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Digital marketing over the past year has seen a dramatic change in how Google is ranking businesses. These days it’s easier to move above your competition even if your business is new. It just requires the know-how, time, and effort.
Throughout 2022, Google has placed importance on website usability. From how long your site takes to load, and how users interact with your site. It looks at how well your site is optimised on mobile devices.
Below are the top SEO trends for 2022. Knowing these will give you a competitive advantage and help your business rank up on Google. Regardless of how old or big your business is.
High-quality content
Every year the demand for content increases not just by Google, but by the people visiting a site. It has become the staple of most digital marketing strategies, especially when concerning SEO.
A website needs a lot of content to compete in the digital battlefield which is SEO.
Does your website have a blog? Are your key landing pages in-depth and cover your topic well?
Depending on the competitiveness of your industry, your key landing pages require in-depth content that covers that topic in its entirety. Studies have shown landing pages with 3,000+ words are much more likely to rank higher on Google.
On-page SEO
On-Page SEO has always been an important Google factor, but in 2022, it’s increasingly more important. There are plenty of tools online that help you discover issues throughout your website. The most popular tools include:
By using tools like the ones listed above, you can help create a better user experience for your customers. They will help you uncover issues such as broken links, slow load speeds, content duplication, metadata issues, and much more.
Run these reports on your website to help discover these issues and work to fix them. This will help your customers browse your website with ease and you will be rewarded by Google in return.
Quality backlinks
Backlinks are still an important ranking factor in 2022. In fact, it counts towards 52 percent of your rank ability.
If you’re a new business, this will undoubtedly be your biggest hurdle. Your competitors will have a higher number of links back to your website from years of trading.
Don’t let this intimidate you. In 2022 Google places a lot more weight on the relevance and quality of backlinks.
Reach out to people in relevant industries and generate high-quality backlinks, you won’t need as many referring domains as your competitors, you only need relevant, high-quality ones.
Site speed
Did you know that every second extra that it takes for your website to load, you increase your bounce rate by eight percent? Google certainly does, and that’s why in 2022 site speed optimisation is a critical aspect of your SEO strategy.
So how fast should your website load? Anything under 4 seconds is our recommendation, but don’t just look at your desktop site speed, the speed of your website on mobile devices is just as, if not more, important for helping you rank up on Google.
Using a tool like www.gtmetrix.com to test the speed can help find these issues on your website and you start optimising based on their suggestion.
If you’re using WordPress as your preferred CRM, we recommend a site speed plugin like WP Rocket or W3 Cache to help improve the speed of your website.
Crawlability and internal linking
Lastly, ensuring Google can crawl your website with ease is critical to your digital performance. Run your website through Google Search Console to help uncover any performance issues within your website.
Upload your sitemap.xml to assist Google in the crawling of your website, this will help you get indexed faster and tells Google the overall hierarchy of your website.
Another great way to improve the crawlability of your website is to incorporate internal links within your content. This helps build context around your pages and will certainly help improve your Google rankings in 2022.
Chris Sears is the founder and CEO of Launch North.
