SEO Trends Any of these are the SEO trends for 2022. Implement these SEO strategies on your website and be ahead of your competition.
SEO Trends to Look for in 2022
The SEO industry 2022
The 13 Top SEO Trends for in 2022
The SEO industry is just as unpredictable as the algorithm updates that Google releases from time to time.
The industry is so volatile that if an SEO goes into hibernation and wakes up after a year, a person may start to sense a generation gap.
So, a lot is happening around the world of SEO and you want to be on top of all of this to make sure that things (rankings) are under your control.
In this blog, I will discuss some of the hot trends SEO 2022 and also make some speculations about how things will turn out in 2022.
If you’re wondering why you’re reading someone’s speculation, the answer is pretty simple. Until Google reveals all the ranking factors, and it won’t, SEO is half speculation, half data-driven.
I’ll share some of the best practices that we follow here at Stan Ventures, and those practices take our clients to the next level. With just a few changes, you can be ready for whatever’s facing you in 2022, at least based on what Google has been testing recently.
Of course, you may find some of the SEO trends of 2021 recurring in 2022. This is because some things are here to stay for as long as the SEO trends exists.
We have removed voice search from this list as the pandemic has severely damaged the potential for voice search growth. This may be due to the widespread use of masks. We’re not sure but the fact is that people don’t talk to computers and smartphones as much as they used to and the only example they use for voice search is while driving.
Google SEO Trends also shows a downward trend for keywords in voice search.
1. IndexNow (or something similar)
Recent reports indicate that Google is next in the list of search engines that use the IndexNow protocol.
For those of you who don’t know what IndexNow is, it is an open-source engine that search engines use to discover new content. Instead of the traditional withdrawal approach, it involves the use of a payment method.
So, when a website integrated with the IndexNow API updates its content, deletes a post, or publishes a new post, the API pushes that information to search engines.
Index-Now API was developed in Oct 2021 by Microsoft.
Index-Now is already supported by the search engines Yandex and Bing. Thanks to the faster indexing offered by IndexNow, search engines can avoid excessive crawl load, making the whole process more energy efficient.
This report of Google’s involvement in the IndexNow movement was confirmed by a Google spokesperson. Currently, they are in the process of testing the protocol’s efficiency to check if it improves Google’s sustainability efforts.
Google’s goal is to become a 100% renewable energy company by 2030. IndexNow’s carbon-neutral initiative means that the chances of Google adoption are high. Indexing pages by the giant search engine will become easier when this happens.
Garry Illyes, a Google search attorney, confirmed in an episode of Search Off The Record that in 2022 Google will make its crawling and indexing process sustainable.
He noted that the current cataloging process leaves a lot of the carbon footprint and there are ways to reduce it further. One method he mentioned is IndexNow.
It was loaned by research advocates John Mueller and Martin Split. However, Ellis said, although Google is testing IndexNow, it may choose to go ahead with something similar in looks, but functionality may change.
He also added that in most cases the crawler (Google bots) don’t have to spend time re-crawling (refresh crawl) pages that haven’t been updated. But this is not happening effectively now. Ellis says that if there was a way that Google crawls pages that were just updated, it could save a lot of power that the servers consume.
He also gave the example of news publishers like CNN and NYT, who often update the content of the home page but not the About us page. If bots could be trained not to crawl to update pages like these, Ellis says it could save a lot of energy.
Any site owner who wants to enable the Index-Now API can do so in three simple steps:
Generate and download an API key from Bing.
Next, the downloaded text file should be uploaded to the root of your server.
Submit bulk or individual URLs to individual search engines using the following URL parameters:
- Google (not yet confirmed): https://google.com/indexnow?url=url-changed&key=your-key
- Bing: https://www.bing.com/IndexNow?url=url-changed&key=your-key
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/indexnow?url=url-changed&key=your-key
Recently, both Microsoft and Yandex announced that they will be using IndexNow to share submitted URLs. Therefore, if you send the URL to Microsoft, it will be immediately shared with Yandex and vice versa. Bing has also automated the whole process with the launch of the WordPress plugin IndexNow.
According to data provided by Bing, about 80,000 sites have joined the IndexNow project. Of these, 60,000 websites use Cloudflare, which also supports IndexNow. Needless to say, if Google joined the initiative, more websites would follow.
2. Note MUM to improve your rankings
Google is making commendable efforts to improve the quality of search results using advanced artificial intelligence.
The biggest leap ever in this occurred from the start with the introduction of RankBrain and later with BERT in 2019 and now the search engine giant is entering another era by introducing the Multitask United Model, or MUM.
