If you work in the marketing industry, you’re well aware that nailing down the optimal strategy for your campaign means hitting a target that’s constantly moving. What was ‘best practice’ six months ago might be obsolete today, and algorithms are always evolving to better serve a platform’s users base.
SEO is, as a concept, challenging to fully understand. Nobody knows all of the factors that go into search rankings, and even if they did, the criteria will likely change before you know it. Still, that’s no excuse for not being up-to-date on the latest list of SEO tips you need to be taking into consideration for your 2022 strategy. See what’s on the horizon:
Expect to See More MUM Than BERT
Ah, our friends MUM and BERT – you’ve heard of them, right? BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations for Transformers, is soon to be a thing of the past. Its replacement is MUM, or Multitask Unified Model. The main takeaway for SEO professionals is that optimization is no longer just a text-based game. MUM takes into account images, webpage snippets, and even video clips in order to find the content that a user is seeking.
Web browsing is becoming a multimedia experience, and the engineers who build search algorithms have recognized that all types of content should be evaluated before presenting someone with a list of results to their query.
Integration Between Channels Is Crucial
Building your online reputation is a major component of searchability. When I say “reputation,” I’m referring to how reliable machine-learning systems find your brand to be, digitally speaking. For example, having a blog that is updated regularly (and hopefully optimized for SEO in the traditional sense) and a website that functions as it should is no longer enough to raise your search position.
Your various digital channels – including social media, PPC campaigns, display advertising, and your website/blog – are all factored into the equation. Your messaging should be consistent, and your audience should be exposed to the different aspects of your online presence. When things work together, you’re showing the Googles and Bings of the world that you’re a well-rounded company. The vast majority of companies that have checked off all the boxes required for a good digital presence are likely to be the type of company consumers are looking for when they search for businesses in your industry. Make yourself one of these companies, and a large part of the SEO component will take care of itself.
Evergreen Content Matters
Incorporating the latest news into your website’s content is great. When there’s a topic in which a large number of people are interested, posting something on the subject is great. Although you want to insert your brand into the conversation on current topics, it’s still important to have content that is relevant today, as well as weeks, months, and years into the future.
For example, if you’re tasked with creating content for a brand in the health industry, you might include a blog post on your website that breaks down some of the latest health trends which have become popular in the market at the current time. This will help boost your SEO in the short term, but once the “trends” have passed (and they always do), your content will no longer be working for you. If you’ve written content that is evergreen, such as “Best Foods to Eat Before You Go For a Run,” there’s a good chance that someone would be just as interested in reading your article in two years as they would be the moment you posted it.
There’s real value to a content plan that stays relevant long after you post it. Various search networks are starting to recognize that “chasing” the latest news in hopes of a search ranking boost is somewhat akin to keyword stuffing. If you’re doing it too often, they’ll catch on and rank you accordingly.
Site Architecture
Building a website that’s optimized for search ranking success requires thoughtful planning. The word at the top of your strategic architecture should be “efficiency.” Though there are a number of factors that should be considered in order to build a perfectly-efficient site, at that top of the list is topic organization. More specifically, topic organization prioritized ahead of keyword organization.
When someone searches for a product or service your business provides, Google doesn’t just look to websites that have the most keywords that match the particular search. It also takes context into account, such as which category the page is under, the heading(s) included in the content, and additional tags that help their algorithms trust the page actually has the information the front-end user is looking to find with their search.
Setting up your website should involve careful planning about not just which content makes it onto the site, but where that content lives. When your site is well-organized, it’s most effective for visitors, and SEO is improved as a result.
Think About How You’d Say It
Whether or not you use it personally, voice-to-text search is something that has grown significantly in popularity over the past handful of years. Google has introduced LaMDA in order to interpret language in a way that’s more consistent with how it’s actually spoken.
When writing website copy, or meta titles that will serve as a brief snapshot into a blog post or informational web page, it’s important to remember that you should maintain a conversational tone that sounds natural. Obviously, you don’t want to come off as unprofessional or careless, but if your sentence structure and word choices sound more like an academic journal than a website, it’s going to hurt you in the eyes of the SEO algorithm.
Wrapping Up
Being an SEO expert requires staying up on the latest news from the internet’s most prominent search engine platforms. Even if you don’t know every single detail of how to rank in the top spot, as long as you know more than your competitors you can put yourself in a position to be successful.
Need help getting in front of your audience? Get in touch today for customized solutions that fit your brand, goals, and budget.
