SEO Consultant
Today we are here to show you what we think could be the best SEO tips for 2022.
Let’s see, these are not tricks that are going to boost your site’s organic rankings immediately and do magic. That, as you probably already know, doesn’t exist. What we’re going to show you are the top SEO best practices for 2022.
We’re going to break down our top SEO tips into 4 sections:
- Clicks
- Content strategy
- Technical SEO
- A general linkbuilding tip for the end
It’s a matter of taste, but personally I find that link building is the task that requires the most effort.
The clicks section, yes, of course, is so called because we are talking about actions aimed at boosting revenue in search results, the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Here it is not about improving positions, but about increasing the probability of conversion into clicks.
Within a content SEO strategy, it is probably the most creative organic positioning work, although the technical can also be quite creative. Let’s go over some trends, things that always play and things that are back.
On the technical side? Well, let’s remember how important Core Web Vitals are going to be this year 2022. User experience to the power. Also, of course, improvements in sitemaps. For some time now, indexing has been driving more than one organic strategist crazy.
We are sure that among our best SEO tips for 2022 you will find many opportunities or remember pending tasks. It is also important to remember that these ideas are suitable for websites with a previous work on acquiring organic traffic, that assume basic SEO guidelines, and that have even been audited beforehand.
A bit of SEO strategy context
índice
So I go on Twitter the other day and I get angry. The usual, right? Ah, I was going to tell you the best SEO tips for 2022, but first I’ll give you some context.
Eli Schwartz, one of the most quoted SEO consultants and also a bestselling author on Amazon tweeted something that made me smile with a teary emoticon. What he says is clear and obvious. What really caught my attention were some of the responses to his tweet. The faces, Juan.
Of course it’s at least a little criticisable that there are businesses that invest heavily in paid traffic and pay little attention to SEO. I don’t want to jump down your throat either, that’s not what we’re here for, but I don’t see the point in responding that this happens just because paid traffic offers better measurement data.
Measuring the success of an SEO strategy is obviously something perfectly achievable.
Maybe not in the same way. You may not have information about the paid keywords (KW) that convert presented as with your Ads (and this doesn’t always have to be the case), but this doesn’t mean that an SEO strategy can’t be profitable, nor that it can’t be measured.
How to improve clicks on search results?
We start with click-through improvements and the recent addition of favicons to desktop search results. They arrived in mobile results in 2020 and it is striking how few sites pay attention to this point.
Including your favicon in your SERPs can represent a good opportunity to differentiate yourself, also to slightly improve your CTR figures. Creating a favicon and making it visible is not complicated at all.
It is simply a matter of adapting your logo image to a square image file, 48 x 48, 96 x 96 or 144 x 144 pixels, and embedding it on your website involves a line of code, or a couple of clicks in the main CMSs such as WordPress or Prestashop.
Another SEO practice that can help a lot to boost CTR in your results is the inclusion of FAQ and how-to schema information in your pages that are likely to show it.
We’ve also recently talked about this and, seriously, the improvement can be dramatic. It’s not always easy for your pages to conquer enhanced or enriched SERP results, but when they do the difference in click-through rates is overwhelming.
How-to’s and FAQ’s fish for clicks
This is about analysing which pages can collect the most relevant information about your site and outlining it within the HTML code in questions and answers, so that they can be displayed in such a way.
Finally, we have to talk about meta descriptions. Please pay attention to meta descriptions, it is the longest part of the SERP and where there are the most possibilities to introduce relevant KW. It is estimated that 30% of the sites indexed by Google do not use meta descriptions. If we analyse which ones don’t use them correctly or which also miss opportunities, I’ll bet a hand with the one I’m writing, just a guess, but I’m sure the figure at least doubles.
This point is a bit controversial, to be honest. It is true that Google rewrites 70% of the meta descriptions it offers in search results. This is usually because the keywords that are displayed do not respond exactly to the user’s query. A refined work on persuasive and semantic meta descriptions can incredibly boost CTR results.
SEO tips on content strategy
As we have already mentioned, in the case of the recommendations for 2022 in SEO improvements in content strategy, we are talking about very used SEO techniques or returning trends, but they are sure to be the most effective.
