It’s hard to believe, but SEO will be entering its third decade in 2022. In that time, the landscape of search engine optimization has changed dramatically—and is continuing to do so. If you’re a business owner who wants your website to stay ahead of the curve, it’s important to pay attention to the trends that will be shaping SEO in 2022, although according to digital marketing agency Cozab, that doesn’t mean common SEO practices such as backlinking, on-site SEO, guest posting, and keyword research should be abandoned. In this blog post, we’ll outline three of the most important ones. Keep reading to learn more!
Focus on “People Also Ask”
Focus on “people also ask” One feature on Google that you might have seen is the “people also ask” feature. This was released by Google in 2015 and is a small little box that has queries that relate to the original search query. Why is this important? Because almost half of the 2.5 million queries about the “people also ask” feature made use of that actual feature.
This means that if you are looking to rise in the rankings, you need to begin creating clustered content. Topic clusters, or clustered content, refer to content that is related to a specific topic. For example, if “SEO” were the topic, subtopics could be “best SEO tips”, “SEO mistakes to avoid”, “best backlinking strategies”, and “what is backlinking”.
More importantly, you could be hyper-specific with the subtopics and create subtopics for those subtopics. For example, if “SEO” is the main topic, then you could develop subtopics for subtopics like “backlinking”, “technical SEO”, “keyword research”, and more. The most significant benefit of this is that Google will assume you are an authority within your niche since you have a lot of depth to your content.
User Intent Is Important
The next trend that you are going to have to focus on in 2022 is understanding that user intent is important and including user intent when creating content. If you were performing SEO quite a while ago, you might have been able to get by with keyword stuffing and gaining as many irrelevant backlinks as you possibly could.
However, with recent changes to Google’s algorithm, there is an intense focus on user intent. Google is still focusing on trying to understand the right intent when a user makes a search query. In other words, what is the user trying to accomplish when searching for this specific term and what content will best answer the search query?
How does this affect websites? Well, it means that you are going to have to begin focusing on user intent too, since content that answers the search queries of users will rise in the rankings. This starts with performing intense keyword research to first identify what your audience is searching for and then determining what content will best answer those questions. This is also where topic clusters come into play, as the content generated from them will undoubtedly answer a few questions that your audience may have.
Snippets
Snippets are another extremely popular trend that you should start using in 2022 and for the years to come. As the name would suggest, these snippets are small extracts from content such as videos, images, and blog articles that are displayed at the top of the SERPs and answer the search query of a user without the user even needing to click on a link.
Not only will this require you to use the best keywords as well as create great content focused on answering a search query in a paragraph, but you are also going to need to focus on Schema markup.
Schema markup is a sort of vocabulary that is a method that structures data around things, places, and people. This sort of structure enables Google crawlers to better understand what content is on a site, what that content is about, and what parts of the content should be used for snippets.
As you can see, the SEO landscape is changing quite drastically, with inclusions such as “People Also Ask,” which helps users find relevant questions faster without the user needing to search, and snippets that provide quick solutions to users’ questions. Focusing on user intent is also incredibly important, especially with the recent updates to Google’s algorithm.
