword stuffing or other tricks that used to work.

With no language or format barriers, Google now takes into account all available content on the topic including podcasts, videos, images, etc on its deeper understanding of what the user is really looking for.

While quality content is still the way to go, and the only way to ensure your pages get these rankings, you need to put extra effort into understanding user intent.

With that in mind, the latest Semrush user intent analysis comes in handy – whenever you use Semrush’s keyword analysis or research tools, you won’t get any insight into the intent of each keyword. Give it a try – it can really help you be better prepared for the MUM update.

Source: Semrush Keyword Magic Tool

In addition to intent, you have to work harder to find the key semantically related keywords.

Thanks to MUM, Google now understands the context of search queries better than ever, and you can only understand that if you understand and approach this context yourself.

So while primary keywords are still very important, the secondary are no longer “secondary”. Your content strategy for 2022 should be based on semantic search and Intent optimization because Google doesn’t just look at the phrase.

semrush keyword intention

To do this, you need a reliable and very comprehensive tool that provides all of the information you need for semantic search and the creation of content that actually responds to user requests.

If you don’t have a tool for all keywords yet, I’ll share my personal favorite: Semrush. In fact, with the largest keyword database out there, it’s the only toolkit in town that offers keyword intent analysis. And my readers have a unique chance to learn one 30-day free trial of the entire toolkit.

Related content: Semrush review

3. You need to trigger rich results and featured snippets

For years, Google has become more of a destination point than a simple search engine that delivers search results. This is where the concept of SERP marketing comes into play.

Knowledge graphs, advanced answers (remember the “people also ask” box), visual results – all Google SERP features fit into this term.

For example, if you type “Yosemite” in the search bar, you will hardly see any organic search results:

Rich Results and Featured Snippets

Hence, your organic presence, while still very important, can get lost among the richness of the SERPs.

And the further we go, the more prominent these SERP features become.

The same goes for rich snippets – images, star-based ratings, prices, and other information that may not appear on competing pages will help you stand out from the crowd.

Love it or hate it, you need to work on implementing structured data and other ways to trigger featured snippets and ensure rich snippets.

It’s not an easy task, but armed with the right information and tools, you can unpack which snippets have not yet been captured by your competitors and implement the right structured data to take over the SERPs.

Source: Semrush Organic Research Tool

4. Video should be a part of your SEO strategy for 2022

For a long time, video was more of a UX thing or something you would think of if you wanted to rely on YouTube marketing.

But now with video forecast in order to dominate all other forms of content consumption, it is part of SEO as well.

Interestingly, when I typed in “2022 SEO Trends” the top scores were all of the videos (which probably means this post could use a video assist):

2022 SEO Trends Google Results

2021 Google I / O was full of announcements about video features – we have two new video related structured data, namely Seek Markup and Clip Markup, which are intended to help your video content show up in the SERPs.

These are key moments-like features, but if the former is only available for videos uploaded to YouTube, the other two apply to all videos.

This means that video SEO now not only applies to the optimization of our YouTube videos for the video giant’s internal search engine, but thanks to the correct implementation of structured data is even a way of showing up in Google’s SERPs.

Just like other rich snippets and featured snippets work.

5. Optimize your pictures because they rank

We’ve heard for a long time that Image Search is coming. And it will be there in 2022.

As much as text content will stick with us, and some even predict that long forms will become more prominent on Google, people love visual content and visual search is the next it thing.

It’s not just a way to look at pictures – visual search is about getting information, and it’s also much more commercial and triggers product purchases.

So if you’ve never taken alt attributes seriously, 2022 is the right time to do it – from proper filenames and labels to high quality images and alt tags, you need to give users and crawlers the right tags and signals to help identify images in the Classify search.

Over to you

Surprised not to see your usual “voice search and mobile search are the next searches”?

Well, all search is now mobile search, and that didn’t happen overnight in 2021. The same goes for voice search. If you’re not ready for it – we’ve already talked about it back in 2018 – Following the SEO trends 2022 discussed here will not help your SEO strategy in the coming year.

However, if you are fully mobile-ready, when looking for contextual relevance, a better understanding of human language and intent, and expanding to other content formats, you need to make sure that:

  • High quality content that matches users’ intentions with real answers to current questions.
  • High-level sources – whoever you refer to must be a reliable and authoritative source. And when you have a backlink from any of these, only a dream will come true.
  • Versatile content formats – videos and images are finding their way into the SERPs, and as people tend to give preference to visual media, Google search will give more space to other types of content.
  • Don’t forget the technical stuff: website speed, UX, and structured data will all play a key role in your SEO strategy in the years to come. This means that you need a regular site audit to ensure that your site is performing at its best at all times.

12484

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *