There are thousands of blogs flooded with topics like top 3\/6\/8\/10\/12 SEO trends in 2022, SEO tricks in 2022, SEO strategy in 2022, etc. Everyone is writing to catch the eyeball, show their expertise and thought process. Many SEO professionals implement a lot of such SEO strategies and predictions\u00a0based on their belief and followership of various thought leaders in the SEO industry.<\/p>\n
The common question for all the SEO professionals remains the same “What SEO tactics and strategies will work to dominate the SERPs and earn more revenue in 2022?”<\/p>\n
So, let\u2019s dive into the SEO trends and predictions for 2022<\/p>\n
1. Featured Snippets<\/h2>\n
In recent years, Google has evolved to deliver a better search experience for the user, like through Featured Snippets. These\u00a0usually appear above the first organic result, commonly referred to as \u201cPosition 0\u201d among the SEO community.<\/p>\n
These featured snippets get generated on most of the queries you’ll ask on Google, especially the ones having how, why, are, will, does, do, can, is, should, etc as a preposition.<\/p>\n
According to a study by SemRush<\/a> on a variety of questions, featured snippets generates tables, lists, and paragraphs. 52.2% of queries generate “lists” for queries with a preposition “how”.<\/p>\n In order to rank your content into these featured snippets:<\/p>\n It would be very difficult to find topics or key phrases where no snippet gets generated. If you find one, you would be lucky. You would need to compete with the existing ones, writing better and more informative content from them.<\/p>\n Let’s first understand, what is BERT<\/a>?<\/p>\n It Is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) that helps Google to understand context on a word-by-word\u00a0basis and then to deliver better search results.<\/p>\n With the incorporation of BERT this year into Google’s ranking and featured snippets algorithm, Google has taken a huge\u00a0step forward into making search about intent matching rather than pure string matching.<\/p>\n By 2022,\u00a0around 50% of searches<\/a>\u00a0will be voice-based so there will be less typing involved. This will give rise to a higher number of long-tail keywords and hyperlocal searches.<\/p>\n The BERT algorithm update along with RankBrain will predominate in 2022 while understanding the natural language through voice\u00a0searches and processing the SERPs based on machine learning. So, your content becomes the next crucial thing.<\/p>\n Though it sounds just opposite to what I mentioned\u00a0above, however, producing engaging and meaningful content for your readers will only help you in 2021. When we write the content without the focus on SEO keywords, we write what we think\u00a0justifies the topic. Since BERT is all about natural language processing, it better is to write in a conversational natural language.<\/p>\n The goal of the content created should be changing the mentality to more of a topic-focus is to create content that addresses an entire conversation holistically as opposed to just focusing around a\u00a0single keyword or phrase on a page should be targeting.\u00a0Include stats, surveys, or an industry study, to get more backlinks from bloggers and journalists.<\/p>\n While designing the content strategy, in a holistic view, the content should be structured in content clusters.\u00a0\u00a0A great example of a site that uses content clustering\u00a0is Hubspot<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The ultimate objective is to have different sections of your content around specific topics creating a hub and spoke structure. In this model, you can connect other content pieces around the same topic together. Having such a model in place will help search engines to understand the core topic and rank the page accordingly.<\/p>\n The content length had also been a topic of discussion during the past few years and it will also be there in 2022. Many kinds of research have shown that writing at length yields a better ranking on the search engine result page.<\/p>\n I certainly agree with this as if you would write about a topic in detail with all the research content, you will automatically reach a good content length without sounding verbose. Just try to cover all the aspects of the topic you are writing about. While detailing out your thought process, you will naturally use synonyms to make the context clear both for users and search engines.<\/p>\n Another\u00a0top SEO trend of 2022 will be to include video content in your SEO strategy. According to Forrester Research,\u00a0video is 50 times<\/a>\u00a0more likely to show up on the first page of SERP than a web page with plain text. Also,\u00a062% of Google’s universal searches<\/a>\u00a0include video. The video content can include a question, a detailed answer with a storyline of the incidence and situations that can be linked to your audience.<\/p>\n You can either\u00a0host a video on your\u00a0web server or on YouTube.<\/p>\n Hosting videos on your website will require a video player to be installed on your server. In addition to it, you should add essential video schema markups to your videos. You can check a list of all the parameters you can use with video schema markup on\u00a0this page<\/a>, It would be great if you can add a video transcript to your post so that search engines understand them better.<\/p>\n YouTube SEO is an altogether different space. YouTube videos can appear in Google Search results, video search results, Google Images, and\u00a0Google Discover<\/a>. Please refer to various blog posts for YouTube optimization<\/a>.<\/p>\n You should also focus on FAQ pages for content creation in 2022.\u00a0Google, in May 2019 announced new search results for FAQs in search and Google Assistant.\u00a0It is designed for pages that provide a list of frequently asked questions and answers on a particular topic. Adding this structured data helps Google show questions and answers directly on Google Search and the Assistant. Here is the documentation for search<\/a> and Google Assistant<\/a>.<\/p>\n With Google Passage update<\/a> in October 2020, Google will rank passages of your page solitarily. Google now looks at each section of your page. So, each of the sections should cover a specific subtopic. A few quick tips:<\/p>\n Technical SEO is all about crawlability; how well the search engine spiders can crawl and index your website pages.\u00a0It is called \u201ctechnical\u201d as it is all about optimizing the\u00a0infrastructure of your website having no relation with content and website promotions.