5 things you should know about SEO in 2022
The world of SEO moves fast. To help you keep up, we’ve compiled five of the most significant updates from the past year and offered some tips to ensure you’re ticking all the right SEO boxes going into 2022.
Google is serious about page experience
Arguably the biggest SEO moment of 2021 came in the form of Google’s long-awaited Page Experience update. This rollout marked a significant development in Google’s search evolution, by introducing a number of user-centered page experience signals to its ranking algorithm.
These page experience signals combine existing ranking signals including mobile-friendliness, HTTPS security, and non-intrusive interstitials (that’s disruptive popup ads in normal language) with a brand new set of signals known as Core Web Vitals - which measure and evaluate the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a webpage.
This update highlights how far Google has come in its ability to grade and rank websites and is a clear signal to website owners that when it comes to developing an SEO strategy, ensuring a good user experience should be a top priority.
If you’re wondering how your website is performing, you’ll find scores and recommendations in the Experience reports in Google Search Console.
Core updates reward good content
Google algorithm updates are more common than most people think. Google makes minor changes to its algorithm on a daily basis with the intention of incrementally improving the quality of its search results. Most of these updates go unnoticed and are barely recognisable to most search engine users and website owners. However, a couple of times a year Google announces more significant changes known as core updates.
This year, at the time of writing, there have been three core updates - in June, July, and November.
Core updates are broad changes to Google’s search algorithms and systems. In other words, they’re not focused on any single thing - unlike the historic Penguin and Panda updates, which focused specifically on low-quality content and link spam respectively - but instead, focus on improving the algorithm as a whole.
Contrary to belief, core updates are not an exercise in penalisation. If a webpage has a drop in search visibility following a core update, it’s usually because there’s a better alternative result for that query - an alternative that in Google’s mind at least, deserves a higher ranking. Google has itself stressed that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with pages that perform less well after a core update.
Core updates serve as regular reminders that Google is serious about prioritising high-quality content in its search results. Whether affected by a core update or not, website owners should review their content regularly to ensure it’s future-proof and worthy of a high search position. Google provides a helpful list of questions to help site owners self-assess their content, which you can find here.
Mobile SEO is the real-deal
There’s been a lot of noise about Google’s mobile-first indexing in recent years and it’s a conversation that will likely rumble on for years to come.
What is mobile-first indexing? In Google’s own words, “Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query.”
The reason for this shift is simple; search behaviour has changed and today, more people search on Google using a mobile device than a desktop.
Mobile-first indexing impacts virtually every website and particularly websites where both a desktop and a mobile version of a site exist as separate entities (thankfully less common these days).
Google started the process in March 2021 and by this point, most websites will have automatically been switched over to mobile-first indexing. So the good news is, you don’t have to do anything in terms of making the switch - Google handles that part for you.
You should, however, be concerned with whether or not your website is optimised for mobile - because that’s another thing entirely. Google details mobile-first indexing best practices for website owners in this post. Going into 2022, providing a seamless mobile-first experience won’t be an option, it’ll be essential.
Search intent is more than a buzzword
Search intent is not a new concept - far from it - but it’s a topic that continued to generate plenty of headlines in 2021.
In simple terms, search intent is the why behind a search query. It’s the reason someone searches. Whether searching for general information or looking up the price of a specific product, there is an intent behind every search query.
Understanding intent has become increasingly important when forming an SEO strategy. Not least because Google already knows what users expect to see when they search for something and will show results based on which results it thinks best serve their query.
Through analysing and understanding this data, website owners can make better-informed decisions about the content they create and the keywords they target. For example, shoehorning the word ’best’ into a product page is unlikely to help you rank when the user is most likely looking for reviews and comparisons.
To maximise SEO efforts in 2022, website owners need to look beyond keyword search volumes and focus on relevance.
Links are as important as ever (and just as hard to acquire)
Links are an inescapable part of SEO and continue to have a significant impact on website rankings. And yet, link building is probably the most underutilised SEO practice of all.
There are, of course, some obvious reasons for this. Not least is the fact that acquiring high-quality links is hard. Quick win directory submissions, link exchanges, and article spinning are (thankfully) a thing of the past but this does leave many website owners wondering how to find good links.
Today, link acquisition is more about earning and less about building. Creating news-worthy stories supported by link-worthy content assets is arguably the most effective link-building strategy going into 2022. This guide to digital PR provides a great overview of what it is and why it’s so important for SEO.
If the points above have highlighted anything, it’s that Google, and consequently SEO, is always evolving. To succeed with SEO in 2022 and beyond, website owners will need to take a 360 approach to their website marketing. Content, links, user experience, and technical SEO must all work together in order to achieve results.
This post was written by our Inner Circle member, Matt. If you’re in any need of SEO advice or help, do be sure to book a 30-minute discovery call.
