Top 10 SEO Trends For 2022

In today’s digitally complex environment, businesses face cutthroat competition every day in online spaces. It’s 2022, and with the new SEO trends and algorithm updates rolling out, brands need to upgrade their SEO strategy.

As so much is happening in the world of SEO, it’s necessary to adapt to changes to outperform your competition. 

You need to implement proven SEO tactics to improve your rankings while protecting your website amid inevitable updates.  

In case you’re an SEO expert, digital marketer, content creator, or have some online business, we have you covered in this blog. 

To make sure you gain incredible results from your SEO strategy, here’s a look at the hot SEO trends that will have a major impact in the ongoing year. 

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is an official Google ranking factor that measures page experience. 

It is one of the most remarkable additions to the page experience update and consists of three performance metrics:   

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP measures the time it takes a page to load the largest content block, such as the cover banner or any widget. For example, when you open any website and a cover banner appears on the screen, LCP will measure the total time it takes to appear on the webpage.

Websites should have an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less.     

First Input Delay (FID) 

FID measures how long it takes for a webpage to respond to a first interaction from the user. 

For example, if you click on some pop-up form, FID will calculate the time it takes to appear on your screen.

• 100ms or less is considered ideal
• 100-300ms means requires improvement
• More than 300ms means poor 

Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS)

CLS measures layout shifts that unexpectedly happen within the lifespan of your webpage.

If there are some visuals of unspecified dimensions or adjustable popups, ads, or third-party widgets, then CLS is hugely affected. 

The ideal CLS score is 0.1 or less.

Assessing and improving Core Web Vitals gives you better loading performance, ease of interaction, and visual stability. Therefore, it’s become a key ranking factor and guarantees the long-term success of a website.  

Search Intent

Today, just creating content is old school and won’t take you anywhere.

According to SEO Trends 2022, you should create content with intent. 

Search intent or user intent is the purpose a user has when typing something into a search bar. 

Do they want to make a purchase, are they looking for something, or just want to get some information? 

It’s the ‘why’ behind their search words.    

As user intent is here to stay for a long time, you need to create content that’s a search intent match. Moreover, Google’s Algorithm is just getting better at giving users what they’re looking for, so any content that doesn’t match the search intent simply won’t rank. 

However, in most cases, the search intent is visible in the keyword, but if the goal is ranking on the first page, you need to know your audience and look for their search intent. 

MUM Update

No matter how crazy the SEO landscape will turn out by the end, one thing will remain constant. You need to create content that gets ranked. And the new MUM update further cements the fact.  

The new MUM update is trained across 75 different languages and understands information across text and images by an AI-powered algorithm. 

Redefining the search relevance, it shows results based on texts, images, videos, and podcasts. With its multimodal matter and T5 text-to-text framework, it’s 1000 times more powerful than BERT. Check out our blog to know more about Google’s MUM update. 

As MUM’s advanced model has changed the dimensions of SERP and SEO, here’s what you can do to align your content strategy: 

Create high-quality content with multimedia formats. Make sure it provides value, answers questions, and has the right imagery so MUM can notice you. 

It’d do wonders implementing multilingual SEO as it goes along with the MUM structure. It will elevate the regional power of your content and dramatically increase your reach. 

And considering these updates, it’s more important than ever now to create and publish unique content not covered by other websites.

For SEO trends 2022, prioritize creating MUM-friendly content, as it will widen your potential audience and bring you more traffic. So to deliver that, do comprehensive research on your audience’s interests, garner useful details, organize content by different categories, and prioritize them based on your SEO strategy.

Automation

As Artificial Intelligence is transforming how we interact with online content, it will continue to play a major role in automating SEO in 2022 as well. 

Through agile, empowering, and result-driven tools, we were able to automate SEO tasks in 2021. Some of them are Copy Ai, Headline, and Jarvis. These AI-assisted content tools can create titles, meta tags, and paragraphs more quickly. 

We’re expecting more advanced tools with more automated features and expecting a drastic usage of AI SEO tools.

‘Can I Rank?, Diib, Searchmetics, ‘ and other AI software are becoming popular due to their incredible features. They allow you to improve your ranking, create effective SEO strategies, offer you multiple SEO metrics, and more. 

Using these tools will allow your in-house SEO teams to focus more on strategies to improve the site’s performance.

IndexNow        

Built as an open-source search engine, IndexNow allows websites to inform multiple search engines whenever website content is deleted, updated, or created. 