According to the announcement made by Prabhakar Raghavan during Google I/O 2021, the new natural language processing model (MUM) is 1,000 times more powerful than BERT and is capable of multitasking enabling it to analyze video, image, and text in 75 languages to give users answers to complex search queries…
What this means is that MUM will combine different aspects of a search query and try to understand the sentiment, context, entities, and most importantly the user’s intent to provide answers very close to what the user expected.
Raghavan demonstrated the power of MUM by running a complex search query “I’ve climbed Mount Adams and now want to hike Mount Fuji next fall, what should I do differently to prepare?”
Check out this video on how to do MUM research and it gives a much better result than the one we are used to.
Google is still testing MUM but is soon expected to be out of the lab and become part of the Google search system. The search engine giant should keep us updated on its integration like how it announced the BERT rollout.
But before that, as a webmaster, you should understand how this can affect your search. We are also clueless but society has come up with some possibilities.
You may start seeing a new type of result, an improved form of Google Answers that combines all available information to provide users with the exact answers they’re looking for This could mean more results 0 click search, which is something we’re already seeing.
Take advantage of structured data. Google takes all this data from what it calls the knowledge graph and it is fed by markup within each site.
Longform content will make a big cut because if a single source can provide a large share of the information users are looking for, those pages will make it to the top.
Forget about keyword stuffing. Focus more on natural content that touches the audience’s pain points.
We still don’t know how powerful MUM is. However, it is best to make the content simple and easy to read. If the content is garbled in a particular language, chances are that MUM won’t find a link to it.
Besides, as an SEO, you should also understand how another language model of LaMDA that was introduced at the 2021 Google I/) works. Although it is a linguistic model for dialog applications, it will have a huge impact on search, especially search that occurs via Google Assistants.
LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialog Applications and sets new standards for natural AI conversations. It can make conversations natural by fetching information from Google’s knowledge graph.
Google SEO Sundar Pichai previewed LaMDA, or “the language model for dialogue applications,” at the company’s I/O event. He said LaMDA is designed to have an open conversation with users without repeating the same information.
LaMDA is a transformer-based model, like MUM and BERT. It can be trained to read words, understand the relationship between words in a sentence, and predict what word may come next.
Google focused on training it to produce logical and specific responses, rather than more general responses.
3. Traffic indexing
Did you hear about Google’s latest announcement of a new algorithm called Passage Indexing?
So, if you are someone who regrets writing long content that failed to gain attention, Passage Indexing could be a game-changer for you.
According to Google, you will now use natural language processing while indexing web pages and trying to understand the meaning of each paragraph within the page.
natural language processing
What this means is that if a particular section (paragraphs) is covered within your article it will now appear in search results for related search queries even if they are buried within the breadth of the primary topic.
Google’s Cathy Edwards, in the Search On a video released by the search giant, said that Passage indexing will affect 7% of search queries in all languages by the end of 2020.
cathy_edwards
If you remember, a similar announcement was announced in 2018 to get Bert. She said BERT will affect 10% of search queries.
In the same video, Prabhakar Raghavan confirmed that BERT is now being used to provide results for almost every search query users enter.
bert_update
Therefore, traffic indexing is more of an internal rating system and will have a greater impact on the results you see in the SERP.
It has been more or less emphasized that web pages with highly structured content will benefit from the Indexing Traffic Ranking algorithm.
What this also means is that in 2022 Google will focus more on improving its overall content ranking.
order_pass
An overall content strategy usually takes an in-depth look at a topic and attempts to address the pressing questions posed by your target users.
In addition, traffic indexing will have a significant impact on search results for long-tail and question-based queries.
This is normal because a precisely defined question requires a needle in a haystack approach to finding the correct answer.
This is exactly what Google is trying to achieve with traffic indexing.
How does it work?
Remember that Google said daily that it found 15% of new queries that had not been searched before? It is widely believed that the majority of these queries are long-tail and question-based.
google_search_queries
By using traffic indexing, the results of such queries will give people the best answers from a variety of legitimate sources.
As you can see in the example above, Google is trying to display the best answer to a particular query from a forum page rather than displaying a result that directs the user to a broader page.
Therefore, the current indexing pattern takes the context and relevance of the entire page but with traffic indexing, Google tries to find context and relevance within individual sections of the page to find more appropriate answers.
However, traffic indexing will not be a separate indexing process. Thanks to Google’s advanced Natural Language Processing algorithms, the process of understanding individual sections will occur when Google crawls and indexes pages.
Google about indexing traffic:
So, for example, let’s say you’re looking for something very relevant like ‘How do I determine if my windows are UV glass. “This is a very difficult query, and we get a lot of web pages talking about UV glass and how you need special film, but none of this helps the average person take action. Our new algorithm can zoom in on this clip directly in the DIY forum answers to questions. You can use the reflection of a flame to tell and ignore the rest of the posts on the page that aren’t entirely helpful.”
