What is SEO for me?
It’s a marketing function, driven by tech and the success of it depends on almost all the verticals aligned with the core business objective. Departmental synergies needs to be aligned keeping SEO as a median part of the growth plan. Any organisation that wants to churn the real value of the channel if in terms of meaningful business growth aligning with the revenue needs to think of it from the start and support the initiative in a prioritised matter.
A standalone SEO initiative without support can’t rank in SEO in 2022 for sure.
What are the trends & future of SEO?
The future of anything depends on one core factor – consistency. Organisations that are serious about consistent growth needs to allocate serious budgets for SEO as a channel. Speaking about growth, it gets more relative when revenue is attributed, isn’t it?
How about multi folds of CONSITANT revenue flowing in with MINIMALISTIC cost at a consistent rate? It this sounds like a plan, welcome to the world of SEO, it is the foremost channel that will have help you mark the EBIDTA positive.
What can we do to achieve this and what are the things that we can do?/ How to achieve/start with SEO as a function to achieve growth?
Also read: 4 key measurement and evaluation priorities for Asian brands & businesses
Trends of SEO
Let’s cover the 3 most important SEO trends and solutions to opt for when optimizing your website. I’ve managed to classify it based on 3 core pillars of SEO –
- Content
- Technical
- SERP enhancements
Ever evolving updates
Let’s accept the fact that we evolve as we learn, similarly the search engines also do, they learn via data and they evolve better. The core objective of any search engine is to suffice user’s intent. At the end google also wants to retain and gain more market share and would do innumerable things (updates) to keep the user experience at par.
- EAT & YMYL
- Mobile first indexing
- Google featured snippets
Recipe for better SEO starts with
1. E-A-T – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
The concept started back in 2014 but it evolved progressively in the recent days. The whole notion around EAT is based on content, it’s relevancy, authoritativeness and its value. Google has successfully managed to transform these pillars in format of an algorithm and added them in their search quality evaluation guide. Any format of content generated should basically adhere to these parameters and then published.
While we can focus and talk a lot more about it but the best to optimize content keeping EAT in mind is to generate more researched content which is basically adds more value and the best way to do so is to either hire a subject matter expert form that content or churn the content that really provides value in terms of solutions for users. There’s no typical measurement standards to it but a reader who actually values the content gratifies in a lot of manners.
YMYL – Your money your life, it’s an acronym used by google to gauge the impact of a content (subject matter) on your money and your life, it’s a standard/guiding principle which holds maximum gravity when optimizing for a content related to below mentioned industry – News & current events, laws, finance, shopping, health & safety and lastly information about a specific group of people which can be classified in a wide range like ethnicity, race, nationality, disability and so on.
To make it simple, YMYL is a concept of authoritativeness and clarity. The content is designed for a user to make decisions should be designed keeping these grounds in place.
Google doesn’t claim directly that EAT is the ranking factor but, we it can be treated as an directive and some data/user behaviour inputs can be taken via these signals.
2. Mobile first indexing
As per stats more then 55% (and growing) users access information via mobile phones then desktop. To keep up with users experience at core, google introduced mobile first indexing as an approach to evaluate websites performance on mobile devices when ranking them. Which means emphasis on content discoverability that is served and want to be crawled and indexed should be more.
What does it mean for you?
To keep up with this update, webmasters now have to perform rigorous crawling crawlability audits then before. Google has released certain tools like lightspeed, core web vitals and schema testing tool to perform these audits. Additionally, webmasters needs to be more careful when they serve important content via JS and CSS, blocking them in robots tag will harm the site’s performance if the content is hidden inside them. In short the contextual resources should allow google bot to crawl swiftly.
The core takeaway/metric of performance is to align content delivery similar for both the versions of the website i.e. mobile and desktop. If they both serve the similar experience then we’ve technically won the battle. Additionally using tools to measure content delivery used be used and keeping an eye on the mobile usability errors is must.
When google scores a page, it will test the speed, stability, and usability of the page version that the user ends up seeing.
3. SERP enhancements
Simply put, a SERP feature is any form of listing on a search engine results page that is not a standard organic result. These features are specifically designed to provide a better experience for searchers by tailoring each SERP to display more detailed and relevant information.
Some of the types of snippets
- Featured snippets
- Video carousals
- Rich snippets
- Sitelinks
- Site stories & Twitter cards
The most popular formats of featured snipped are designed in the these types
- Paragraph
- List
- Table
- Video
- Accordion
- Rich Answer
- Tool or Calculator
What does it mean for you?
Researchers claim that SERP features will reduce the probability of clicks that we used to get Which is no surprise, actually, the goal of these featured snippets is to give the searcher an instant answer to their question so they wouldn’t have to click.
When there’s a featured snippet at the #1 position, it only gets ~8.6% of clicks (on average), while the page that ranks right below it will get ~19.6% of clicks (on average).
Is it a blessing or a boon
It’s an opportunity, an opportunity to tap in the long tail /question based queries that the users are looking for. It can also relatively help in increasing the branding elements of your brand especially when you’re generating long form content which is benefiting the users.
How to approach SEO in 2022?
As we marginally covered the core trends and newer aspects of SEO, there needs to be a uniform solution a method or a blueprint that anyone can follow isn’t it. Well here’s my opinion on the same.
- Audits – Audits are the real core of any successful SEO strategy and it needs to be done in various formats.
- Technical audit – A technical audit can save and enhance experience for both users and bots. A well-paced recurring audit models needs to be designed with technical alignment in place for better performance.
- Content audit – How, what & when to write content? Should the content be based on trends or stats? How much to write and what to expect these are some of the questions that should pop-up often, a well devised content strategy aligned with proper tools needs to be a part of the core strategy.
- Technical support – SEO in 2022 is no more a core marketing driven function, it’s a universal function aligned with tech. All things audited and planned needs to be executed. A well aligned tech team can help SEO’s in numerous ways.
