SEO Trends for 2022.

SEO is one of those topics that is constantly evolving. To stay at the top of the SERP, (Search Engine Results Pages), you need to stay on top of the latest changes and updates.

This is our guide to the most important updates and changes to SEO in 2022.

Good old-fashioned SEO.

Good old-fashioned SEO still plays an important role. And by old-fashioned, we mean the good quality work SEOs have been doing for the last few years — not the keyword stuffing they did back in the Wild West of the internet.

SEO changes and adapts, but the key elements of SEO have still stayed the same. Before you start aiming for top spots in SERPs and checking out all the new and exciting SEO features, it’s key to have a good foundation of old-school SEO.

A quick breakdown of what we mean by that is:

• Audit your web page

• Fix technical issues (slow page-load times, massive and un-optimised images, bad redirects, no sitemap, missing or incorrect robots.txt, canonical issues and the list goes on)

• Keyword research & searcher personas

• Creating high-quality content that answers searcher intent

• Optimisation of the content

• Link-building campaigns and link profile management

• All the rest of the SEO goodness.

Now that your website is all kinds of SEO-friendly, let’s get into the juicy stuff.

Video content.

Search for anything on Google right now. We’ll wait for you. Did a video come up in the organic list? We’re betting it did. Type in ‘Thor’ to Google and not only will video come up, but it will have its very own Video SERPs feature.

Type in ‘how to fix a blocked sink’ (an issue the writer had to resolve over the weekend). Not only was a video in the top spot, but it also had a recommendation of where to start the video and a snippet of text of what is said in the video.

If you scroll further down there is the Video SERPs feature, and each of the videos in this section has key moments identified in the SERPs to help navigate to the section you may need.

As you can see, Video is already important in search results and is likely to grow more incorporated. With the launch of two new structured data elements for video (Seek Markup and Clip Markup) this has been confirmed for us.

There’s a heap of stats on why video helps all parts of digital marketing:

• Including a video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by 80% (Unbounce, 2018)

• Video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from SERPs

• People who watch videos stay on a site two minutes longer on average and are 64 percent more likely to make a purchase.

We got all our stats from these two resources: Video stats & the importance of Video SEO.

There’s never been a better time to start producing high-quality videos and to start optimising your old videos.

A few key ways to optimise a video for SEO:

• Add in chapters to your YouTube videos

• Include Closed Captions

• Optimise your title, tags, and description

• Eye-catching thumbnails

• Boost your channel authority by getting more subscribers

• Use Video Schema markup.

EAT.

Googles EAT principle is more important than ever. EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. In short, EAT is a characteristic that indicates a page is high quality and helpful to users.

Google has given us a little more insight into what they consider to be high-quality content, with EAT guidelines. Great content should:

• Help users

• Be created by an expert

• Be posted on an authoritative site

• Be trustworthy

• Be updated regularly.

What does this mean to you?

Essentially, it means that you should be producing high-quality content and boosting your trustworthiness.

Here are a few key things you can do:

• Back claims up with statistics and facts

• Link to reputable sites such as .edu & .gov URLs

• Get high-quality backlinks

• Tell visitors who you are, with a Team or About Us page. Author pages are a great way to build trustworthiness, expertise and authority

• Make content with experts

• Update your content more regularly.

While EAT is not a huge update, it is indicative of the moves Google is making, ranking high quality and trustworthy sources higher than others.

SERP features.

Featured snippets are becoming more prominent. Getting your content in a snippet is a great way to get significant traffic. Optimising for the featured snippet will become a lot more important.

People Also Ask features are growing. Almost 43% of search queries include a People Also Ask box. These features can be easily optimised for — just make sure to do some keyword research and include ‘How’, ‘Why’ and ‘What’ keywords in your page headers.

There are heaps of other SERPs features. These are a few of them:

• Knowledge Cards & Panels

• News box

• Site links

• Local pack

• Reviews

• Tweets

• Video

• Image Pack

• Rich Snippets.