We have to start by readapting the TOP contents that offer the best results for your site. It is logical to think that improving what is good, can only bring something better, isn’t it?
It is logical and it is profitable for Google positioning. Crawlers like updates, they like relevant content to be updated. Here we are talking about small changes, but never changing the URL. Modifications in titles, betting on new keywords, updating images…
Beyond evaluating the effort of an internal linking audit that your site may need, this strategy can also be assumed with a priority-profitability criterion that helps to organise tasks.
Linking a KW from a new post to an old content, not only benefits the results obtained by the linked post and reputation. The more systematic and organised this work is, the higher the increase in user retention rate and the lower the bounce rate will be.
Extensive and thoughtful content attracts links
Another tip in SEO of content that could not be missed is the investment in long content over 800 words, or in other words, avoiding thin content pages as much as possible.
Just because a post is long, over 1,000 or 2,000 words, does not mean that it will rank better. Slightly shorter content can also get good positions. The length of a content is not a ranking factor.
However, the length of a post can influence the number of links it can get, in fact some say that it is one of the main factors that influence the number of backlinks it can get.
Careful titles that point to relevant keywords, listings and indexes and the use of images are especially favourable for obtaining links in long contents.
Technical SEO for 2022
The year 2022, in terms of SEO, is the year to invest in the user experience. Ok, this is something that is often said, ok, but Google’s Core Web Vitals update that started to be implemented in 2021 is already starting to take effect. We’ve told you about that before too.
These experience metrics that we already told you about a few weeks ago are mainly focused on the loading speed and how the different elements of a page are displayed.
That is, the time it takes to load a result and to what extent the structure of the result varies until it is finally displayed. To improve these results, the focus should be on the usual improvements in loading speed. Here we need to touch a bit more code.
We also said we were going to talk about sitemaps. Since the beginning of 2021 there are a lot of people in the SEO business who are quite concerned about indexing.
Did somebody say crawl budget? Search engines sometimes don’t focus on crawling an entire site. Or put another way, there are pages that may be left out, simply because the spiders decide to pass over when they get tired of it.
An interesting technical SEO recommendation for 2022 may be to limit the sitemap to 10,000 pages. This doesn’t have to be the case for your site, this is a significant size, but it may serve as an explanation.
Limit sitemaps and prioritise profitable pages
The limit for a sitemap is 50,000 URLs. Limiting the number of results included in a Sitemap can sustainably improve crawlability.
Splitting the effort into several smaller sitemaps can help improve the results you get from Google Search Console. You can check what stays in and what stays out.
This leads us to talk about a strategy of dynamic sitemaps, or what is the same, prioritise the addresses that are included in each of the sitemaps depending on the need for crawling that you have. The most important ones first, of course. To continue with the same proportional scales, here we could be talking about a small sitemap of 1,000 addresses. Divide and conquer.
Work on link building
Some of us think that link building can be one of the most time-consuming tasks in an SEO strategy. You have to put a lot of effort into it and in many cases it is a medium to long term investment.
It is not the easiest job, nor is it the most rewarding, but you have to get on with it. As we said when we talked about SEO tips for content strategy, the elaboration of extensive and careful content can be a good way to get external links. This is known as passive link acquisition.
It is about attracting links to your site in a natural way. Examples of types of content to attract links? Well, with the creation of content that answer current questions, that solve questions in general, tutorials and whitepapers about your business or services, guides…
Investing in this type of content in a sustained and long-term manner can be one of the best tactics to attract links.
Another good idea for link building is to analyse your competitors’ links. Amongst your best competitors and for your best results. We have also reviewed that updating and working on your top pages helps you to climb up the rankings.
There are quite a few online tools and resources, usually paid, yes, that allow you to find out which pages are linking to your competitors. I’m sure you could find several examples among your own competitors. That’s the way to go.
These are the best SEO ideas for 2022 that we had to tell you about. As we have already said, this is not a secret potion that will magically boost your rankings.
That’s why, after assuming some basic guidelines in organic positioning and within an established strategic concept, all the SEO tips we have given you can surely bring important benefits to your website’s organic search results.
