Marketing experts made significant headway in discovering helpful information on website optimization for businesses in 2022. Many of these discoveries led to the resurfacing of older Seo Trends, while others have only been made possible due to technological advances in recent years.
Regardless of their original creation date, marketing experts have a seemingly endless list of prevalent SEO strategies to bring with them into the new year.
2022 SEO Trends
Trends this year of all kinds have come and gone quicker than any year prior. After breaking down each of the SEO trends of 2022, marketing experts at professional optimization company, Firestarter SEO, have compiled a list of SEO trends worth perusing for all businesses in 2023.
Transitioning from Short-Form Content to Long-Form Content
While short-form content can be valuable for SEO purposes for numerous reasons, long-form content takes the cake as one of the top SEO trends of 2022.
Higher Content Grade
The grade of a piece of content is determined by how well a specific topic is covered throughout the writing. Long-form content
greatly outperforms short-form content in this category simply because it creates the opportunity to go into greater detail about a topic at hand.
However, it’s important to take into account just how long the long-form content should be.
How Long is Long Enough?
Marketing experts categorize long-form content as writing anywhere from 1000-7,500 words, while short-form content contains less than 1,000 words.
While the range of content that is considered to be long-form is large, and it’s necessary to analyze competitors when deciding on the best content length, content with the highest rankings on Google throughout 2022 are those that are roughly 1,500-2,000 words long. This word count range is predicted to continue to show the best results in SEO strategies aiming to reach the first page of Google in the new year.
Optimizing for Local SEO
In recent years, searches containing the keywords “near me” have significantly increased, with 12% of users searching for businesses in a specific city, country, or region every day.
Optimized Google Business Profile
Since 2020, online businesses have become more prevalent, increasing the difficulty of individual companies to stand out.
Optimizing Google Business profiles has consistently been an SEO trend over the last few years, and marketing experts don’t see that changing anytime soon. An optimized GBF increases the chances of a business coming up in search results while also ensuring those users specifically looking to shop local will see where and how to best shop that business’s products.
Local Link Building
Building backlinks is vital in any SEO strategy, but it’s even more impactful for local SEO.
Local link building requires any other local webpage, including blogs and forums, to link a business’s website within its content. Local backlinks inform Google of a website’s relevancy, therefore creating new Audience exposure, boosting its ranking, driving traffic, and increasing domain authority – all beneficial for local SEO.
Local Keyword Research
Taking the time to perform keyword research to best resonate with target audiences can be exponentially beneficial for local SEO efforts.
Keywords that pertain to what audiences within the local area are searching for push further into that niche, increasing the business’s visibility.
Create the Best User Experience
One of the most beneficial SEO trends this year that’s proven worth bringing into 2023 is focusing on user experience.
Understanding Audiences
User experience largely depends on the varying wants and needs of audiences, which can change based on each business. Because of this, it’s crucial for businesses to perform research that can help them get to know their audience as much as possible.
Easy Navigation
Regardless of the type of business or the audience that they have, 94% of users across the board agree that one thing is necessary – the ability to quickly find what they’re looking for when entering a website. Navigating with ease is pertinent to the audience’s experience while engaging with a website. When a website is challenging to navigate, users will likely exit out and go to a competitor’s page to find what they need.
Marketing experts placing their efforts towards creating a positive experience for audiences greatly increases the odds of them remaining on the website for longer, which has a direct impact on website visibility and SEO rankings.
Mobile Friendly SEO
As of 2022, almost 60% of internet traffic across the world are user browsing on their cell phones, so it makes sense that Google crawlers prioritize mobile-first indexed content.
Incorporating Responsive Design
Google crawlers ranking mobile-friendly webpages higher isn’t the only initiative for businesses to have an easy option for users to view a website on their cell phones. Studies show that 74% of users are more likely to return to a mobile friendly website, and 67% of those users are more likely to buy from them.
While marketing experts emphasize the importance of businesses having a mobile version of their website for audiences to easily navigate through products, services, and content, this doesn’t mean that the website should only be easily viewed on mobile phones.
To stay on top of SEO trends, businesses need to ensure their website has a responsive design that adapts to their audience’s screens regardless of if they choose to do so on a laptop, desktop, cellphone, tablet, or any other device to scroll.
Prioritize High Quality Content
Producing mass amounts of content is a priority for many businesses, but quantity is less important than quality for enhancing SEO rankings.
Uniqueness Content Score
Google continuously makes improvements in its search result rankings, one of those improvements being ranking unique content above recycled content. As a result, throughout 2022, the importance of creating unique content wasn’t lost on businesses when developing their SEO strategies.
Unique content entails writing on new concepts and topics in a meaningful way that provides audiences with important information. Unique content helps audiences connect with a business, which attracts not only significantly more traffic but also opens increases the odds of these audiences becoming repeat visitors or customers.
Image SEO Trend
Retaining users’ interest while reading website and blog content has become increasingly complex, as attention span has dropped to only eight seconds within the last few years. However, keeping audiences on a website for as long as possible is crucial to a lengthened visit time, which is highly considered by Google for SEO rankings.
One way marketing experts have found aids in retaining interest is by adding high quality images frequently throughout the content. However, adding any random image isn’t going to be beneficial since larger image files slow down website servers’ loading speed. It’s necessary to optimize an image by compressing, renaming, and considering its’ format prior to using it to break up content.
Featured Snippets
Google knows that audiences prefer to spend as little time scrolling on to find what they’re looking for as possible. So throughout 2022, creating a featured snippet box with thorough yet concise content that explains what will be shown when clicking that specific link has become a popular trend for SEO, as it increases the organic click-through rate by 8.6%.
Popular Voice Search Trends
The popularity of using voice search like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa to find answers has quickly risen over recent years.
In 2022, 20% of mobile searches were done using voice search. The trend of voice searching has made it necessary to find a way to implement it into SEO strategies. Marketing experts have found that using longer and natural language keywords is the best way to reach audiences that are using voice searches.
Implementing Voice Search into SEO Strategies
Voice search marketing tactics steer more content towards answering more specific questions that target audiences ask. Many businesses have already begun to explore creating content with natural language keywords, and it’s predicted that this SEO trend will continue to grow throughout 2023.
Including video snippets throughout the content is another way that businesses are participating in implementing voice search strategies to keep up with trends. These snippets include the long-tail keywords into content without disrupting the writing flow or appearing unnatural.
Hiring a Professional Search Engine Optimization Company
SEO efforts are rapidly increasing, making it absolutely necessary for businesses to work with the best SEO professionals to ensure they’re staying ahead of their competitors.
Throughout this year, the amount of time and effort spent developing and maintaining the best SEO strategy possible for businesses wasn’t lost on marketing experts, causing the trend of hiring a professional optimization company to catch on.
Award Winning SEO Company
With the marketing being saturated with different SEO companies promising to be the best, it can take time to decide which one to trust. Fortunately, Firestarter SEO has a team of professional website optimizers with proven positive outcomes from their search engine optimization services.
If your New Year’s resolution is to bring the most beneficial SEO trends of 2022 into the new year, contact Firestarter SEO for the best 2023 SEO success.
The post Marketing Experts Best SEO Trends Going into 2023 appeared first on Firestarter.
