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Preparing Your SEO for 2022
Before the digital revolution, traditional marketing strategies like TV adverts and billboards were used, and, in fact, they still are today. However, the development technology has allowed digital marketing to take centre stage in many businesses’ marketing strategies, which is why SEO (search engine optimisation) is so widely practised by businesses today.
Whole teams are typically deployed to manage SEO, something that is done by businesses who understand the importance of practising good SEO. As we come to the end of the year, it is important to take note of how SEO will change heading into the new year. Getting ahead of the curve when it comes to this will prove beneficial as those who think ahead will not be caught out when trends change, or indeed, Google updates their algorithm. This is something that businesses should be doing anyway though, as the one mistake that many make is thinking that their SEO is as good as can be.
There is no doubt that Google’s algorithm gets better at recognising content with useful and trusted information by the day. In 2022, this is a process that can be expected to be at its most refined point to date, and it will be easily observable how sites that provide this kind of information will rank high in search engine results. This will most affect those pages that have misleading titles, also known as ‘clickbait’. As the content of the website is generally not relevant to what the title suggests, Google can recognise this as content that is not useful and will rank it accordingly. This idea also applies to links within a website too. If the link is pointing to a website that is not useful to users, then the hosting website will be ranked negatively as a result. To combat both trends, businesses should make it clear to users what their titles are pointing towards, as this will ensure the best rankings from Google.
The snippet is one feature that has risen in popularity since Google started to introduce it. For those who are not in the know, this is the little snapshot of information that is displayed when a simple query is typed in. Typically, this will have a picture, and a short burst of information underneath that will likely satisfy the user’s query. The most common scenario of this happening is when users type in a celebrity’s name. In 2022, the snippet will likely disappear. This may come as a surprise to most, but often, the snippet can give users misleading or simply incomplete information. As most will know, Google prefers information that is trusted and useful, and this notion is true even when it comes to its own features. Following this line, businesses can expect the snippet page to not feature on search results anymore, and those who have formatted their pages to get displayed on a snippet should focus on other areas of SEO considering the absence of this feature.
One more growing trend is the rise of voice searching. This is something that users are beginning to prefer more as it allows them to take the pain out of typing questions into search engines, letting them speak out loud as if in a conversation instead. This will mean that websites that have been formatted with keyword searching in mind could suffer because of this trend, as people do not type in the same way that they speak. Considering this, businesses must change their SEO practice to accommodate this new way of search engine querying. Key phrases like “best cars in 2021” will lose to phrases like “what are the best cars in 2021” as the latter represents a more conversational form of questioning. By changing key phrases on their website to suit this growing method of searching, businesses can make sure that they are well prepared for the coming year.
There are many more ways in which the SEO landscape is changing, evidenced by the trends that have emerged this year. The onus is on businesses to analyse these trends and adapt their SEO practice to accommodate for the changes that ate likely to happen in the future, as this will ensure that they are not left behind when these changes do materialise.
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