Whether you’re a small business owner, a digital marketing agency, or an established brand trying to hold their ground, SEO is still one of the most important aspects of digital marketing in 2022. Now, we’re not going to call it easy, nor will we call it a fast track to the top. But, we will say that with a little bit of patience and the right strategies, SEO can help you climb to the heights of search results pages.
Read on for the top 5 tips for SEO in 2022. If you’re able to tackle them yourself, that’s awesome! But we know SEO can be confusing, so if you need some help with it, we know a few experts.
Track Your Competitors Best Performing Pages
Everybody has competitors and fortunately for businesses in 2022, most of their marketing strategies can be easily tracked and analyzed. Finding your top competitors’ organic traffic is one of the most surefire ways to optimize your businesses’ SEO strategy. There are many tools that can accomplish this. We prefer SEMRush’s Organic Research Tool to figure out what’s driving your competitors’ organic traffic.
Understanding the specific keywords and content they’re ranking for can help you get right up there with them. You might even find holes in their content that you can fill with your own. Understanding the competitors’ strategy might provide you with some golden opportunities to optimize and improve your existing content as well.
Creating Content Strategies With a Purpose
There’s a lot of content out there. With it being easier than ever to produce and distribute, it seems like people these days are creating content just to do it. But not you. You’re going for real results here. That is why your content needs to be purposeful and beneficial to your overall strategy.
What goes into making a strategy you ask? Determining what keywords you want to rank for is a good starting point. You can follow that up by creating blogs and videos (we’ll get to that later) that cover topics surrounding those keywords.
Your content should be focused on showcasing your expertise in your field. For example, if you’re a carpenter, everything you produce should be about carpentry. How To’s, best practices, tutorials, etc. Google wants to deliver experts to their customers, and that’s what you need to communicate in order to rank highly on search engines.
Using Digital PR to Earn Authoritative Backlinks
Backlinks remain one of Google’s top ranking factors in 2022. What’s a backlink? It’s a link from another website that leads to your content. It’s basically a digital co-sign from whoever is linking to your content. This tells Google that they think your content is valuable.
Using digital PR to get journalists and publishers to link and cover your content is one of the best ways to rise in the rankings. Publishing research studies, expert insights on your industry, and other linkable assets like infographics are all ways to earn backlinks.
For example, we’re going to link to an article on link building and digital PR from Search Engine Journal here, and that’s going to tell the algorithm that we find that particular article helpful, and will therefore give them a backlink that Google will take into account when ranking their page against similar pages.
Focus on UX
Let’s not lie here, Google is just as much of a product as they are a service. They want to provide the best experience for their customers, much like any other business. So, making sure the user experience on your website is in top shape is a spot you cannot miss.
Optimizing your website loading speeds, stability, interactiveness, mobile experience, and responsiveness are all things that Google weighs when ranking sites for a query. Put it this way. If you were searching for topics in a book, and that book was unreadable for whatever reason, you probably wouldn’t get much from it, no matter how good the information is. Google is no different. You can use Google’s Core Web Vitals Tool within Google Search Console to test all of the aforementioned checkboxes.
Recreate Blogs as Videos
Video marketing is essential in 2022. It’s more digestible, it’s more interactive, and it’s just plain better for the majority of people. Recreating some of your most researched or visited pages as videos can really boost your SEO. Research shows that publishers who utilize video content on their website see a 41% increase in traffic from search than those who solely rely on written content.
In addition to adding videos to your website, ensuring they are available on YouTube is vital to leveraging your video content. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, behind Google, so it only makes sense to have easily accessible content there too.
Wrap Up
SEO is a necessity in 2022. So much is found through search engines and if you want to build a thriving business, you need to rank. We’re not going to call SEO easy, nor are we going to call it fast. But, we are going to say that with these tips, you are vastly more prepared to climb the SEO mountain.
It’s important to note that Google updates their algorithm pretty frequently, so it’s important to keep up to date with the changes. Or, you could bring in the SEO experts at DSM, who are always ready to help.
If you’re looking to build a booming online sales pipeline and outrank your competition, shoot us a message. We’re here to help.
