Update Your SEO Strategy With the Upcoming SEO Trends

SEO continues to be a driving force for marketers the world over. In this article, we’ll be going over the all-important upcoming trends so that you can optimize your website and online activity. This will prime you for higher rankings, which leads to increased growth and success. 

Strategy Updates: The Need-to-Know SEO Trends 

Here’s Nexa’s guide on the trends that will inform SEO Strategies in 2022. 

The Role of User Intent 

The first guiding principle is to stop thinking in terms of ‘SEO content.’ Instead, create content for people with user intent and keywords in mind.  Google is working hard to identify the intent of a user’s search and provide the closest possible matching information that will provide them with what they need, be it transactional, commercial, navigational, or informational. 

Understanding the relationship between your keywords and how to use them to target search intent is already the key difference between an effective and ineffective search strategy, and in 2022 it will become even more vital. Content should be created with a comprehensive approach that is rooted in providing value for your audience profiles is key. 

Quality Content

When large sites complete audits, many pages are regularly being categorized as ‘Discovered, currently not indexed’ in Google Search Console. It is important to become familiar with this exclusion type within the Coverage report in GSC and pay attention to the patterns Google is trying to highlight. 

Rather than adding hundreds of generic bits of content to the site, research the overall interests of the target audience, organize those entities by the topic, and prioritize them by the relevance to the business goals. 

Content performance is crucial and this goes hand in hand with creating site-wide high-quality content that is primed for SEO purposes. 

Localisation of SERPs 

Misinformation is pushing Google to create a fact-oriented SERP, as seeing an idea repeated across page titles in a SERP can reinforce or guiding beliefs. This is why marketers need to focus on building a good reputation via third-party and industry sites as well as wikis, GMB completion, site markup, and knowledge panels. 

Google will be focusing a lot more on the localization of content over the next year, which will build on the trend of country-specific content outranking those that used to be top of the SERPs but are more globally focused. Demonstrating the local relevance of your content is key. 

Images & Visual Content 

Sites with unique images will see a large boost in image, product, and normal search in response to user behavior and intent. This is particularly true for younger audiences who prefer unique lifestyle images and can instantly tell if visuals are real or staged. 

Another trend to look out for is Google Lens, which will enable shoppers to look for a product using a photo on their device or found on a website – essentially a reverse image search with a solid use case for image optimization. AI will also help Google to recognize if an image or video is the best result for a user. 

Other search engines should also have the attention of SEO teams, with DuckDuckGo continuing to grow in popularity among users.

Automation

As more SEO professionals worldwide become increasingly Python-savvy, we’ll see more automation, especially in agencies where more tasks will be automated. This includes the likes of the content and technical audits, tools for analysis, and other areas of research.

The implementation of real-time SEO validation and alert systems within platforms are set to decrease issues and monitor them in real-time to provide warnings as soon as they happen.

The need for better automation to overcome gaps in technology, skills, and resources to be able to scale execution is rapidly passing from a ‘nice to have’ to a necessity. This is especially true for larger websites at enterprise levels. 

Mobile & User Experience

Mobile page experience as it relates to core web vitals is leading the charge. Based on recent tooling, resources, and updates to analytics, it’s clear that the entirety of the mobile experience is dominating in prominence. Mobile is being used for all stages, from the discovery all the way through to post-purchase. It is therefore important to focus on how easily users can interact, engage, and utilize your mobile site. This will affect not only mobile UX but Core Web Vitals on mobile, mobile usability, mobile-first indexing, and mobile security.

Improved Indexing 

IndexNow allows websites to easily notify search engines whenever the website content is created, updated, or deleted, effectively changing the relationship between SEO professionals and search engines for the better. 

It eliminates the frustration from IT teams at how search bots hit websites - instead of having to continually manually alter search engines about any changes to your site or content, and have crawlers putting a heavy load on the system, it can all be improved using this advancement in technology. It will also reduce the time it takes for search bots to find them, crawl and rank content, which is beneficial to marketers. With IndexNow, we can submit a list of only URLs with changes and/or updates through the API.

The E-A-T Principle

Demonstrate an appropriate level of E-A-T in your on-site content, link building, online PR, and even technical SEO.

E-A-T in SEO stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It covers the crucial parts of a website as far as search engines are concerned. These pillars measure the usefulness of content and the authoritative value (with the likes reviews and backlinks), during a time when trustworthiness is highly important for today’s websites. 

E-A-T can help you rank higher on Google. To do so, you need to ensure you are developing content, link building, online PR, and technical SEO. In addition, keep these 6 Steps in mind when optimizing your website:

1. Update your web content
2. Focus on link building and mentions
3. Generate good reviews
4. Invest in site security
5. Optimize the About and Author pages
6. Make the Contact Us page visible 

Improve Your SEO Efforts and Performance

The wraps up our take on the SEO marketing trends that will undoubtedly lead to strategy updates for 2022. With these best practices, you’ll be able to improve your ranking via search engines, which forms a crucial part of a brand’s online presence and visibility. 

To improve your SEO efforts and performance, reach out to us at Nexa. We’d love to discuss the best options for your business and get you ranking higher.