If we do not take into account the novelties in this direction, we can go in a completely different direction, which in turn will not develop our business in any way. Also you need to carefully study all the SEO optimization trends first, in order to have a great result.
SEO strategies
Strategically, the first goal of SEO-optimization of the site will always be to attract as many customers as possible to the marketing loophole. A funnel, according to Sprout Social's definition, has five distinct phases.
First, there is the awareness phase. This increases the target audience's awareness of your brand's website. It is also worth noting that this contributes to the client's favor.
Second, the review stage activates your supporters and social proof to help customers when they compare you to your competitors.
Third, at the conversion stage, the client's purchasing action becomes simpler.
Fourth, we can design a program for your customers that includes discounts, email communication, and the use of social media.
Finally, during the defense phase, you cultivate relationships with receptive individuals in order to support future marketing funnels and even promote your brand to other potential customers.
Therefore, the entire SEO process should follow this pattern. As a principle in business, this is unlikely to change as much as the SEO landscape. Therefore, if you keep this in mind when working with SEO and business, it will definitely be a very successful decision.
Of course, we often digress from our main goal and do those things that do not play a big role in promotion, so we need to be less overzealous and work according to already created working templates. We must always have business goals in front of us. Let's take a look at what strategies have not been working for a long time, and what you definitely do not need to spend your time and effort on. Therefore, all these methods will not help you acquire and, most importantly, keep customers in this marketing funnel.
Changing Your SEO Strategy
It is difficult for us to change approaches to work, so we often use old strategies. Sometimes it is very difficult to completely change your approach. It is better not to play with attachment because it takes a lot of your energy and in turn it constantly diverts your attention from important things.
First of all, you need to abandon all the oldest and not fully working methods of link building for a long time. Hence, link building is still a very valuable asset in SEO. This is an important factor in search engine rankings. It is, however, not the primary one, and thus cannot be the ultimate goal of SEO optimization.
During the golden age of link building, SEOs simply spammed random directories with their links and it worked (Core DNA, 2020). Today, this is completely unsuitable.
Also, special attention should be paid to the exact placement of the link that will lead to your site. It would be fantastic if it was placed on authoritative resources, as this would result in a very high rating for the article itself. In short, you must do everything possible to ensure that the site has several large publications rather than many small blogs with less authority. Quality is more important than quantity; it is far more profitable to collaborate with authoritative sites on the relevant subject that are most appropriate for the article's topic.
A high rating doesn't mean a lot of traffic
Being in the top ranking when issuing does not guarantee a 100% increase in traffic. Of course, they used to start from this, but definitely not today. Nowadays, if we enter a query into a search engine, the first thing we see is an advertisement. Therefore, if the side shoots at the top of the ranking, it is already harder to find it under all those ads.
Currently, the rating does not play such a big role, it has been replaced by CTR, and clickability on the link that leads to the site. This technique is more efficient nowadays. There are different methods to increase this process, here we can include work with meta tags, headings, and the description itself. First of all, you should look into these combinations offered by Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.
Write for people, not machines
According to a Core DNA study back in 2020, SEOs focused on search engines. Robotic search engines read information. Also, we should not forget about the opinion of visitors, because this greatly affects the rating of the article and the site. If articles are written for people, it's good for business. These articles are meaningful and useful to the consumer, which is why Google now defines a measure of customer centricity.
Today, the reality is that the real needs of users play an important role, so the excessive influence of keywords is no longer so important. It is very important that all the information be very readable, there should be a specific structure with all paragraphs and structures, also have a good font, beautiful visual elements that suit a certain topic, etc. Therefore, it is worth noting that the more relevant the site is from the side of search engines, the better it answers the questions of site visitors.
Another important factor that Google considers is how long a user stays on a web page. Of course, we are interested in the fact that the articles are very interesting, because the user lingers for long periods of time to carefully study everything, thereby ranking higher than content that is not interesting to the user and is not filled with any keywords. As a result, you must remember that in order for your business to be very successful in 2022 and not fail completely, you must find a happy medium, striking a balance between SEO for robots and SEO for people.
Content volume value
Longreads are more likely to drive consistent traffic than short or medium-length articles. Numerous studies have shown that they generate three times the amount of organic traffic as medium-length content. The detailed information-rich content requires readers to spend more time exploring - and we all know what happens when site visitors spend more time on a page - Google sends you more traffic via search rankings.
