1. Focus on ON PAGE SEO
Here are some best practices to help you with on-site SEO:
- Use your keywords at the beginning of your title tags
- A meta description lets people know what is on your site before they click on it. Improving the preview of your webpage will lead to more clicks and a higher rank.
- Focus on creating long-form content (aim for at least 1,800 words)
- Insert your keyword two to three times per page (keyword stuffing will get you the opposite result)
2. Don’t Neglect Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to making sure that your website is designed in such a way that search engines will be able to crawl and index it easily. Content is still king, but if the search engines can’t find, crawl, and index your pages, all your efforts will be in vain.
For example, you’ll need to make sure that:
- All your pages are secure
- Your site is optimized for mobile
- You don’t have any plagiarized content or similar content on different pages of your own site
- Pages load quickly
- All the links work
3. Content Writing
Quality Content is Still King
Google is still interested in quality and original content. Creating and publishing quality content should always be your top priority in ranking your website at the top of search engines. Quality content has always been serving as one of the main pillars for SEO trends in the past.
4. Create Internal Links
An internal link is a hyperlink between two pages on the same website. They pass PageRank (or SEO value) as well as context through anchor text and surrounding content. This is a big help also for user's navigation.
5. Google Lens & Optimizing Images
Lastly, you can increase the incorporation of visuals by making your website compatible with Google Lens. It will help people find your products faster by only using an image to search. Optimization of images for Google Lens is just another way for people to find your website. It’s an innovative trend that will characterize successful SEO practices in 2022.
6. Start optimizing your website for voice search
Voice search will remain a strong SEO trend in 2022 and the next couple of years. There is increasing popularity of voice search today. It is estimated that close to 58% of consumers already use voice search when looking for local business information.
Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri are already changing people’s lives in many ways. The best you can do for your website now is to make it optimized for voice search. Voice is now going to be the primary form of search with the advent of smart speakers in homes and voice activation in vehicles, medical devices, and even TVs.
Optimizing your website for voice search is all about creating conversational content. That is coming up with content written more casually with little emphasis on keywords. Here is how to achieve this:
- Include FAQ on your website
- Ensure your titles and subheading are written in a question format
- Adjust all your keywords to cater more for conversational-based searches
- Spin all long-tail keywords into questions and come up with content that provides accurate answers to the questions
7. “E-A-T” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
While SEO is one of the main buzzwords whenever Google rankings are discussed, Google E-A-T is another three-letter acronym that can help you in the new year. Basically, it stands for expertise, authority, and trust. These are three elements that Google looks at when working out the ranking potential of your website. These typically include content that offers medical, legal, safety, or financial information.
Expertise refers to the credibility and experience of your author(s). When visitors land on your website, will they find content written by authors who are trustworthy and experienced? To show your expertise, you can, for example, include short author bios on your website, like yours truly has done.
8. Mobile is the New Wave
Since everybody now has a smartphone, the number of mobile searches done worldwide exceeds that conducted by desktops. That’s why making your website mobile-friendly is one of the most effective digital marketing trends in 2022.
It’s crucial for your webpages to automatically readjust their design according to the device being used. This will allow users to access your site without glitches, unwanted zooming in/out, or a confusing layout from their mobile devices.
9. Structured Data/Schema Markup
Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.
Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general. For example, here is a JSON-LD structured data snippet that might appear on a recipe page, describing the title of the recipe, the author of the recipe, and other details:
From time to time, you can also try to include content, like facts and figures, that others can quote on their own blogs. Content creators often link back to statistics which can earn you valuable backlinks.
You can, for example, add it in the form of an infographic. As mentioned earlier, adding visuals like infographics can also help to lower your bounce rate which in return will also improve Google search page rankings.
If you regularly read our blog, you would know that we love to publish stats. As Exhibit A (aka the screenshot below) shows, it has helped us to create numerous backlinks (and from authoritative sources, if we may boast a bit).
12. Create a Google My Business Profile
Businesses can also get a better Google ranking for local searches by creating a Google My Business profile. In short, a Google My Business profile helps you to control how your business appears across Google products such as Search and Maps.
So, double-check that all your business details, like contact details, business hours, and address, are correct and complete. According to Google’s help page, relevance and prominence play a key role.
If your Google My Business profile closely links to what your target audience typically searches for, Google will find it easier to match your profile to the right searches. Also, if your business has more Google reviews, it can help to boost your local ranking on Google.
13. Keep Track of Your Results
Not only should you audit your brand and content regularly, but it’s also key that you monitor your SEO results. While it won’t improve your SEO directly (Google won’t know about this step), if you don’t know how much organic traffic you’re getting, what’s the point? This also helps you to double-check that you are, in fact, ranking for all the keywords that you’re targeting.
Also, does the traffic boost convert to more customers and sales? SEO is time-consuming and if you don’t track your results, you won’t know where to make changes and if it’s worth the time and effort.
Register your website in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
14. Don’t be Afraid to Hire Experts
While there are more technical elements like mobile optimization and web page speed that you’ll be more inclined to leave to the professionals, it doesn’t mean that everything else you should do on your own. Whether you need a freelance content writer or a UX designer, if there’s any other aspect that you feel you need help with, hire the help of the professionals. We’re talking about your online presence here. That’s a lot that’s at stake.
Contact Fort Myers's Most Trusted Digital Marketing Agency
Digital Marketing Concepts has been helping businesses build online reputations and increase website credibility for over 6 years. Our leading web designers, graphic designers, SEO specialists and social media marketing specialists work together to deliver premier results.
To schedule a FREE initial consultation, call Digital Marketing Concepts at 239-244-2009 today.