As search engines get to know about every update immediately, they crawl and show website changes with instant indexing.   

It’s making the job of SEO professionals much easier, as all they have to do is submit updated URLs through IndexNow API, and Bing and Yandex will instantly know about all the website changes. 

According to the report, Google is testing IndexNow and might join Bing and Yandex in using the new protocol.  

Offering incredible features, It’s surely transforming the relationship between SEO Professionals and search engines. 

Visual Search

Millennials, Gen Zs, or Boomers, everyone’s using Google Lens these days. 

The rise of visual search is taking over as users are getting more comfortable using Google Lens on phones. 

As Google Lens is capable of identifying billions of things, it offers super convenience when it comes to shopping, directions, copying text from images, identifying places, and more. With so many incredible benefits, the visual image search will continue to grow exponentially this year. 

In 2022, all sites having unique images are likely to observe a hike in their product and image search. To make your website detectable by Google Lens, you have to make sure it’s mobile-friendly because 100% of Google Lens searches are performed on mobile phones. 

In addition, optimizing alt text and image filenames will help you with Google Lens Rankings. Also, note that content-rich and high-authority websites have a higher chance of appearing in Google Lens results.

Video

Online videos are taking over the internet.

According to a report published by Cisco, in 2022, videos will make up 82% of all online traffic. Video-sharing platforms are experiencing a boom, and Google is also working on increasing the video featured snippets in the present year.  

So, it goes without saying that your strategy for SEO trends certainly needs video content in the ongoing year. 

As Google uses keyword-integrated descriptions, titles, and tags to evaluate videos, you must optimize powerful keywords and hashtags in the descriptions.

Remember to do your research before creating a video, see what type of content your audience watches, and start from there. The right video content will draw the attention of your audience faster and bring you more traffic while improving your search results. 

EAT

E-A-T will remain one of the hottest trends in 2022. 

The empowering combination of EAT – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – is about writing high-quality content for the end user. It evaluates how much value your website is offering to the audience. 

Expertise – The creator of the main content should have a high level of expertise. It allows them to write with in-depth knowledge of a particular niche. 

Authoritativeness – Refers to building a reputation in the industry among other influencers. It establishes your recognized authority when users look up to you for some information, product, or service.

Trustworthiness – Become a credible and trustworthy voice for your audience. It’s about the legitimacy, credibility, and accuracy of everything present on your website. 

Have a look at our blog to learn more about EEAT. 

Not only does Google use these factors to assess the quality of web pages, but it also helps to develop high-end, catered, and unique content for websites. Speaking of its unrivaled significance, it is crucial to implement EAT in your content, online PR, link building, and technical SEO. 

Moreover, to improve and demonstrate EAT, you need to build more links, keep your content up to date, check the facts, increase reviews, hire experts, set up a Wikipedia page, and show credentials and contact details.   

Long-Form Content 

In 2022, one of the trends that can help you outsmart your competition is long-form content.

And why is that? Long-form content is more likely to show EAT metrics and have better rankings.  

Consistently publishing high-quality, value-driven, and relevant content on your website will improve your search rankings. But make sure that the content you’re creating and uploading is following EAT and is 2000 words long or more than that. 

And remember, you need to keep your readers engaged throughout. 

You can break down your content into multiple sections, and add H2 and H3 subheadings, this way it’ll be more readable and offer more clarity to the readers. Also, make sure your content is easy to share with the shareable links on the top and bottom of the page.  

Localization of SERP

When it comes to localization, we came across many region and country-specific websites outranking globally-focused ones in 2021. The SEO trend of creating more region-specific content will continue to surge in 2022  as many global-focused websites are restructuring their content model from scratch. 

One of the most important things for websites targeting multiple countries or regions is to create local-focused content. 

Have a look at your keywords if they have some local intent. For example, type ‘(x online services) USA’ and check SERPs on different search engines. 

If you notice that most of the results have keyword targeting for ‘USA’, it means Google is showing localized SERPs for that particular industry. 

Therefore, to improve your search rankings, you must focus more on creating local web pages with local SEO. In this way, you’ll be able to show the coveted relevance of your content to your targeted audience.   

Final Thoughts 

SEO will continue to evolve and bring many incredible features our way. 

To be on top of everything, you must keep up with the trends and keep an eye out for more news. And remember, implementing the right SEO trends will not only allow you to outsmart your competition but will also help you grow tenfold in no time. 

With the right strategy and implementation of the 10 SEO trends above, you’ll have a higher chance of dominating SEO in 2022.