Featured snippets become more visible
Today it has become very popular for mobile optimization to use featured snippets. This was all very much in demand, as half of the mobile screen is now occupied by a selected fragment.
While Google has put an end to duplicate search results with featured snippets and top organic search results, featured snippets remain an important part of SEO. We can also use featured snippets to customize and increase traffic.
Smart search improvements
Nowadays, users have an idea that smart search is associated with the autocomplete function.
Forms for Google searches It's worth noting that today's smart search is much more similar to Google Discover, a channel dedicated to delivering videos and articles to mobile users. Despite being a relatively new service, Google Discover is gaining traction, with over 800 million users as of today.
While the algorithm remains a mystery to marketers, this type of predictive search is expected to evolve into more sophisticated information delivery systems due to a variety of factors. In addition, we can boost website traffic using only Google Discover, which is a very effective method.
Image optimization
Google has always helped webmasters and site owners visualize and optimize visual content. Accordingly, it is not surprising that images eventually affect the user experience in one way or another. Today, the concept of an image is primarily used to make one or another purchase or to use some kind of information. not just for aesthetics.
To do this, SEOs need to be very good at optimizing images while embedding the highest quality and most relevant images, providing custom filenames and alt tags. This method has performed very well in all aspects. It's very efficient.
Focus on customer service quality
Experienced entrepreneurs understand that the connection between the seller and the buyer is very important. Accordingly, one should not forget about the importance of the marketing funnel. It promotes quick visualization in order to attract the client with all sorts of images to be fans of their brand. Of course, this applies to many business processes, including SEO. Also, this process includes completely different aspects of content, design, and some technical aspects. Let's take a look at this step by step. Notice the big shift towards customer experience.
Of course, search rankings are influenced by completely different methods, such as the quality of customer service. The process takes place in a way that tends to increase site latency while telling Google's algorithm that users find your content relevant and very interesting. With this algorithm of actions, the machine raises the site up in the ranking, showing it to other interested users.
Therefore, everything should work in such a way that the client would quickly move on to certain actions on the site. Therefore, it should not just be a user experience. It is worth remembering that the best interaction between you and them will be excellent only when all your desired results coincide with the desired actions. This is a whole chain of events.
- The best SEO software.
- MOZ Local offers an SEO keyword generator as well as keyword analysis (it also analyzes links to ensure they are of high quality).
- SEMrush is a comprehensive digital marketing management platform that provides you with the tools you need to get your brand to rank highly in search results.
- Serpstat assists businesses in improving their search engine rankings (provides an estimate of the company's promotion costs).
- Moz Pro checks the site for errors and helps to improve its content by automatically prioritizing problems for a quick resolution.
- Ahrefs has the highest backlink index (so you can be sure of the integrity of the URLs you link to on your website).
- .Quality content. Today, it is the content that we present in SEO that takes a very high role. Search engines conform to what they consider to be good and useful content for users. Therefore, we must always follow the plan, and at the same time have a great content strategy. Of course, all content should be primarily aimed at the user, and carry maximum value for him. It would also be great to use different types of media, here we can include video content, and audio content, therefore, at the same time have a very high level of customer involvement.
- Fave a search quality score (SQR). Google today has many contacts with more than 10,000 search quality evaluators around the world. Therefore, these "evaluators" need to conduct searches and also evaluate the quality of pages that may appear in some of the first results. It is also possible to analyze your site. You can also ask for help from a specialist in order to have good content.
- Working with keywords. Today it all looks a little different, you need to look for completely different approaches. Google is implementing a lot of changes to their results pages today, here we can include different changes per page, it can be different purchases, local packages, and featured snippets. All this, together with time, led to a decrease in CTR for sites that rank first in search results. Over time, marketers began to pay more and more attention from the very top search positions to a completely new concept in keyword optimization: SERP marketing. This type of keyword optimization is the optimization of content to appear in various search items such as top stories, videos, images, and "also of interest" topics.
- One of the most important SEO requirements is original content. According to statistics, almost all content marketers first of all pay attention to what the consumer audience wants. The audience comes first, not advertising.
- Effective SEO. Since marketing has a very important place in everyone's marketing arsenal today, this new marketing technique is often used in SEO. Therefore, we would like to draw our attention to the fact that this method is not expensive if we compare it with typical marketing. Also, this method has the ability to reduce the time it takes to reach an audience since people who have a lot of influence already have their own followers, to which companies can connect.