The importance of structuring your content
The structure of your content will become as important as its quality when Passage Indexing is published.
It is important to divide the content into multiple sections and each section should discuss a sub-topic.
This way you can give Google alerts about the depth of your content and how it will satisfy your users’ search target.
So, what I recommend at this point is to make use of title tags to organize your content.
Also, if you are writing a short article, the benefit of traffic indexing may not be obvious. Google says the benefit of traffic indexing will be felt by sites that have valuable content buried inside.
However, if you are writing short content, the chances of covering subtopics and smaller sections are lower, which means that Google will of course rank you for the main topic, but not for queries that require precise answers.
If you scan the highest-ranking pages on Google for highly competitive search queries, 9 out of 10 are long-form content over 2,000 words.
Also, looking at the user experience angle of long content, make sure you have a content table at the top or pinned.
Because users don’t bind wait and you can’t force them to read the entire content. Users abandon login form pages with poor navigation because identifying the information themselves is painful and time-consuming.
4. Web Basics
Before we heard about Passage Indexing, the SEO trends 2022 community was mad about Core Web Vitals.
As you already know, Google pays webmasters to provide a better page experience to users.
This was mainly to ensure that no user visiting a page of Google search results would be exited from the page due to a poor page experience.
The Page Experience Algorithm has been around for some time now and Vibrant Web Core will become a new addition to it as of May 2021.
This means that it will join current page experience signals like HTTPS, Spam, Safe Browsing, and Mobile Friendly to determine the page ranking.
Core Web Vitals is a set of three main Page Experience metrics that provide Google data about the user experience offered by individual pages on the web.
The three fundamental factors of the web are:
- Largest Coating Content (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Planning Shift (CIS)
cumulative shift
Additionally, Google has also confirmed that AMP-enabled websites may not have to worry about complying with Core Web Vitals because AMP-enabled pages usually meet the requirements.
amp_pages
AMP pages are served from a Google server and contain minimal elements that may take longer to load.
However, Google warns webmasters against using heavy images and other external elements within AMP as they may affect the result of “web vitals”.
It should be noted that Core Web Vitals will not be a primary SERP PageRank signal. Google says it will continue to rank web pages with high-quality content and links even if the site doesn’t meet the Web Vitals standards.
So, if you activate AMP, that means you’ve saved time and money to optimize the site for web basics.
5. User focus + search intent SEO Trends
2022 is the year when you will prioritize search intent for a query and user behavior over everything else.
People’s research They go to Google or other search engines like bing and Yandex to find answers to their queries or to learn about a topic in general.
When companies understand what users are looking for and provide them with content that answers their questions, the company also leverages it with users.
According to Britney Muller of Britney Muller LLC, SEO experts need to move away from traditional SEO practices that hold little or no value today as algorithms become more and more powerful.
They should instead pay more attention to research intent. Paying close attention to search queries will allow companies to create competitive content that online audiences want to consume.
Marie Haynes, CEO of Marie Haynes Consulting Inc., that to achieve success in SEO in 2022, you must be excellent at providing the right information to your users.
Google will get better at understanding when users are looking for expert advice and will rank the pieces of content that have followed E.A.T’s guidelines above all others. SEO experts can take control of search in 2022 only when they truly understand what users are searching for.
Brands will need to cater to the audience more than promoting their brand or products and services. This means not forcing users to register on your site, showing unnecessary popups on your site, or redirecting them to registration forms.
Stephen van Wissum, Vice President of Community, ContentKing, believes that in addition to understanding what users are searching for, they should also write down their preferred type of content (videos, podcasts, articles, etc.) and present it accordingly.
Alexander Kessler, CEO of INFUSEmedia, offered some additional advice on the purpose of the research. According to him, companies should analyze the on-site journey and search for organic lead data. This will not only help them understand the search term they used to find your content, but also the site search keywords for all the pages they visited within your website. This data collection will help brands connect them to the content journey.
6. SEO Trends Localization
We believe that local businesses will see more traction from Google because there is a definite push towards highly localized search results.
This means it’s time to focus on creating quality reviews on Google My Business and even on other trusted review platforms.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen country-specific content and companies benefit from search results rather than global entities.
This means that Google wants to display results that will be useful to users. For example, the results I get for the keyword “solar panels for home use” in the US are different from those shown in India.
That’s because ranking sites in the US don’t serve people in India, at least directly. But even though it had a higher authority compared to its Indian counterparts, it failed to rank up.
Although this is a macro example, Google does the same thing at the micro-level, where search results (not just the map package) change based on the user’s location.
