SEO Trends 2022

In the span of a few years, SEO services trends have changed dramatically. The algorithms are constantly evolving due to innovation in emerging technologies.

Search engines, like Google, require your curiosity and undivided attention all year round. Needy, eh? Make no mistake, however, with the rise in popularity of AI-powered voice ecosystems, voice search is changing the landscape of SEO cost.

With 2022 just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about what SEO trends you want to be ahead of. Digital marketing professionals, marketing agencies, and businesses alike will need to be prepared for 2022, arguably more so than ever before.

Lucky for you, we have compiled some of the most important SEO techniques and strategies to help you prepare for what is coming!

Voice Search

The popularity of voice search is continuing to rise. In fact, it’s reported that around 58% of consumers use voice search to find local business information.

We already have Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant that play a crucial role in people’s daily lives. Many people now use a smart speaker in their homes and with the introduction of voice activation in everything from televisions to medical devices, it’s only a matter of time before voice search is the primary form of search.

What this will mean for SEO trends is that there’ll be an increased need for businesses and marketers alike to focus on their “conversation marketing” skills – translating written content into natural language. This change in vocabulary could also be an opportunity for brands to connect with their customers on a more personal level.

How to create conversational content

Voice search encourages you to create content that is more conversational in nature, with no formal structure and less emphasis on keywords.

In order to stay ahead of this trend, it’s important that you know what conversational content is out there on the internet so you can easily come up with new ideas for your own website.

One place to start would be Q&A websites like Quora and Reddit – both platforms have a lot of resources to get you started. Also, things like FAQs or how-to articles are going to be more important than ever since people will be asking questions and expecting Google to provide answers through it’s voice assistant

Put this into action

Adjust your target keywords to cater more to specific conversational-based searches, you can and should even spin long-tail keywords into queries. You’ll then be able to shape content around answering such queries, which could be in the form of a blog article or even an FAQ page. Remember to include the search query as you normally would as an H1, H2, or H3.

Accessibility

This is something that 10to8 has focused heavily on this year, with the launch of our new Accessibility Suite and WCAG Compliant booking pages. The number of people who have internet access is increasing. So, being able to be seen and found by everyone – including those with visual impairments or other disabilities – is going to be key.

Ensuring your website content, services, products, and more are accessible for people with disabilities will not only help you in the rankings but also provide a better customer experience.

The bottom line is that if you want to rank higher on Google search, this is one of the SEO trends you need to pay close attention to. You need to provide an amazing customer experience for everyone – which means improving your website’s accessibility now more than ever.

Put this into action

When it comes to accessibility, there are a lot of things you can do – and maybe some that your company has already done. You should be focusing on the following:

• Make sure all images have ALT tags so they’re readable by screen readers.
• Ensure your website is WCAG compliant. This means it meets a certain level of accessibility requirements for people with disabilities. Making small adjustments to color contrasts and adding subtitles to videos could be a good place to start.
• Add in ARIA attributes to make sure screen readers can read text, widgets, and more.

Featured Snippets

In featured snippets, the search results that typically feature at the top of Google’s organic search results come in many forms such as answer boxes, along with ‘People also ask’ which Google deems to be relevant based on the original search query.

The purpose of such boxes is part of an ongoing effort by Google to answer questions as quickly as possible and further enhance the user experience. In many cases, it removes the need for the user conducting the search to click-through. Regardless, this is a great opportunity to increase organic impression share, and be seen as an authoritative and helpful source.

Put this into action

The techniques previously suggested for optimizing for voice search can also be applied to featured snippets, as of course, you are also answering a query.

While there is no hard and fast way to appear in featured snippets, we do know that Google favors numbers, steps, and lists alike. For instance, have you ever searched for a  recipe on Google? If yes, then you would have likely noticed that ingredients are presented to you in a clear and concise list form.

If you have figures and intriguing stats, then be sure to include them when creating content designed to be featured in rich snippets.

Speed Up

Improve your mobile and desktop page load times, or get left behind. While it’s no secret that page speed is one of the most important SEO trends, lately page speed has become more important than ever before.

In fact, Google’s recent algorithm update has made page load speed a much bigger factor in the ranking than it once was. To be successful in optimizing for featured snippets, voice search, or even just to appear on page one, a fast-loading website will help your chances.

Google wants to return answers as quickly as possible, and studies have shown that 1 in 4 users will bounce from a page that loads slower than 4 seconds. High bounce rates will seriously damage your reputation with Google and lose customers.

Plus, back in July 2018, Google announced to the world that they will be using page speed in mobile search rankings too. So, it’s not just for desktop searches.

The bottom line is this: if your website takes longer to load than others on the same network connection you are likely going to rank lower and have fewer visitors.

Put this into action

To improve your page speed across desktop and mobile you will first need to have a good understanding of how your website is performing. By using Google’s PageSpeed Insights not only will you get a score out of 100, but you will also get some top recommendations that you can follow to speed up.

First, ensure you are following Google’s guidelines for faster web pages. This includes reducing the size of images and adding content to your HTML using CSS or Javascript instead of server-side languages such as PHP or Python.

Secondly, use a Content Delivery Network in order to serve your website content from the closest server to where a user is located.

Third, use caching for static resources like images and CSS files so that they are only downloaded once – this will save bandwidth for both you and your users. Lastly, ensure all of the scripts on your site are GZIP compressed as it can make up to 70% of the difference in page speed.