Latest SEO Trends in 2022

Every year new technologies and approaches appear, including SEO. Search engine optimization develops as search engines update, new approaches and solutions for site ranking appear. If you ignore the latest international SEO trends, you can move in a completely opposite direction, which will not contribute to business development at all. It is important to know in advance what to do and how to get a positive result.

SEO strategies

Strategically, SEO site optimization is always aimed at getting customers into the marketing funnel. As defined by Sprout Social, a funnel has five distinct phases.

1. Firstly, the awareness phase. This increases the awareness of your target audience about your brand site. It also makes customers more receptive to future interactions.
2. Secondly, the consideration phase activates your advocates and social proof to help customers when they compare you to your competitors.
3. Thirdly, at the conversion phase, you make the purchase process as easy as possible for your customers.
4. Fourthly, at the loyalty phase, you create a program such as discounts, email interaction and the use of social media to support your customers.

Finally, during the advocacy phase, you develop relationships with receptive people to support future marketing funnels and even promote your brand to other potential customers.

Therefore, whatever you do for your SEO should, in principle, follow this pattern. As a business principle, this isn't likely to change as much as the SEO landscape. So keeping this in mind when dealing with SEO and business will lead to success.

Often we overdo it because we over-focus on things that don't really matter to our business goals. Consider which strategies should not be used for a business due to their obsolescence, since this will be a waste of time, money and effort. They are less likely to drive happy customers into your marketing funnel.

Changing your SEO strategy

Sometimes it is very difficult to change our habits, for this reason we continue to use dying strategies, but do not dare to change our approach. Attachment in this regard plays a cruel joke, because it takes energy away from ineffective processes, distracting from really important tasks.

Refusal of outdated link building methods

Link building is still a very valuable SEO asset. This is an important factor in the ranking of a site by search engines. However, not the main one, so this may not be the ultimate goal of SEO optimization.

In the golden years of link building, SEOs simply spammed their links against random directories (Core DNA, 2020) and it worked. This is absolutely not suitable for today.

It is important that the links leading to your site are placed on authoritative resources, then the article itself will have a higher rating. In this regard, it is better to have several large publications linking to the site than many smaller blogs with less authority. Quality is more important than quantity, it is much more profitable to work with authoritative sites of the relevant topic, most appropriate to the topic of the article.

A high rating does not mean traffic

Even if the site gets to the very top of the ranking in the search results, this does not always increase traffic. This approach worked before, but not now. If you look at the search results, you can see that its first positions are filled with ad units, so even if the site gets to the top of the ranking, it turns out to be literally "buried" under all this information.

Instead of the ultimate goal of SEO optimization to put it in the top of the search results, you should focus on a different kind of metric - CTR, click-through rate on the link leading to the site. This indicator can be increased by working with meta tags, titles and descriptions. It's worth starting with the combinations offered by Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.

Write for people, not machines

According to Core DNA research back in 2020, SEOs used to focus on search engines. Robotic search engines read information, but the opinion of visitors also affects the rating of the article and site. If articles are written for people, that's good for business. Such articles carry meaning, they are useful to the consumer, so now Google is determining the customer focus indicator.

The overflowing of the article with keywords now does not work as a plus, since it is important that the content meets the real needs of users. It is not only the content that matters, but also the design - for the text to be easy to read, it must be divided into paragraphs and structured, have a comfortable font, visual elements corresponding to the subject of the article, etc. The better the site answers the questions of site visitors, the more relevant it will be from the point of view of search engines.

Moreover, Google places special emphasis on the length of time users stay on a particular web page. Useful content that site visitors read will rank higher than articles that do not carry a semantic load, but are filled with keywords. In order to make a business successful in 2022 and not ruin it completely, you need to find a middle ground, strike a balance between SEO for robots and SEO for humans.

Content volume value

Longreads are more likely to be a help in getting constant traffic than small to medium-sized articles. Numerous studies have found that they bring in the most organic traffic, generating it three times more than medium-length content. Detailed topic insights that provide in-depth content take more time for readers to explore - and we all know what happens when site visitors spend more time on a page - Google drives you more traffic through search rankings.

Selected sections become more visible

Featured snippets were created primarily for mobile optimization. This turned out to be successful, as 50% of the mobile device screen is now a featured snippet.

While Google has put an end to duplicate search results with featured snippets and top organic search results, featured snippets remain an important part of SEO. Plus, the featured snippets can be customized to drive more traffic.

Improving smart search

Many people associate smart search with Google's auto-complete search form feature. But these days predictive search has a lot more to do with Google Discover, a feed that aims to deliver videos and articles to mobile users. Despite being a relatively new service, Google Discover is growing in popularity, with over 800 million people using it today.

While the algorithm remains a mystery to marketers, given many factors, this type of predictive search is expected to further evolve into more sophisticated information delivery systems. In addition, Google Discover could very well be an effective tool for increasing website traffic.

Optimizing images

Google has always made it clear to webmasters and site owners to properly tag and optimize visual content. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that images ultimately contribute to the user experience. While images used to serve aesthetic purposes, users now click images when shopping or looking for information.

