SEO is a constantly evolving, everchanging, and unpredictable process. While the core principles of SEO remain unchanged, the industry is so volatile that one may feel alienated and lost after a year away from SEO. It is thus essential to stay on top of the SEO trends to stay relevant. Here are the top 6 SEO trends to tap in 2022 to keep your traffic and keyword rankings trending upward.
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Voice Search
Voice search is a new hype in the industry. According to Perficient, voice search is one of the fastest-growing types of search. 55% of users do voice searches to ask questions on a smartphone. As voice search evolves from voice recognition to voice understanding, Google gets nearer to its aim to transform voice search into "an ultimate mobile assistant that helps you with your daily life so that you can focus on the things that matter." Voice search not only helps build brand awareness by increasing traffic to your website but also helps enhance the user experience, which is one of the most important aspects that Google is currently emphasizing. It is vital to optimize your SEO advertising strategy to accommodate voice search via focussing on conversational keywords, providing context with schema markup, building FAQ pages, etc.
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First-party data collection
Understanding the organic search funnel is crucial to preparing your SEO strategy. First-party data helps understand website performance, search terms driving traffic to your website, and the traffic's impact on your business. First-party data is crucial to driving decisions and positive change for sustainable growth. First-party data refers to the consumer information gathered from your own acquisition channels. As this information is under your responsibility, it is crucial to manage it to benefit your business without disrespecting any regulations. First-party data collection is essential to create personalized experiences and make custom segments. Some ways to collect first-party data are surveys and interviews, CRM, customer feedback, social media reviews, etc.
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User experience
A study revealed that it takes almost 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines if they will stay or leave. Poor UX affects your chances of ranking high in the Google SERPs. A website with many errors, an old aesthetic, and a lousy navigation structure will have a tremendous bounce rate. When linked to a search, time spent on the website is the main criteria for Google tracking. Thus, a high bounce rate website is likely to be considered irrelevant or spammy and lead to a decline in the chances of your website being ranked on the first page. The easiest way to fix this is by enhancing the user experience. Start by going through and using your website as a visitor would, and don't be afraid to switch it up if you find anything annoying or generally unpleasant.
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Passage Indexing
Passage Indexing is Google Algorithm's new technology that ranks individual passages within a page on search results based on the users' search query. Passage Indexing has a ripple effect on the search results page as Google Crawlers now understand the relevance of distinct passages in your content. Passage Indexing does not significantly impact Google's indexing process; it has to do more with ranking. Google now ranks sections of the content that matches the search query. It is, therefore, crucial to optimize SEO for passage indexing. The easiest way to ace this algorithm is by introducing long-form content and updating it with new stats, links, and resources.
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Include videos.
Implementing videos in SEO is an effective scheme. YouTube alone has more than a billion users, so it's time to start if you're not creating video content. To optimize your SEO using videos, it is crucial to optimize the name and description of your video channel and provide the relevant information and resources of your channel. And, of course, keywords are essential so that your SEO strategy is infallible.
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Semantic search opportunities:
Semantic search is intent and contextual meaning-based search connected to Machine Learning built by Google to improve the search experience and make it easier for users to find what they're looking for. Semantic search improves user experience by putting all the work in the backend.
It is essential to optimize your SEO strategy with semantic search opportunities. Two ways to do that are:
- Optimizing secondary keywords: Since Google can understand the intent of searches and articles, the keywords you surround your primary keyword with are essential. So do not solely optimize for one or two key phrases. Instead, cover various ways searchers think and write about a topic.
- Provide accurate information and try to answer the entirety of the search queries. Your content must answer the Googler's primary question and also include every other question they may have about a topic. It provides a better user experience and keeps them on your page longer. This is partly why longer posts rank better on Google. You can try adding FAQs to your posts if you can't find an organic way to include essential topic questions.
While these tips and tricks can come in handy, SEO is not an easy fish to tackle. Finding the right professional SEO ads services can help you deal with the tricky challenges and new algorithms Google keeps throwing to optimize your SEO marketing ads services. Stay relevant, stay trendy!
