10 Top SEO Tips To Use In 2022

Did you know that Google updates its algorithm between 500-600 times a year?

Like most aspects of digital marketing, SEO continually changes and evolves with regular Google updates, new tool releases, and different trends emerging.

Our blog often shares in-depth insights and advice on how to get your content trending on Google, from how to select the SEO agency that’s right for you, to how to use social media and SEO to gain new business. But what strategies should you keep in mind in 2022?

Let’s take a look at the SEO tricks that are guaranteed to get your content in front of your target audience this year.

Practice the E-A-T principle

The E-A-T principle is part of Google’s algorithm and their search quality evaluator guidelines. It stands for:

●    Expertise

●    Authoritativeness

●    Trustworthiness

It basically refers to the measurement of your company’s reputation on the web and, as Google prioritises more established, brand authentic, and trustworthy sites over others, it’s a great starting point – particularly if you’re refreshing your marketing strategy in 2022.

You can practice the E-A-T principle by getting your customers and clients to leave great reviews on reputable sites, sharing case studies, and earning high-quality backlinks.

Update (and repurpose) old content

If you’re not producing as much new content as you’d like, take the time to review old content that didn’t rank or didn’t do as well as you’d hoped. Run an SEO and link audit to see if there are any better keywords you can rank for and be sure to fix any broken or outdated links.

Additionally, updating and repurposing old content can give it a new lease of life and another chance to reach new audiences with different hashtags or graphics.

Which brings us to our next point…

Don’t forget about images

Did you know that 91% of people prefer visual content over written content?

Images are essential for breaking up large blocks of text and ensuring great user experience – and this doesn’t just refer to photographs. Things like graphics, videos, and infographics can have a significant impact on both user experience and SEO ranking.

You can also use images to implement keywords and keyphrases in your alt text and file names – but ensure your alt text accurately describes the photo without keyword stuffing. Additionally, make sure your images are compressed to a decent size, so they don’t slow down your website – site speed is another Google ranking factor.

Build up backlinks

Building backlinks should be an essential part of any long-term SEO strategy – but you should still put significant thought into the type of backlinks you hope to gain. You shouldn’t be aiming to get backlinks just for the sake of it: ideally, a high-quality backlink should be natural and reflect your brand.

Backlinks are also a great way to let search engines know that your website is relevant, reliable, and trustworthy. Try guest posting, link roundups or reaching out to relevant professionals in your industry to generate high-quality backlinks.

SEO is something that is crucial to the success of your business. SEO determines how easily people can find you based on your search engine rankings.

Whether you want to improve your sales or raise your brand awareness, using the best SEO practices is the best approach.

The goal with this whitepaper is to take a closer look at these top SEO best practices so that you can understand the changes that you should make.

Focus on user experience

Before delving deeper into SEO, ensuring your website has a great user experience should be the backbone of your strategy. If a reader has issues with your website, such as unreadable text, images not loading or too many popups, they’re not going to stick around to read your content. You’ll end up with a high bounce rate and barely any leads.

Making sure your website is easily accessible is an easy task that should be revisited often. We’d recommend keeping an eye on the following:

●    Page loading speed

●    Ensuring the page is mobile-friendly

●    Crawl errors

●    Image and text size

●    Content length – Google recommends pages should be around 2000 words to rank well!

Consider featured snippets

If you didn’t already know, featured snippets are the boxes that appear at the very top of Google search results, making the result stand out amongst others. There are three major types of featured snippets: paragraph, list, and table. But sometimes, a snippet can include an image to accompany the paragraph text.

According to SEMrush, long term keywords have a higher chance of resulting in a featured snippet. Using questions, dated content (where relevant), and fewer subfolders (what’s listed after forward slashes in the URL) is key to obtaining featured snippets.

Get to grips with your site’s core web vitals

With Google set to roll out Page Experience in May, it’s time to get to grips with your website’s core web vitiates ready for this update. Google’s Page Experience is a new algorithm that ranks pages based on their core web vital scores: such as speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.

To prepare for the new update, now is the time to understand what core web vitals you should be measuring – and how.

Recreate content into videos

We’ve already spoken about repurposing content, but if you’re going to start anywhere in 2022, it should be recreating content such as blog posts or news articles into videos. As we mentioned above, people prefer visual content over text, so if you have an older post you’d like to repurpose and update, consider turning it into a video to get more exposure on SERP.

This may also give your content a boost to become a rich or featured snippet.

Want to repurpose that content further? Break your video down into smaller clips and space them out over time, before eventually publishing the video in it’s entirety.

Optimise voice search content

2021 taught us that voice search became one of the most popular ways for people to search the internet and this factor doesn’t look like it’s slowing down. Think about how many people use voice search to search the web – whether that be by their mobile phones or Alexa! This is only set to increase in the coming years.

You can optimise this trend by opting for more natural and conversational language across your content and getting set up for local search results. Try using Google auto-fill and related searches for ideas.

Think about keyword clustering

Definitely not to be confused with keyword stuffing (which can hinder your content more than help it!), keyword clustering is another strategy to consider in 2022.

Google’s natural language processing technology is getting more and more advanced, which means your landing pages should be optimised for multiple keywords rather than just one. Though choosing one main keyword is still considered the norm, ensure you don’t forget about secondary keywords that are relevant or in-line with similar search content.

We hope these 10 SEO tips help – but it’s important to remember your basic SEO strategy too. Whilst you implement new trends and prepare for Google’s upcoming changes, ensure the basics of SEO don’t fall to the wayside. Continue to create high-quality content with a focus on on-page SEO, keyword research and using social media to support your SEO efforts

Getting your website to rank in Google is more competitive than ever.

123 Internet Group’s comprehensive AI-driven SEO and Website Audit automatically reviews and identifies problems with your website that could hinder ranking performance. Providing a clear, actionable list of prioritised SEO recommendations.

If you want to discuss your report in more detail, or for more expert advice, our friendly SEO consultants are always on hand to help!