To do this, SEO specialists are expected to optimize images using high quality and high relevance images, while providing custom filenames and alternative tags. Such image optimization techniques have been proven to be successful.

Focus on customer service quality

Professionals understand that business success depends on a healthy bond between buyers and sellers. This is why the marketing funnel structure is a very effective model that allows us to visualize in order to entice customers to become fans of the brand. This applies to all business processes, including SEO. It also includes all aspects of content, design and some technical aspects. But first, let's focus on the big shift towards customer experience.

Customer service quality affects search rankings. This increases idle time and tells Google's algorithm that users think your content is relevant and useful. Thus, the machine raises the site up in the ranking, offering it to other users.

Therefore, the user experience should be tuned in such a way as not only to increase the rating of the resource, but also to help customers move to the desired actions. However, a good bond between you and them will only develop when your desired actions also match the desired results. All this is presented in the form of a whole complex of actions.

1. Best SEO Software.

• MOZ Local provides a keyword generator for SEO as well as keyword analysis (it also analyzes links to ensure they are of high quality);
• SEMrush is a complex digital marketing management platform that provides the tools you need to get a brand to lead in search results;
• Serpstat helps companies improve their search engine rankings (it gives an idea of the costs of the company for the promotion);
• Moz Pro checks the site for errors, helping to improve its content, which also helps by automatically prioritizing problems for quick resolution;
• Ahrefs is the platform with the largest backlink index (thanks to it, you can be sure of the integrity of the URLs that you link to on your website).

2. Quality content. Page content plays an integral role in today's SEO. Search engines match what they think is good and useful content for users. Thus, it is important to have a good content strategy. In the broadest sense, a content strategy should aim to create maximum value for users. In addition, you need to use different types of media, such as video, audio, and others, in order to maintain a high level of engagement.

3. System Query Results (SQR). Google has contracts with more than 10,000 search quality evaluators around the world. These "evaluators" are tasked with conducting searches and evaluating the quality of the pages that appear in the first results. You can analyze your site yourself or contact experts who will help with quality content.

4. Working with keywords. It doesn't look the same anymore and requires a different approach as Google has included a number of changes to its results pages, including purchases, local packages, and featured snippets. This has led to a drop in CTR for sites that are in the top positions in search results. As a result, marketers have shifted their focus from the top search positions to a new keyword optimization concept - search engine marketing. The purpose of this type of keyword optimization is to optimize content so that it will appear in various search elements such as top news, videos, images, and topics that are of interest.

5. Original content. Unique content is not a trend, but a core SEO requirement. In fact, 90% of successful content marketers prioritize audience needs over advertising requirements.

6. Powerful SEO. As influence marketing continues to be a part of everyone's marketing toolbox, this new marketing trend is reflected in SEO. Supporters claim that this method is much cheaper than traditional marketing and effectively reduces the time it takes to reach audiences as influencers already have followers that companies can use.

7. Relevance of design. Page optimization is a really broad term that captures both front-end design and back-end frameworks. Now design plays a big role in the user experience as they don't see the beautiful server-side architecture of the site, but only communicate with the user interface. Success in design will increase the time spent by attracting users through a beautiful web design.

All this, combined with useful content, allows you to increase the site's ranking, make your business successful and effective.

Growth in the number of non-Google search engines

From the very beginning, we only paid attention to Google, and rightly so, since it is the most popular search engine so far. However, it is not the only one. This does not mean investing time and resources in SEO for Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. But experts recommend keeping in mind that people tend to search for useful content on other sites like Amazon, YouTube, and Facebook.

Thus, SEO should no longer be too Google-focused. Google has a big role to play, of course, but you should turn your attention to broader and even more targeted options. If you're doing international business, you can't ignore big sites like Amazon and Facebook. This is especially important if you operate regionally or locally.

Working with video

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and for good reason (information according to Search Engine Journal research). In this system, you can watch videos, interact with other users and even communicate with the creators themselves. Therefore, video marketing is one of the most important approaches for business development. And not only on YouTube, but also on Instagram and Facebook.

Technical SEO

SEO trends and practices may change, but technical SEO is an ongoing problem. This applies not only to your server side, but also to the consumer experience. Technical SEO is mainly about getting the site to be scanned by Google and other search engines in the best possible way.

This will mean that it is highly visible and processed by search engines, so that the owner will receive views, new users and other key performance indicators on their site. Google Search Console is the best tool for this.

Machine learning and progressive web applications

In the world of SEO, Google itself uses machine learning to combat spam and provide users with good useful quality content. The search engine has already deployed this to Gmail with a 99.9% success rate.

The power of machine learning lies in the relative independence that is provided to the computer. This allows it to achieve a specific goal by simply adhering to established rules. By training the machine, entrusting it with analytical work, the site owner gains strategies and tactics that will help optimize SEO as they move forward, without diving into the process on their own. Based on current machine learning statistics, this approach will be a strong trend in the future. Business intelligence tools are also becoming more popular every year.

