It’s no secret that search engine algorithms are always changing. If you don’t keep up with the changes in the industry, you’ll inevitably be left behind. The fact is – the SEO strategies of the past may not always apply for 2022. Today, SEO isn’t just about stuffing as many relevant keywords in your blog post and there’s a lot more that impact ranking factors.
When it comes to boosting your business’ search engine rankings and website visibility, check out these SEO strategy practices for 2022.
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Best SEO Practices for 2022
Topical Authority
Become a master of your craft—and make sure that people know it. You need to show your readers and search engines that you know what you’re talking about by covering your topic thoroughly.
The best way to show people that you truly know about your industry or subject is to have a lot of relevant and quality content over the years. This will prompt people who visit your website to be confident in your knowledge and prompt search engines to rank you higher than everyone else in the niche.
If you’re confused about where to start, create a topical map. Think about all the ideas related to your topic, or even go to Google to type in your topic and see what comes up. SEO tools like SEO Minion can help with this too, but the simplest way is to look at the related topics after you do a Google search. Don’t forget to look at your competitors too. They have already done the research, so why not use them as a starting point?
Let’s use an example to demonstrate topical authority. Imagine you sell dog treats. There are many types of dog treats, some of which are made for dogs with sensitive stomachs, some with lower calories, and even homemade treats that are healthier for your dog. You need to cover it in its entirety to come close to being a topical authority.
All that being said, it doesn’t mean that you should prioritize quantity over quality. Long form content still does well as they point to a higher content quality. You should still consider how your content is written and whether it’s easy to read. People will lose confidence in your expertise pretty quickly, after all, if your website appears at the top of the organic search results yet they start seeing mistakes in your content that don’t look professional.
Focus on Engagement
What does focusing on engagement mean? This means ensuring that people actually read the article, or that they’re able to find what they came for when they visit your website. You can check this by looking at the bounce rate; the lower the bounce rate, the better. This means your readers are spending more time on your website.
Help your visitors spend more time on your website by separating paragraphs, making your content easy to read, and bolding important words and phrases. You also don’t want huge blocks of text that people won’t spend any time reading. Additionally, you can also make your information more understandable by using clear headings so your content is easy to scan and people can find what they need to quickly. These factors can help to keep your visitor engaged.
It’s vital to focus on how your visitors are behaving when they visit your website because Google will look for this to see if your content is working. Google will then use this information to determine how your site ranks for a particular topic.
User Experience
Don’t forget about your UX—the setup of your website and how people navigate through it. You will want to focus on your Core Web Vitals for this:
- loading performance
- hosting
- how quickly your server responds
- how the actual layout loads in
You don’t want your web pages to take too long to load or to look odd when it does. Ensure that the content appears as it should and that the page operates as it should. Also, make sure that the whole webpage is mobile-friendly. Google has a mobile-friendly tool to help you check whether people can see your pages load well on their phones.
Keep your website clean using safe browsing too, so that people feel safe visiting without any malware. You might want to turn off ads on mobile for better user experience.
Besides encouraging them to stay longer on your site and boosting your rankings, it also helps to create a positive experience with your brand. Overall, you won’t go wrong focusing on creating a positive user experience for your website visitors.
Link Building
Finally, it is extremely important to build backlinks to your website. Search engines view external backlinks as votes for your website. Links from reputable sites contribute to the legitimacy of your site, leading to better search engine rankings. Contextual links in external articles will also bring in more traffic to your site, gaining your business new visitors.
Conclusion
Take the time to implement these search engine optimization ideas to improve your search engine rankings and increase your website visitors. While some foundational tips like building quality links to your website still matter significantly in 2022, there is a focus now on new ranking factors that you should steer your SEO efforts towards.
If you want to see better SEO success in 2022 and gain more organic traffic, contact our digital marketing team today to see how we can help you implement SEO best practices and build better domain authority for your website!
Stephan Boehringer is the CEO of Get The Clicks, a web marketing company. Stephan has over 20 years of experience in the field of web marketing, and has been a speaker and consultant for many years. Stephan is passionate about web marketing and helping their clients be the best they can be.
Stephan Boehringer graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services.
