We’re going to witness significant changes in the digital marketing industry as Google rolls out two major algorithm updates in 2022. Therefore, websites need to adapt to those changes to ensure they rank on Google and build their brand profile.
- 68% of all online experiences begin with search engines.
- SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
- Only 78% of Google users click on the second-page results.
So as you can see, SEO is still crucial for businesses in 2022.
But as user behaviour changes and search engines adapt in response, what will SEO look like in 2022 and what are the latest trends?
1. A Greater Focus On Mobile User Experience
Statistics suggest there are 6.648 billion smartphone users worldwide. In fact, 91.96% of the world’s population has access to smartphones. As a result, companies will have to focus more time on building a mobile-friendly user experience. Mobile-optimised websites get 15% more clicks than non-optimized websites. And 40% of users will visit a competitor’s website if they have a poor web experience.
Google finished the rollout of the Mobile-First indexing (MFI) in March 2021 after years of anticipation. It will enable Google to focus on indexing mobile-friendly websites. But websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will suffer greatly.
Therefore, that’s why must build mobile-optimised websites in 2022. You can prepare your website with a responsive web design. You can also improve your website’s page load speed by optimising videos, allowing cookies, and minimising directs.
2. Page Experience Will be a Heavier Ranking Factor
Google began a gradual rollout of the Page Experience Algorithm in early 2021. The update will span numerous user experience signals, such as Core Web Vitals, which is an evaluation of a user’s overall experience with a web page. Google will complete the update in March 2022 after first implementing the update to mobile. However, the final rollout will also include desktop search results.
But the page experience will likely be a heavy ranking factor for desktop and mobile websites. Many other metrics are crucial to the page experience: loading speed, interactivity, visual stability, and HTTPS security. So website owners and companies will have to focus on improving all aspects of their site’s performance.
You can prepare your website by checking the performance of your page with Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, or Chrome User Experience Reports. Additionally, you can focus on usability and user experience by redesigning or modifying your website.
3. Greater Featured Snippets
Although Google has recently made some significant updates, they’ve also added smaller changes, such as the Passage Ranking Update. Google has closely tied this update with Google BERT, which is a deep learning algorithm that helps search engines process words with greater relevance to the context of other surrounding words.
With the addition of the Passage Ranking Update, Google will index individual passages from a particular page (otherwise known as featured snippets) along with whole web pages. That will make it easier for users to find answers to specific queries on Google.
You can prepare your website for increased featured snippets by targeting long-tail keywords in your content. You’ll need to research your audience thoroughly to seek out relevant content and understand their queries. Focus on quality content with your audience in mind. Forget keyword stuffing and writing for search engine bots.
4. Better Answers for Complicated Questions
Google recently updated its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) in May 2021. The Multitask Unified Model (MUM) is a natural language model that’s similar to BERT, but it’s significantly better than BERT. The Multitask Unified Model allows Google to use contextual information to present more detailed answers to complicated queries.
However, the Multitask Unified Model is different from the Passenger Ranking Update because it’s multimodal. As a result, it can understand information simultaneously from various sources, such as web pages and pictures. That gives users more relevant content to answer their queries, and overcome language or format barriers to answering questions.
You can prepare your website for this update by producing high-quality content. However, the content must add value, use excellent images and videos, and have authority. You’ll also need to add structured data to aid search engines to understand your content better.
5. A Larger Focus on Video Content
More and more people are using Google’s images and video search results. For example, recent research suggests 66% of people use video as their number one source of information. There are also 2 billion people on YouTube. Therefore, 2022 is an excellent time to focus more on your video SEO strategy. More businesses will invest in video content through YouTube or TikTok in 2022 to support their written content.
If you create a long-form blog article, you can add a video to the blog page. That will boost your article’s ranking, and it’ll also optimise the video on YouTube. Therefore, you can gain brand exposure on multiple platforms, which is excellent for overall SEO. Keywords play a large role in your video’s ranking. So ensure you use the keywords of focus and optimise your video description.
Another significant advantage of integrating video into your website is the amount of time a user spends on the page. If they choose to watch the video on your page, your average visit time will grow. In the world of SEO, the average session duration and the dwell time are critical to better ranking. If you don’t have a video strategy, 2022 is an excellent time to start one.
Optimise Your SEO Strategy In 2022
Although SEO is always changing, your website must remain fully SEO-optimised. At Media Giant, we are experts at Wellington SEO and Google Ads. We can help your business with SEO Optimisation, keyword research, web design, software development, and so much more.
SEO is as important as ever in 2022. If you haven’t prepared your website for these upcoming trends, we can help you prepare for 2022 now.