There is some buzz around Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). In a nutshell, PWAs are browser driven web pages that give users the ability to use a standalone application. The experts recommend them for installation, but they should work like an application even in browsers. Examples of PWAs are Housing.com, Starbucks, Airbnb, Yummly, and Twitter. Google developers define them as improving user experience with:

• reliability - loads instantly and does not slow down even in poor connection conditions;
• speed - quickly responds to user actions with smooth animation;
• engagement - immersive experience and a natural feeling of the application on the device.

PWA is promising for SEO and marketing, this is already visible, and in the next 2022 it will become even clearer.

More and more attention is paid to semantically related keywords, so ignoring this trend will ruin the business in the near future.

Semantically related keywords or "semantic keywords" help Google deliver better results for your query. Originally designed to solve search problems, semantically related keywords also allow search engines to determine an appropriate ranking for a search result. It’s also worth paying attention to voice search and the use of artificial intelligence to increase customer engagement, as these latest seo trends are now coming to the fore.

Algorithms: BERT is now outdated. Meet MUM

After the BERT(bidirectional encoder by Transformers) launch in 2019, the Google algorithm started to understand the connection between the words and the aim of the search. 

BERT is a new approach that allowed Google to give the users voice assistants. People now stopped typing search queries; they voiced it instead. The speech is conversational and smooth, and this is why Google needed to adapt its algorithms using artificial intelligence and neurolinguistic programming. 

However, Bert is just the beginning. During the Google I/O 2021 conference, the company announced a new model of interpreting and user service. They called it MUM, which stands for multitasking unified model.

The Google search manager, Prabhakar Raghavan, claims that the new model is 1000 times more effective in speech processing. Hence it can do more tasks at a time. MUM can analyze videos, images, and text in 75 languages, and then it is capable of giving answers to complicated search inquiries. In short, MUM is an artificial intelligence model that can understand feelings, context, abstract notions, and user intentions, according to which it gives unique, user-customized answers. You will no longer need to search for a few things and change the wording before the system gives you the desired response.

Now Google is capable of providing a proper answer just in one query. Multimodel of MUM means that the users can combine the text, images, and voice to get relevant answers to their questions. Pandu Nayak, Google search vice-president, puts it the following way: ‘Shortly, you will be able to photograph your tracking shoes and ask whether you can use them to conquer the Fuji? Mum will understand your inquiry and connect your image to it. Then it might redirect you to a blog where there is a discussion of the required gear’.

LaMDA: Google wants to talk to you

I am sure you have heard about the importance of voice search and its optimization for answering clients’ questions regarding SEO trends. Google is beginning to change its algorithm to satisfy the users and keep up with the newest voice technologies. Now it wants to be able to talk to you. 

During the Google I/O conference, they showed us LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). As you might have understood, LaMDA is a model of machine learning developed for dialogues running on Transformer, a neuro-network architecture of Google.

Ella Collins, Product Management vice-president, and Zoubin Ghahramani, general research director, LaMDA is an architecture that:
‘Creates a model that can be taught to read many words (for example, a sentence or a paragraph), it can draw attention to the correlation of the words, and then it can predict what will be the following words. LaMDA is taught how to lead a dialogue’.

Suppose MUM is about seeing the difference in people’s emotions and the actions preceding their search inquiries. In that case, LaMDA wants to talk and show the results according to other users’ browsing activity.

LaMDA is only a part of the entire Google strategy. You can expect other, more developed models of artificial intelligence, which use dialogue inquiries for searching and ranking. If you have not optimized your website for voice search, now is the right time to do it.

Core Web Vitals: UX receives a new meaning

The days of optimizing a page for a keyword and building links to it as the primary ranking method are passed and gone. However, SEO still depends on website optimization and link building, but now they are not the only crucial thing. 

One of the new aspects of ranking is the perception of the page, which Google defines as a set of signals that measure how the users react to the interaction with the internet page. 

Core Web Vitals is the most notable element in this tool update. Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure page load speed in terms of user interaction.

1. LCP indicator shows the productivity of the load. Google strongly recommends that the LCP is below 2.5 seconds. 
2. FID indicator shows interactivity. Google advises that FID is less than 100 milliseconds.
3. CLS indicator shows visual steadiness. Google recommends keeping the CLS under 0.1.

Google combines the Core Web Vitals with aspects such as the comfort of using the page for mobile users, HTTPS protocol usage, and irritating advertisement absence. Altogether, this is a set of characteristics that will boost the user experience to its top. 

Conclusion

In addition to the seo trends in 2022 that have already been described, others may appear until 2022, so you should always keep your finger on the pulse. But our recommendations should not be abandoned, since they are based on expert forecasts and are of great value in the development of business ideas.

Today's SEO is more than just advertising and marketing, it is painstaking work taking into account current trends in other areas that may have an impact on your business. Of course, SEO is very important. However, you need to balance this with working offline as well. Many marketers tend to forget that real-world interactions play a big role when it comes to revenue and conversions. It's worth keeping up with the latest technological innovations and not giving up on some proven tactics. It is this combination of approaches that seems to be optimal in working on business promotion.