SEO is a changing beast and staying on top of it should be your businesses top priority. Our last post on SEO was a hit, and helped a number of our clients see success with their SERP scores. That’s why it’s time to give you a head-start on boosting your SEO strategy for 2022!
Improve Your Site’s Core Web Vitals
What is a core vital? It’s a derivative of increased interest from Search Engines in an overall website’s UX quality. This yielded CWV, otherwise known as Core Web Vitals. We will be diving into how to apply Core Web Vitals to your site in our next blog.
In short, CWV consist of three metrics:
- Cumulative Layout Shift (or CLS), responsible for a page’s visual stability;
- Largest Contentful Paint (or LCP), tied to a page’s loading speed;
- First Input Delay (FID), showing the quality of your pages’ interactivity and how responsive they are.
Voice Search Keeps Growing
The 2020s were the year of the voice search, Siri, Alexa, and others have made searching the web a non-tactical task. According to a study by Findstack, 71% of consumers prefer to conduct queries by voice instead of typing. What’s more, three-quarters of all US households own at least one smart speaker.
With this sort of growth, Google has been leaning into this user behavior in order to judge the relevancy score of websites. What’s more, Google is working on a new Schema property called “speakable” to aid webmasters in their voice search SEO. This property identifies text within a webpage that is best suited for audio playback.
This type of SEO is especially important for local SEO, as using voice to find places “near me” or “close to me” has been at a higher level than ever before.
Understanding User Intent is Key
User Intent’s basic meaning translates to “considering where your target users are on the customer funnel journey and using appropriate keywords.” AKA: Optimize your content for users first and for search engines second. That means, all of your content should be directed towards the most relevant and common questions around your topic. Thinking about content through the lens of a curious customer will help the search engines recognize your article as an informative piece of content.
Give your Pages a Facelift
While creating fresh, up-to-date content will never stop being important, it’s also true that pages gain authority with years – like a fine wine. Therefore, it’s completely logical to refresh your older pages periodically, thus receiving the benefits of both new content and your pages’ accumulated age.
A way we do this within our own agency is to update legacy blogs (like SEO advice!) to be brought into the current year. Pruning old blogs, and adding new ones, help target the algorithm from both sides.
Evergreen Content is King
Fresh content is great and all, but unless you can make it go viral, then content with long-lasting relevance still beats it in terms of clicks and conversions. Naturally, every aspect of our lives evolves and changes with time, so even the best evergreen content can’t be relevant forever. Always watch out for any developments in your niche so you could update your most powerful pages on time.
Don’t Forget About MUM
Multitask Unified Model (or MUM) is a new AI-based algorithm created by Google. It is perhaps one of Google’s most ambitious projects so far. MUM analyzes a user’s query and compiles a thorough, in-depth answer from a multitude of relevant pages – no matter what language they are in originally. Therefore, with the language barrier out of the way, MUM is going to make SEO more global and much more competitive.
Want help bringing your content strategy into the new year? It is the perfect time to bring in a team of experts to revamp the way you market to the world, and communicate with customers. Give us a call for a complimentary evaluation and social media calendar for your first month.