LSI & Semantically Related Keywords.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index. In terms of SEO, LSI keywords are search terms related to the main keywords you are targeting. LSI is Google’s answer to matching content closer to a searcher’s intent.

Instead of just searching through an article for a particular keyword, Google is now understanding the context of the search and the context of the search terms. It hunts through articles for words that are semantically linked to the original keyword.

Find LSI Keywords using:

• Google Autocomplete

• Google Related Searches

• People Also Ask.

Many SEOs recommend sprinkling LSI Keywords throughout your content. A great way is to use many of the keywords you find to create sections of your webpage.

For example, if you ran a window cleaning business, then the main keyword you are targeting is ‘window cleaning’. With Google Autocomplete, you’ll find that people also search for ‘window cleaning tools’ and ‘window cleaning products’. Then, using People Also Ask, you’ll see another Keyword is ‘How much does it cost to clean inside windows?’ Now you can create a piece of content that address these keywords with separate sections on tools, products and pricing.

As you can see, understanding searcher intent and how to answer their questions is more important than ever.

IndexNow.

IndexNow is an open-source engine used by search engines to discover new content. It could prove to be one of the biggest changes to search engine indexing.

Instead of crawling pages, when a website integrated with the IndexNow API updates its content, the API pushes the information to all search engines that are also using IndexNow.

Currently, Bing and Yandex are using IndexNow and Google has said that they are testing it.

A key benefit of IndexNow is that there is no time between publishing your content and it being indexed by a search engine. It happens instantly!

(BTW, there is an IndexNow WordPress Plugin.)

Core Web Vitals.

Last year, Google updated with the page experience update, which made page experience measure through Core Web Vitals an official Google ranking factor.

The key metrics to be aware of are:

• Largest Contentful Paint: amount of time it takes the largest content asset on the page to load

• First Input Delay: how long it takes for your site to respond to a user’s first interaction with the page

• Cumulative Layout Shift: how many unexpected layout shifts occur during the lifespan of the page.

To work on these, you’ll likely need a web developer to help — but getting started on optimising these will have an impact on your ranking.

What affects each metric?

• Largest Contentful Paint: hero images, videos, fonts, background images, late-loading content

• First Input Delay: JavaScript, third-party code, tracking scripts

• Cumulative Layout Shift: image sizes, image dimensions, animations, multiple fonts, popups and menus.

How to improve it?

• Largest Contentful Paint: compress images, use correct dimensions, lazy loading, use third party video hosting

• First Input Delay: minify JavaScript, remove unused tracking scripts

• Cumulative Layout Shift: ensure all assets are the right dimension, reduce number of fonts, use set dimensions and predefined areas for showing ads.

Three key tools to measure your Core Web Vitals have been provided by Google:

• Search Console has a new Core Web Vitals report in Search Console which will allow you to evaluate pages across an entire site.

• PageSpeed Insights has been upgraded and is now capable of measuring Core Web Vitals — they are annotated with a blue ribbon

• Lighthouse was recently upgraded to include new metrics and performance score.

Image search.

Image search has come along in leaps and bounds. At Search On 2021, Google announced a push to make SERPs more visually browsable. This indicates a push towards visual content.

A recent Google case study showed that sites using the max-image-preview: large meta tag could see an increase in CTR by 79% and an increase in clicks of 333%.

Guess it’s time to start optimising all our images.

Localisation.

With predictions that nearly half of all searches on Google will have local intent, there has been a push towards highly localised search results on the search engine.

Boosting your Local SEO could have huge gains for you this year.

Some quick steps to take:

• Revamp your Google My Business page – update your business description, list products and services on offer, publish frequent and engaging posts, add FAQs

• Ask customers for reviews on Google and other platforms

• Make sure your location is on your website such as the footer, a meta description, and body copy

• Create Local Content

• Keep NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) up to date across all sites.

It’s time to start getting local with your SEO!

2022 is a big year for SEO. We hope that these 9 SEO Trends in 2022 helped you narrow in on the SEO factors to focus on this year.