- Relevance of design. Page optimization - of course, this topic is very broad, here we can confidently include aspects of the external design, as well as some technical aspects of the internal interface. Today, we can say with confidence that design is a very important aspect of the user experience itself, as users cannot see the most colorful internal architecture of the site. All this because they only interact with the user interface, and nothing more. A beautiful design will draw and attract the user's attention in every possible way, while also increasing the search time.
With the help of such techniques, we can greatly increase the ranking of our site, which will lead us to certain success and efficiency.
The rise of non-Google search engines
When we first look at a search engine like Google, it is not surprising that it is one of the most demanded and popular systems today. However, we must keep in mind that it is not the only one; there are others. This does not imply that you should devote time and resources to optimizing your website for Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. However, experts advise taking into account the fact that people tend to look for useful content on other websites such as Amazon, YouTube, and Facebook.
Today, when working with SEO, we should not only look up to a search engine like Google. Undoubtedly, Google has an important role, but we all need to notice other options, on a larger scale, more targeted. Therefore, if you have a big international business behind you, you cannot do without sites like Amazon and Facebook. This is important if you are working at the regional or local level.
Working with video
It is unsurprising that YouTube is the most popular search engine in the world today (information according to a study by Search Engine Journal). As a result, you can watch videos, interact with other users, and even chat with the creators themselves in this system. Today, we can mark this method of interaction with users as one of the most effective approaches to business development. And not only on YouTube but also on Facebook and Instagram.
Technical SEO
Despite changes in SEO trends and practices, technical SEO remains a constant challenge. It is about the customer experience as well as the backend. The goal of technical SEO is to get your site crawled as quickly as possible by Google and other search engines.
Of course, this means that it is extremely visible and is also processed by search engines. To have a large number of views, full users, and many other important performance indicators on his site. Google Search Console is one of the most incredible tools for this available today.
Machine learning and progressive web applications
Today, in an environment like SEO, Google itself can often implement machine learning. First of all, this is done in order to fight spam, as well as in order to be able to present good, quality content to users of sites. Today, the search engine is already using this in Gmail with a 99.9% success rate.
Of course, the main strength of machine learning lies in the relative independence of the computer. With the help of this, we have the opportunity to go to a certain goal, for this you just need to follow certain rules. So when we train a machine to do analytics, the site owner has strategies and tactics that can help optimize SEO as we go along. The point we need to keep in mind is the possibility of an independent process, without going into details while doing it yourself. Of course, this method will be at the peak of popularity for a long time, you also need to remember that business intelligence tools are also developing rapidly. Every year they become more and more popular.
Today we can see a lot of hype among such progressive web applications (PWAs). In short, this PWA is a web page that can be controlled by the browser. In turn, this gives us the opportunity to exploit a simple standalone application. Of course, professionals recommend them for installation, but they should work as an application even in browsers. Examples of PWAs are Housing.com, Starbucks, Airbnb, Yummly, and Twitter. Google developers define them as improving the user experience by:
- reliability - fast loading, instantaneous, do not delay even when the connection is very poor;
- speed - has the ability to respond very quickly to user actions with smooth animation;
- engagement is, of course, a great experience, as well as the real feel of the app on the device.
There is no doubt that PWA is promising for SEO and marketing today, however, closer to 2022, it will develop even more over time.Today we pay a lot of attention to semantically related keywords. If we do not adhere to this trend, our business will soon be irrelevant.
Semantically related keywords or "semantic keywords" are the best Google helpers. Therefore, it is best to rank for a given query. Primarily designed for search purposes, semantically related keywords provide the ability to properly rank search results. We will also have to spend a lot of time on voice search, and the introduction of artificial intelligence in order to increase customer engagement. These trends are becoming more and more popular today.
Algorithms: BERT in the past - MUM enters the arena
With the launch of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representation by Transducers), it is worth noting that in 2019 the Google algorithm began to understand even better the subtle relationship between words and the purpose of a search query.
BERT is a completely new trend today, which allows Google to help in every possible way in serving voice assistant users. This new trend has simplified the work of users, copper now they do not need to enter search queries because there are voice commands in search engines. Google has got artificial intelligence, and for good reason, because people communicate much more colloquially and fluently, so Google had to adapt their algorithm accordingly using NLP.
It all started with BERT. Sometime later, at one of the Google I / O 2021 conferences, the company announced a new model for interpreting and serving its users. She was at one time called the multitasking unified model, or MUM.
