SEO in 2022: What to Pay Attention to?
By: Julie Gabriel
Tags: SEO, Google, Search Engines, Seo Services, Seo Tips

SEO trends in 2022 leave little room for imagination.

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is constantly changing. Although the SEO wheel will not be reinvented in 2022, there are still some trends to consider in order to be able to keep up with your own website. Here are six SEO trends to look out for in 2022.

The goal of Google is to give users the best possible results on their search queries. To achieve this, the search engine giant continues to develop, forcing website owners to constantly adapt their strategies. We have summarized six important trends for you here.

1. Rich snippet optimization

The rich snippet function will not lose its importance in 2022 either, because relevant questions are increasingly being answered using rich search results directly in the search engine result pages, or SERPs for short. Hence, you should optimize your rich snippets as best you can.

The rich snippets can include other elements such as ratings, links, images, or events. As soon as you know what information is relevant for your company, you should put it in the source code. In this way, they are then formatted and played out via Google.

2. Video content

Video content is an SEO trend both on your own website and on YouTube, with which you can generate added value for users and achieve top rankings. Because videos have a positive effect on the page experience, as users have the option of reading long texts as well as recording information visually.

Keyword optimization also plays an important role in video content. You should use your video’s metadata to tell Google what the video is about. But you shouldn’t ignore the spoken word either. Also, put your key keyword on the sound level to give the search engine an understanding of who the content is relevant to.

3. Search intention and E-A-T

Taking into account the search intention of users has always been a central topic and will remain so in 2022. Because there is no point in providing users with content that does not match their search intent. In search engine optimization, it is therefore important to identify which search intentions users have for certain keywords that are to be ranked. If the search intention is missed, there will be too few clicks from the search results on your own website — despite possibly temporary high visibility.

When optimizing for a search intention, you should always consider E-A-T. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Three factors by which Google measures whether or not it considers a website to be trustworthy.

E-A-T is particularly important for websites that Google thematically categorizes as “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL). These are websites, the content of which can influence the health, joie de vivre, financial situation, or safety of users. It is therefore particularly important here to give the search engine credible authority, for example by always backing up statements with facts and statistics.

4. Mobile optimization

If you haven’t already optimized your website for mobile devices, now is the time to start. Because now more than half of the traffic via Google search comes from mobile devices.

Website browsing via smartphone or tablet is very different from operation via a computer. The screen and the fonts are smaller and look completely different. If you do not adapt your website to the format, it is very possible that users will drop out because the user experience is not a pleasant one.

You should therefore adapt your website accordingly and also make sure that the loading times are still within an acceptable range.

5. Voice Search

When it comes to the importance of voice search in search engine optimization, opinions still differ widely. If you look at the figures, you can clearly see a trend: In 2020 alone, sales in this market rose by 20 percent, a trend that not only emerged in 2021, but in 2022 the forecasts even speak of 40 percent more people that will use the voice control of assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana and thus make voice search an important topic.

The FAQs on your website could be a great start to getting started with voice search. Formulate the questions as your target group asks them and note that spoken search queries can also be longer than typed ones.

6. Longtail SEO

The increasing number of zero-click searches in search engines is becoming more and more of a problem for website operators. The zero-click searches are short search queries where the answer is already displayed in the search results. Users no longer have to click on a website, but can end their search again immediately. As a result, website owners lose valuable traffic.

So far, zero-click searches have only occurred for simple or frequent search queries. That is why longtail SEO is gaining in importance, as longtail concentrates on complex search queries with a low search volume and these usually cannot be answered in the SERP due to their complexity.

If you, as a website owner, work towards ranking for more complex keywords, especially in the longtail, you can avoid the risk of a possible zero-click search.

This article has been adapted from the story on my Contentime blog.