SEO Trends for 2022: How to Get on Top of Google Search

SEO is about making websites easy to find and understand. It is one of the earliest marketing disciplines out there, and it has also transformed rapidly. It looks almost nothing like what it did when we started. Therefore, here are what is the most important SEO trends you should know for 2022 and how you can implement them.

Trend: SERP Marketing and Content Diversification

Google is building an ultimate resource that can give comprehensive answers to any query, with knowledge graphs, quick answers, and interactive and visual results.

Within one search result page, we can see suggestions, knowledge graphs, related videos, “People Also Ask” results, visual results or organic “text” results. You need to take each individual search result page as a whole to achieve brand visibility there.

How to Dominate Google with SERP Marketing

There are a lot to be done to create an effective SERP Marketing campaign. Here are some steps to get you started:

1. Analyze Your Current Opportunities

Determine all important content formats that needs to be created to dominate your target queries. Track your current rankings to show where you are missing out. Use this method or tool to understand your current opportunities better and optimize for those.

• Set Up Content Collaboration Strategy

Content diversification brings in both challenges and opportunities at the same time. On one hand, you need to come up with quality content assets in various formats continually, which is incredibly hard to progress. On the other hand, you get to leverage more mediums and try more tools and tactics, which will be useful in long run.

Content collaboration is the tactic that can solve many issues and empower your marketing with more benefits, including natural backlinks, trust and shares. And the good news is there are great projects that help you build contacts to co-create content and scale it.

Of course, unified communication is a big part of it, especially post-covid when most companies have moved to remote operations.

• Organize Your Strategy Using an Editorial Calendar

For content collaboration and co-marketing opportunities, consider using an editorial calendar solution that will help you organize your campaigns and can help you organize your omni-channel content marketing strategy and boost its effectiveness:

Content diversification lies at the foundation of omnichannel marketing that has multiple benefits (including cross-device compatibility, smoother shopping experience, creation of more marketing channels and more). Therefore, you may want to start working on it whether you are worried about your search visibility.

Trend: Rich Results

Google search results are becoming increasingly richer in contents and more interactive these days. This gives SEOs a competitive advantage over those website owners who are not keeping up with Google’s moves. Search snippet is interactive — you can click any question to unfold the answer, and from there, even get to the site for more answers or results. There are many tools, plugins and solutions, allowing any website owner to implement structured markup with no technical knowledge required. You can look into tools like Schema markup generators or WordPress plugins that support Schema.

Trend: Mobile and Voice Search

Voice search is no longer a trend but more to a habit. Frequently, most of us are asking questions to a mobile device or a smart speaker than typing these days that it had become a routine.

Obviously, mobile search is going strong. Google switched its priorities by introducing Mobile-First Index, which means that Google largely uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking. In other words, if your page doesn’t look good on a mobile device, or if the mobile version has less content, you may lose rankings in both mobile and desktop search results.

Given that mobile device users often use voice search to find answers while on the go, it is safe to assume that voice search is getting popular, and these two trends are very well connected:

• Both mobile and voice users are likely to be looking for answers while in the middle of the task (so they need clear, concise answers right away)
• In both of the cases, the top result (which is often the featured snippet) is really what matters. So, we are competing for the top result now, versus top 5 positions as we did a few years ago
• Obviously, make your site mobile-friendly and fast (page speed is important!)
• Adapt your content strategy to catch those featured snippet opportunities to outrank your competitors. Mobile users seldom have time to scroll, and with voice search there’s only one result being read to the user. This makes featured snippet optimization incredibly essential for your online visibility — you are either there or nowhere.

There’s a lot to optimize snippet features:

• Researching current featured snippets for your important queries (and learning from them)
• Structuring your content with H2-H3 subheadings that address questions behind queries triggering featured snippets
• Providing quick, concise answers (no longer than 90 characters) below each subhead for Google to grab and feature.

Trend: Semantic Search and Intent Optimization

Google moved away from exact-matching keyword optimization years ago. Searches do not use the actual string of words that are being typed in the search box. Instead, it looks at the query context and analyzes the possible search intent to deliver results.

You can see this all around the SERPs and even in Google Suggest results.

For example, how Google interprets the query on the fly to deliver results:

• You may have lost your puppy, but you may be interested in pet and animal control centres, not just puppy store or facilities
• You may search for refrigerator, but you may be interested in television or microwave and be redirected to related electronics or appliances sales

Google has got very good at understanding searcher intent, and old-school content creation methods that focus on a single keyword string don’t work. We need to create content that solves problems. That’s what Google is after, and so are our potential customers.

How to Optimize Content for Semantic Search and Search Intent

For the first, simply searching Google to get an idea of how is the query interpretation work. Do more research and look for other ways Google is trying to solve the problem for the user.

For example, explore semantic research tools is another good idea. Text Optimizer by Google is an intent optimization platform that helps you cluster any search query into related concepts and entities. It uses Google’s search snippets to come up with ideas to expand your initial copy to provide more solutions and meet Google’s and its users’ needs. Based on semantic research, it will even help you build sentences based on common co-occurrence analysis of the terms you select.

Trend: EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

You could invest into buying a well-established domain or buy a keyword-rich domain name by sacrificing on its “brandability”.

These days, your domain name has no direct impact on your rankings. Thanks to its smarter algorithm and knowledge graph, Google can tell if there’s a real entity behind the domain and determine each page EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

The route to higher rankings is no longer fast or predictable. You need to keep building an established brand, work on your reliability and collective authorship. Your domain name is still crucial but most important is how memorable and how easy is it to associate your business with your niche?

Generating a business name is more important than finding a keyword-rich domain name. Building a strong brand and becoming a reliable entity is more important than finding an established domain name. Page experience indications are more important than clicks. It is all about focusing on real metrics now.