If you recall the words of the man who was the head of the Google search department, Prabhakar Raghavan, he said that a completely new model of natural language processing is 1000 times stronger than the one that was before. This should not surprise us much today, because with the help of it there is an opportunity to quickly work through many tasks at the same time, this is the secret of multitasking. With the help of MUM, we are able to parse many different videos, pictures, and text simultaneously in more than 74 languages. This gives us the ability to provide answers to the most complex search queries. To put it simply, in simple terms, then MUM is an artificial intelligence model because with the help of it we have the ability to understand feelings, the context itself, abstractions, and user intentions. Therefore, on the basis of all this, it has the ability to provide the most unique answers when requested by the user. Of course, with MUM today, we won't need to make multiple queries until they in turn find a very valid keyword, which will help give the answer the user needs.
Therefore, Google will instead provide them with the results they need from just a voice request. Let's see, so what is MUM multimodality. In a nutshell, this is what consumers can get by combining text, different pictures, and voices for relevant results. As Google's VP of Search, Pandu Nyak, explains: "After all, you can take a picture of your hiking boots and ask, 'Can I hike Mount Fuji with them?' MUM will recognize the image and relate it to your question. He can then point you to a blog that contains a list of recommended gear."
LaMDA: Google wants to talk to you
Every day we have the opportunity to observe how trends regarding SEO are changing. Today, naturally, one of the important roles will be played by voice searches, as well as how important optimization is for answering user questions. Hence today, Google wants to communicate with users. What is needed for this? First, completely change the algorithm of actions in order to fully adopt it to new technologies in a very short period of time.
Most recently, LaMDA (a language model for conversational applications) was presented at one of the Google I / O conferences. Of course, the name itself already tells us that LaMDA is a machine learning model that was originally designed for dialogue and built on Transformer while having its own Google neural network architecture.
As the VP of Product Management said earlier Eli Collins and Zubina Gahramani, Senior Research Director, LaMDA is an architecture that:
“This is an opportunity to create a model that firstly can read many words (for example, a sentence or a paragraph). Secondly, she can pay attention to how these words relate to each other, and only after all this, predict which words, in her opinion, will be next. LaMDA is trained in dialogue.”
Of course, if the main task of MUM is to disentangle the emotions and different intentions of the people behind their search queries, then surely LaMDA will want to chat and present results based on what users are searching for on the Internet.
LaMDA is only a small part of Google's overall strategy. Of course, we can anticipate very large and sophisticated AI models that use conversational queries to find and rank pages. As a result, if you have not yet begun the process of optimizing your site for voice search, now is the time to do so.
Core Web Vitals: UX has a whole new meaning these days
Already today, this method of ranking a site using keywords and creating links to it is no longer relevant. Today, on-page optimization and link building still play an important role, although it's not the only thing that matters when working with SEO.
Page Experience can be labeled as an entirely new member of the ranking factor family, which Google defines as “a set of signals that measure how users perceive the interaction with a web page.”
As we explore the elements, we can point out one of the highlights of this tool's update, which will be Core Web Vitals. We can characterize it as one that has a set of different indicators, which in turn have a good chance of measuring page loading speed. Of course, this is possible if you look at it from the side of one or another interaction with the user.
- The LCP metric measures download speed. Google, in turn, advises aiming for LCP in less than 2.5 seconds after the page starts loading.
- The FID metric measures interactivity. Google recommends FID less than 100 milliseconds.
- The CLS score measures visual stability. Google recommends a CLS score of less than 0.1.
Google combines Core Web Vitals with other factors such as mobile usability, use of the HTTPS protocol, and no intrusive interstitial ads. This is all in order to be able to create a comprehensive set of measures that in turn prioritize the user experience.
Summarize
Every day there are many new products that you need to keep track of. There is no doubt that by 2022 there will be many innovations. But for today, you should rely on the recommendations that are noted a little higher, since they are primarily based on the forecasts of many experts, respectively, and are of great value in the development of business ideas.
It is worth noting that today, SEO is much more than just advertising and marketing, it is hard work given the current trends in other areas that can affect your business. Of course, SEO is very important. Of course, you need to have a balance with working offline. Of course, many marketers tend to forget that real-world interaction plays a very big role here when it comes to revenue and conversions. We must always be aware of the latest innovations, as well as follow tactics that have long been proven. Consequently, only such a combination in work is the most optimal for business promotion.
