Before we begin, let’s just refresh our head with two absolute basics of SEO:
A) On-Page (where you work on your website/s) and Off-Page (where you work on building quality backlinks from high authority websites)
B) Its all about creating contextual (/personalized) content using right set of KW you want to rank for (text, infographics, video, audio) to be part of both on-page and off-page.
Let’s get started! Here are some of the SEO strategies you need to look at without-a-miss to up your game in 2022:
1) CONTENT
SEO, in my opinion, is all about content and the top 3 content requirements for SEO in 2022 are:
A) First and foremost – Personalization –
Search engines are all about personalization since the beginning. User puts in a keyword or phrase and the expectation is that the most relevant content should appear. Google makes this need of the user it’s priority and hence is the #1 search engine in the world. Marketers who take care of the personalization aspect in everything they do (content, landing page, ad campaign, etc.) will always prosper. Web 3.0 concepts of Inbound Marketing, Account Based Marketing, Design Thinking are all based on personalization, the emotional needs of the audience. In other words, your customers are people, not just purchasers of your product or service.
Having said that, Search Engines have always made sure personalization takes the first seat and will continue to do so in 2022 using AI and ML. You would’ve observed, the search results you see on a query would be different from what your friend would get for the same query. That’s because Google Chrome tracks what each user likes to read, watch and consume and try to personalize results accordingly. You would’ve also observed the role Google Assistant (/Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa) are playing in pre-filled search queries that you either would’ve just uttered or might have thought about. Hence, as marketer, whether you like it or not personalization is going to stay like a corner stone of all you do.
What follows if you cracked the personalization nut? The user engagement. Search engines will, if not already have, increase the score on amount of engagement, time spent on page and goal completion in the ranking algorithm. You have to take care of personalization through the user journey under your SEO program and on-page content optimization to make sure you keep people from pogo-sticking (a user lands on your page after clicking the link from search results and going back to search results to click another link as your content wasn’t engaging enough, in other words user did not find information on your website/landing page relevant enough).
B) Volume and Consistent Content Creation for both on-page and off-page.
Simply put, the more relevant content produced with right keywords and put out there, better the reach and hence better authority you get in your niche against competition. And the challenge is obvious too, how to maintain consistent volume of quality content generation to be able to create your topical authority. That’s where AI Content Creation Tools comes handy and the prediction is the use of these tools will be on rise as the tools themselves mature in terms of making content contextually relevant.
Further reading:
What is Topical Authority? The larger the coverage your website has on a topic, more authority search engine bots would deem you on that topic. Read all about topical authority here – https://www.searchenginejournal.com/topical-authority/247189/
What is AI Content Creation? – AI content creation means that a machine creates content for you to deliver customized digital experiences to achieve micro-moments of influence with your audiences. Read all about the strategy and the available tools here – https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/ai-tools-for-content-strategy
C) Finally to add to the need of consistently creating quality personalized content, the focus is also on the format of the content, that is interactive, i.e., video. Search engines are pushing video content in a big way and hence YouTube is the place to be to cover your overall SEO game.
2) HIGH AUTHORITY BACKLINKS
Off-Page SEO is all about building high authority backlinks for your website. Simply put, get your website linked back with highly trusted sources (with domain authority greater than 70) for Google to deem you the authority. Some of the known methods to put your efforts on and recommended in order of priority:-
> Guest Posts – find quality content producers/publishers who maintain a good reputation on and around the topic of your business, to write about your niche (ensuring the right keywords are used contextually) and give you the link back.
> White hat link insertion – reach out to relevant sites requesting them to place your link in their existing article. You will see success in this activity only if your site is interesting enough for them. In other words, they’ll only repond positively when they see the value of placing your link in their article for their users. And also if they get a link back to their site. Remember, try manual reach outs as mass reach outs using a software is something Google hates and penalizes pretty badly.
> Editorial Link Building – is something that you don’t pay for, request for and trade for. Editorial Links unlike acquired links are links which your site organically attracts because you’re producing quality content, taking it to the audience via social networking sites and public relations. For examples there are a lot of links I’ve shared in this article.
> Citations – typically includes brand name, phone number and/or address are still important for local SEO, helps build credibility with your audience. Search engines do give an eye of interest to links coming from there, sites like Yelp, Google Sites, Houzz, Manta, etc. Here are some tools to get help with local citation building – https://loganix.com/local-citation-software/
Further reading: All about Link Building – https://www.semrush.com/blog/link-building/
3) PARASITE SEO / BARNACLE SEO
What is Parasite SEO? It’s an off-page SEO activity where you put your content on Web 2.0 websites (WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, LinkedIn, Vimeo, YouTube, Quora, Yelp, etc.) and leverage their domain authority. For example, along side posting quality content here on www.rakeshsingh.me, I also put my content on LinkedIn Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lead-scoring-basics-tips-digitalmarketing-rakesh-singh/) or Medium.com (https://medium.com/@sinhrakesh/rethinking-employer-branding-48e699c040fe). Like topical authority, parasite SEO is something that search engines would see as deliberate effort to boost search engine ranking. Until they come up with an algorithm update to handle that, parasite SEO will continue to help build backlinks. In a nutshell, create quality content pieces or videos with 1000+ words on Web2.0 sites, blast social signals and links at it. The concept of Parasite/Barnacle SEO works on Private Blog Network and PBN’s need to be made with a word of caution. As Niel Patel says, “these are technically not a black-hat SEO strategy but are not white-hat either”- (https://neilpatel.com/blog/private-blog-networks/)
4) GOOGLE ALGORITHM CHANGE
Life of a digital marketer is beautiful as it’s constantly changing. You want to stay relevant, better keep an eye on changing algorithms of the platforms (search engines in this case). Google will keep updating the algorithms and the latest to keep close eye on are:
> Page Title Rewrites — August 16, 2021 – Title tags replaced in SERPs with other relevant text from a webpage – https://moz.com/blog/ways-google-rewrites-title-tags
> SERP Features – here is the list – https://www.theegg.com/seo/apac/a-complete-guide-to-google-serp-features/
> Keep an eye on all the Google Updates Here – https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
Best way to make sure algorithm updates don’t hit you bad, consistently take care of three basics:
a) Technical SEO – clean untidy URL structures, take care of site-speed by remove junk from your code, implement redirects and fix your broken links, responsive UI and UX, add XML sitemap, implement no-index and canonical tag to fix duplicate and thin content issues
b) Content – personalize, as explained above, per users’ search intent | internal linking to take care of the user journey.
c) Backlinks – make sure they’re white-hat, diverse and high authority
Hope the above help you build your SEO game stronger this year! Do leave a comment, whether you agree, disagree or want to add to add to the list above.
With that, stay safe and have a rocking 2022.
