Every year brings new opportunities to reevaluate and refine our SEO strategies to be more targeted and impactful for our brands and clients. It’s estimated that 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search, and as a result, investing in SEO continues to be a valuable, affordable investment for brands who want to grow their market share and revenue.

Because Google regularly updates their algorithm and the competitive landscapes of keywords constantly change, our SEO strategy needs to remain close behind. If you want to see more SEO success in 2022 and beyond, keep these SEO tips in mind as you tailor and target your digital strategy.

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1. Prioritize High-Quality Content

Although Google’s algorithms are regularly updated, their north star has always remained the same: Quality. Google wants to rank and promote web pages that provide useful, valuable, and relevant information to their users.

To rank higher in search results, your team needs to prioritize the quality of your web pages over anything else. If you’re not quite sure what quality means, Google looks for the following quality-signals when ranking web pages:

• Original reporting or analysis
• Comprehensive and topically-rich copy
• Fast-loading, interactive, and visually stable content
• Relevant internal and external links
• Strong relevance and satisfaction of search intent

Google is getting better at recognizing quality-signals, so even if your competitors have higher authority than your domain, you can still outrank them if Google sees your content as more useful and comprehensive.

2. Invest in your Page Experience

The quality of a web page is not only in the subject matter, but in how the page performs for users. With Google’s recent Page Experience update, the technical performance of your web pages will be even more vital to SEO success in 2022.

Google measures the technical experience of web page in these primary areas:

• Core Web Vitals: These metrics include Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay. Strong Core Web Vitals signal a high-performing web page.
• Mobile-Usability: Pages should load quickly and be responsive on mobile devices
• Security: Google favors pages that use https protocols and provide a safe and secure browsing experience for users

To audit your current Core Web Vitals, use PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, or Google Search Console. If Google has flagged any of your pages to have Core Web Vitals issues, those pages are unlikely to rank well until those performance issues are resolved.

3. Target Long-Tail and Low-Competition Keywords

If you’re deploying an SEO campaign in a highly competitive market, it can take more time and authority building before you can rank on page 1, particularly for competitive keywords in your industry.

So to start driving traffic to your website in the meantime, find less competitive or long-tail keywords that share similar search intent but are more realistic to rank for. This often takes more time and research, but it’s worth it to start earning clicks faster. As you build your site authority, you can rank for those more competitive terms in the long-term.

4. Bring AI Solutions into your SEO Strategy

AI solutions can help solve some of marketing’s biggest challenges: Personalization, content creation at scale, and making sense of large amounts of data.

Bringing AI into your martech stack can be essential to growing faster and outranking your competitors in less time. Some of my favorite SEO tools utilize AI, NLP, and machine learning technology to give web pages a competitive edge and more ranking potential.

Try out free trials of tools like SearchAtlas, CopyAI, or BrightLocal to get an introduction to the competitive advantage AI can bring to your SEO.

5. Improve your SEO Analytics

How can you improve your SEO if you don’t have a complete picture of your current keyword rankings? Google Search Console is one of the best tools available for understanding which keywords are driving the most traffic and where untapped traffic opportunities still lie.

You can use the tool to identify any pages on your website with high impressions but low organic traffic. This usually means that Google is showing the content for lots of searchers, but your ranking position is not high enough to earn actual clicks.

Building backlinks to those pages or improving their quality and comprehensiveness could potentially mean a huge influx of traffic to your website.

6. Launch a Digital PR or Link Building Campaign

Although quality content is becoming more powerful, Google’s #1 ranking factor is still the number of unique referring domains pointing to your website. Earning backlinks is an essential part of SEO and still one of the best, quickest ways to see elevated rankings in the SERPs.

If you do not have an SEO, content marketing, or public relations team actively seeking out backlink opportunities, you are missing out on the chance to elevate your average positions across all of your keywords.

Look for reputable publications in your industry to collaborate with, provide thought leadership to, or earn press coverage from. The more authoritative and reputable your referring domains are, the more likely those backlinks are to move the needle on your site authority.

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Conclusion

Although it can feel like SEO is constantly changing, the reality is, the core concepts remain the same. Websites that take the time to create quality, trustworthy, and high-performing web experiences for users are bound to see SEO success in 2022 and beyond.