SEO Tips to Help Your Website Stand Out in 2022
A few SEO tips to grow your organic rankings.
The pandemic may have disrupted people’s lives and companies’ operations, but the online space has grown stronger than ever. The competition has become even more intense as more businesses transition into digital platforms. As a result, you now need to pay more attention to your SEO strategy to stay ahead and avoid getting overtaken by other players.
With search engine optimization (SEO) evolving, you might be wondering what practices you should leverage to market your brand most. If you want to succeed in the digital marketing game, you must stay updated with the latest trends. Only then will you achieve top ranks and widen your customer reach.
Check out the list below to get top SEO tips that you should take advantage of in 2022. These techniques will help your website stand out amid the growing competition.
Target the Right Keywords
It may not sound like anything new, but keywords continue to be a core element of SEO. You should optimize your content with keywords related to your business and what you offer. When selecting keywords, you should consider relevance, search volume, and level of competition.
With that said, specificity is now becoming more important in keywords. Users nowadays are making longer and more comprehensive search queries with at least four keywords, so adding long-tail keywords into your strategy is a must. In most cases, these are variations of the short keywords that include other details like location to target your audience more.
Content Marketing is Still the Key
As keywords remain important for SEO optimization, quality content is still the king in digital marketing. Regardless of your objectives, you should always post valuable, informative, and relevant content that your audience will enjoy. Remember that you are writing with your readers in mind-not the search engine.
You can incorporate blogging into your strategy to publish new blog posts and increase your authority and credibility for content-related SEO tips. If you are unsure what to write about, try to think of your customers’ common questions and create content to address these.
Additionally, while it helps to add facts, statistics, and other important details to your posts whenever possible, remember to make your content readable. For example, your tone, language, and choice of words should match your target audience to ensure that they can read whatever you write. Using headings and short paragraphs can also improve readability.
Optimize for Voice Search
Voice search has been an emerging SEO trend in the past few years, and this coming 2022, it is expected to stay strong. Around 58% of shoppers are already using voice search to find information on local businesses, and by next year, 55% of households are predicted to own smart speaker devices.
Given this expected growth, optimizing your website for voice search is more important than ever. Aside from adding long-tail keywords into your SEO strategy, you can also restructure your content to make it more conversational and improve the user experience, especially for mobile devices.
When doing keyword research, look for long-tail keywords relevant to your business. For example, voice search queries often sound more natural since people say their questions out loud, as if they were asking these to someone else. Given this, you should think about what questions your audience may ask, then use different variations for your keywords.
Improve Technical SEO
SEO trends will often involve on-page or off-page practices, but you should never forget the importance of your technical SEO. With the Google Core Web Vitals in place, you need to pay more attention to page experience as a ranking factor. Even with the best content, you might not get the top ranks if you have a slow site and many technical issues.
The Core Web Vitals tackle your site’s loading times, interactivity, and layout shifts, so you will need to make sure that:
- The main elements in each web page load quickly to keep users engaged in your site
- Your website responds to user interactions, such as when they press a button
- There are no distracting layout shifts that occur while your page is loading
While managing your technical SEO factors can be more challenging, it is one of the top SEO tips you should not overlook. To check out how you are performing in the Core Web Vitals, you can head over to Google Search Console or PageSpeed Insights. By optimizing these search signals, you not only improve the user experience but also stay ahead of the competition.
Optimize for Mobile
If you have not yet optimized your site for mobile devices, you are missing out on a huge market and opportunity. In 2020, 68.1% of all website traffic came from mobile, and this number has been growing through the years. Nowadays, it is no longer an option but a rule to have a mobile site that responds as well as your desktop site.
Generally, the idea behind mobile SEO is to make sure that your site’s mobile version loads, provides a good experience, and delivers the right information. Now that Google has also moved into a mobile-first indexing policy, you need to pay even more attention to the content and design on your mobile site.
One of Google’s signals under its page experience ranking factor is mobile friendliness. As such, optimizing your site for mobile SEO has become a non-negotiable today. Companies that have still not jumped on the bandwagon are likely to get left behind if they still do not start now.
Add Video Content
When it comes to content development in online marketing, you need not limit yourself to articles and blog posts. While the ideal content format will depend on your objectives and messaging, videos of the best types to increase your digital presence and user engagement.
Video marketing is growing in use because of the significant returns you can get from it. Whether you are trying to tell your brand’s story or inform customers about a new product or service, videos help you provide more entertaining and digestible content. The use of visuals and audio makes it easier for users to understand whatever you want to say.
Leverage YouTube SEO
Social media will continue to be important in your SEO strategy, but for 2022, you should explore the potential of YouTube SEO more. Since Google owns YouTube, which is also a search engine, you can drive more visibility by posting videos on the platform. By squeezing in a promotion or offer in your video, you can attract more leads and attract some of the millions of viewers who browse through YouTube daily.
Conduct a Competitive Analysis
The key to staying ahead of the game is knowing your competition. As a business owner, you also need to be familiar with the competitive environment to find appropriate ways to differentiate your business from others. In your research, look for businesses that target the same keywords, then analyze their SEO efforts.
Try to look for strengths and weaknesses to build your strategy and get the best possible results. Are there gaps that you can fill in to outdo your competitors? Are there points of improvement that you should focus on in your strategy to stay competitive? These are some of the questions you can answer.
Optimize for Featured Snippets
Featured snippets refer to the short snippets of text displayed at the top of the Google results page to help users get quick answers. Earning a featured snippet can increase your organic traffic and give you more visibility on the web since these snippets take up most of the space on a search engines results page. Thus, having your site in that position can give you a big advantage–even over the web pages in the #1 rank!
Before optimizing your website for snippets, you should first familiarize yourself with the types of snippets: paragraphs, listicles, unordered lists, tables, and videos. Then, when building your content development strategy, you should consider what snippet you are targeting. One way to do this is to make a master list of all your content ideas, along with their respective keywords, search intent, and the type of snippet you want to achieve.
There is no fixed formula for earning featured snippets on Google, but the main goal is to provide the best answer to users’ search queries. Thus, when writing content, make sure to include research-based facts in your content while still keeping it simple and readable so that you can deliver the best value to your readers.
Ensure Accessibility
Site accessibility is one of the top SEO tips you should explore in 2022, especially with growing Internet users. Accessibility is an important aspect of website design since you need to ensure that all users, including disabled people, get a good experience and valuable information from your site.
By making your site more accessible, you increase your chances of ranking higher on Google and generating more traffic. Some of the most common include the following:
- Follow all the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) rules
- Add alt text to your images and descriptions for more complex images
- Provide transcripts for podcasts and audio content
- Include captions in videos to provide visual access for hearing-impaired users
- Create contrast with colors to assist those with color deficiencies
- Provide many contacts information, not limited to a phone number
- Keep your navigation menu simple
- Choose readable fonts
As you may have noticed from the list, many of the practices to improve site accessibility intersect with the best practices for mobile web design. Thus, you may already be doing some of these, but it is still worth checking your site to ensure that you address all the barriers for users with some disabilities.
Work with a Professional Agency for Your SEO Strategy and SEO Tips
The SEO tips above are some of the main strategies you can use to make your website more visible and attractive in the online space. If you need help putting all your plans into action, P3 Agency is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides tailored solutions based on a client’s needs.
Contact us today at 1-800-515-9422 to learn more about our range of services and elevate your marketing efforts and about our web design in Clearwater.