<\/p>\n All the best practices of technical SEO need to be followed to rank your website in 2022 to generate more revenue. Here is a quick list of elements of technical SEO:<\/p>\n Technical SEO approaches search engine readability, and UX targets your website’s visitors.\u00a0Both share a common goal of giving users the best experience. However, there is a very close relationship between\u00a0technical SEO and UX; the contradictions!<\/p>\n When we consider UX, we mean better load speed, easy navigation, and faster response to user actions. For all these.\u00a0 JavaScript-based frameworks suit the best, however, at the same time, they contradict with getting crawled by search engine bots.\u00a0 Either we need to have server-side rendering or pre-rendering services for page-level crawling with apt on-page elements.<\/p>\n These days more Google searches happen on mobile devices, hence optimization for mobile is crucial. It’s your choice whether you implement your mobile site through\u00a0separate URLs, dynamic serving or having a responsive design. Each of them has its own pros and cons.<\/p>\n In 2022 and years after, mobile SEO will win the world. After the mobile-first index, Google crawls the mobile version of your web pages and attributes the mobile page structure and content to position you on SERPs. So, having a great mobile page should be the highest priority. If your page doesn’t load well on the mobile screens, you will lose ranking in both mobile and desktop results. Google\u00a0recommends<\/a>\u00a0that your site should load\u00a0in under a second\u00a0for mobile users.<\/p>\n For various industries, mobile SEO will prevail in 2022 as a crucial part of their SEO strategy. It will primarily be focused on the transactional websites having different functionalities which depend upon the user actions.<\/p>\n Here are a few quick actions to optimize your website for mobile devices in 2022:<\/p>\n In July 2021, Google Search Console rolled out the Core Web Vitals report that shows how your pages perform based on real-world usage data (sometimes called field data).<\/p>\n The report is based on three metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS.<\/p>\n Status metrics are evaluated against the following boundaries:<\/p>\n \u00a0 Please note that\u00a0Google puts tablets<\/a>\u00a0\u201cin their own class\u201d and states: \u201cWhen we speak of mobile devices, we generally do not include tablets in the definition\u201d.\u00a0In other words, according to Google: mobile=smartphones.<\/p>\n Accelerated Mobile Pages<\/a>\u00a0are stripped-down versions of webpages designed to load quickly on mobile devices. In fact, AMP pages load about 4x faster than their non-AMP counterparts<\/p>\n For non-transactional (display content-only) websites, the AMP pages will be crucial. On mobile devices, AMP pages will rank higher due to faster loading speed.\u00a0The main aim of the AMP project is to prioritize speed and readability. AMP pages are developed with lazy loading of images which means that the images will load upon scroll only. Also, AMP pages are heavily cached on Google’s server to\u00a0display the content as fast as possible.<\/p>\n With the rise\u00a0of “near me” queries, everyone is looking for local SEO. The local SEO industry will grow multifold in 2021.<\/p>\n DID YOU KNOW?<\/strong>\u00a0According to Google,\u00a046% of overall searches have a \u2018local intent\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n Catering to the local reach has become crucial for most businesses. The rise in demand for local providers opened up\u00a0new business opportunities for the brands.<\/p>\n There are three core elements of local SEO<\/a><\/p>\n Other important factors of Local SEO in 2022 will include NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) syndication, citations, local reviews on social business pages, local directories, and supporting content.<\/p>\n SEO is generally classified into Technical, on-page, and off-page SEO. While considering off-page SEO the first thing that strikes us is backlinks. I have noticed on different forums that people are asking if backlinks will hold any value in an SEO strategy in 2022?<\/p>\n The answer is yes, however, there will be a change in the definition of quality backlink. Quality backlinks in 2022 will be\u00a0the ones\u00a0earned from natural backlinking by publishing quality content.\u00a0It’s a paradigm shift towards the topics centric approach we need to attain to earn backlinks.<\/p>\n At the same time, influencers and branding elements will also play a major role in your SEO strategy in 2021.\u00a0 Influencer marketing had always been a trending topic over the past few years and it has shown value as well. Branding and influencer marketing goes hand-in-hand where you promote your brand on various publications and collect the share of voice from real people.<\/p>\n Branding helps you get brand mentions and influencer marketing helps you to get backlinks.<\/p>\n Brand mention – If you are getting mentioned by your business name or brand name by the people but they do not link (hyperlink) back to your website, it will still help you to rank high in Google search.<\/p>\n![\"featured-snippets-2020-semrush\"](\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2019\/12\/featured-snippets-2020-semrush.jpg\")
<\/p>\nHow to rank for featured snippets in 2022<\/h3>\n
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2. BERT & Voice Search<\/h2>\n
![\"google-bert-2020-trend\"](\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2019\/12\/google-bert-2020-trend-1024x576.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n3.\u00a0Content for Readers, not Machines<\/h2>\n
Content Clusters<\/h3>\n
![\"hubspot-content-cluster-2020\"](\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2019\/12\/hubspot-content-cluster-20201.png\")
<\/p>\nContent-Length<\/h3>\n
Video Content<\/h3>\n
FAQ Pages<\/h3>\n
Google Passage<\/h3>\n
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4. Technical SEO & UX<\/h2>\n
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5. Mobile SEO & AMP<\/h2>\n
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The Core Web Vitals\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"core-web-vitals-evaluation\"](\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2019\/12\/core-web-vitals-evaluation.png\")
<\/p>\n6. Local SEO<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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7.\u00a0Backlinks, Influencers & Branding<\/h2>\n
8. Google E-A-T and YMYL<\/h2>\n
![\"ymyl-google-2020\"](\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2019\/12\/ymyl-google-2020.png\")
<\/p>\n