From now on, websites that you want to target local audiences must include the name of the city, state, or country so that Google doesn’t miss out on your website’s ranking higher.
7. Optimizing SERP Branding, Knowledge Charts, and Entities
This year, keeping a close eye on brand SERPs and knowledge cards will become very important. Understanding who you are, what you offer, and what audience you serve will be of great value to other businesses.
We may start to see custom knowledge graphs in 2022. Google has a lot of information about you, including your search history, behavior, email, and social media, and you may be able to extend the process of customizing your knowledge graphs.
What does this mean for search engine optimization in 2022? This means optimizing a brand’s full digital presence like their social media profile, Youtube channel, etc., to influence Google to differentiate it the way you want it to.
Today, it’s not just about your website and what it shows, but it’s about your brand’s entire digital presence and how they interact with each other on the SERP. SEO experts should understand how NLP (Natural Language Processing) and entities play a role in Google rankings.
The importance of good keywords remains crucial but is secondary to understanding the topics related to the query and the purpose behind it.
Google Discover is the only place where no keywords come into play. The only way to improve it is to create your entity in the knowledge graph and sharpen how it relates within the subject layer, according to Jess Schulze, international digital director at Ringier.
Some of the activities Scholz suggests focusing on are:
- Ensure correct and complete organizational coding.
- Build a strong presence based on knowledge such as Wikidata.
- Claim your listing to use the Google Posts feature.
- Set up a Google My Business profile for a traditional business.
8. All SEO is mobile SEO Trends
Ensuring that your website performs well for mobile devices is something you should continue to pay attention to in 2022. The mobile user experience will be a huge focus for all SEO experts.
Simplicity is key to an easy-to-use web design. You also need to customize the content of your website according to the needs of your users. Google will eventually ignore your desktop site and focus entirely on your mobile site to determine your rankings.
So, if your focus on improving the user experience on mobile devices has been minimal thus far, it’s time to shift your focus entirely on it. If you have a separate desktop and mobile site, it’s time to consider migrating to a mobile responsive site.
9. Evaluation, adaptation, and implementation
In 2021, thinking outside the box will be more important than ever. You should have a better perspective on the opportunities in front of you. This is the time to get organized, build a plan, and act on it.
Switching to a strategic SEO plan will be critical to helping you stay on top of your competition. We recommend shifting your focus from user behavior to a dual process of understanding the market in which these consumers operate first and then taking a more strategic approach to changing demands in the real-time market.
You should use the many tools, platforms, and resources available to you to understand how economic, social, and psychological factors affect your query and then consider understanding consumer behavior at a deeper level.
10. More automation
Given the number of SEO tasks we were able to complete in 2021, 2022 will open doors for even greater opportunities. We can expect an increase in the quality, content and quantity of AI-generated content for this year. However, this will create greater challenges for search engines to get rid of unwanted content.
Over the past few years, more and more industry-leading tools have been introducing automatic features to bring up site changes. This was particularly useful for in-house SEO roles, who can now spend more time focusing on strategies to improve site performance.
11. SERP planning and functional changes
There will be a significant change in the way content is presented or displayed on the website since the announcement of the Google Passage rating. Instead of having multiple pages on a topic, why not have an entire page dedicated to that specific topic.
Cindy Crum, CEO, and Founder of MobileMoxie believes that lanes for identifying and ranking Google will be a huge SEO trend in 2021. Lanes are really important in terms of Google’s ability to extract the accurate information that audiences are looking for.
The strong page and layout structure help to improve the passage as well as the presence of highly readable text that facilitates NLP assessment.
Google is testing several layout changes, including a more comprehensive automatic suggestion that gives users information without having to hit a search button or scroll down in results.
Google is expected to add infinite or continuous scrolling in search. Although it was implemented on mobile search results in the US in late 2021, we may soon see this feature in other regions and desktop searches as well.
12. Long content
One of the trends that will help you outperform your competitors in 2022 is the constant posting of long-form and relevant content on your website. Content must comply with E.A.T guidelines and must be 2,000 words or more in length.
As long-form content continues to gain prominence in 2022, well-written long-form content can cross the 2,000-word threshold and aim to standardize the 3000-3500 text mark.
13. SEO scalability
If you want to beat your competition in 2022, you should focus on building the scalability of your SEO services.
Mark Traphagen, Vice President of Product Marketing and Training, Cyclarity recommends listing all tasks and workflows and then deciding which of these steps can be automated with SEO tools.
You should also set up an alert system that monitors important changes such as the ranking of important keywords, URL changes, or changes to content. Create SoPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for any other tasks that you can’t automate.
conclusion
These are the top 13 SEO trends 2022. Implement these SEO strategies on your website and be ahead of your competition. Which of the following strategies do you think will be most important in 2022?
