As usual, the new year will bring new changes, trends, and challenges in the ever-changing world of search engine optimization. When it comes to your website, there are some very specific things you can do to boost your efforts for SEO in 2022.
What Are your Core Website Vitals?
Core Website Values became a SEO ranking factor in 2021 and will be a HUGE influencer in 2022. So what is Core Website Vitals? Google is hooking your site up to a monitoring system to see if it can stand up to its stress test. In addition, Google is testing for three main areas to evaluate user experience.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), AKA Load time. The time it takes for a page’s primary content to load. The ideal LCP is 2.5 seconds or faster.
- First Input Delay (FID) AKA you can see, but nothing is actionable. An ideal FID is less than 100 ms.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Measures visual stability. This is the amount of unexpected layout shift of visual page content. The ideal CLS is less than .1.
How do you find out if your site or pages have good vitals? There are several tools and Chrome plugins you can use. The better news is they are Free! Google Search Console is a great tool to address speed, get performance reports, and loads more insights. Check out their Youtube channel for more info.
Here are a few more resources to help with other areas of your site vitals:
Create Content for Google Passage Ranking
The Roaring 20’s brought yet another interesting Google update, The Google Passage Ranking. This update on a Google scale was massive, affecting 7% of all searches. (To put that into perspective, Google Penguin only impacted 3.1% of all queries.) So Kind of a big deal.
Passage Rankings is a feature that allows Google to rank passages of content independently of the page or the main subject.
For Example, if you wrote a page talking about the Toyota Tundra and in that content, you had a section talking about the Toyota Crawl feature and gave a decent explanation on how it worked. Google could then use this section in the SRP for someone searching for more information on Toyota’s Crawl Control, even though your page was about the Toyota Tundra.
This feature has opened up the possibility of ranking not just for the handful of keywords you are aiming for but much more for SEO in 2022.
Optimizing for Google Passages
How do you optimize for Google Passages? It’s relatively simple; it all stems back to quality and organized content. You can create an easy-to-read blog post with the user experience in mind. The content must have clearly defined sections with headers to indicate what that section will address.
Is Content Still King for SEO in 2022?
The short answer is, yes. Content still holds a major sway on web page performance and overall search ranking. After all, it’s still about delivering relevant answers and information based on your subject matter and desired search keyword terms.
In fact, content matters so much that you should literally ALWAYS be creating more of it. Call it the ‘A-B-C’s’ of web content – Always Be Creating! That means devoting constant time to relevant keyword research and generating content that can rank for it. New content is the easiest way to attract the eye of the almighty and continually evolving Google algorithm.
As far as ideal length, for SEO in 2022 you want substantive content that offers as much relevant information as possible. That being said, long-form content (1-2,000 words) works best when it’s well done. However, keep in mind that quality matters more than quantity, here. So, if it’s more effective to put out more great content that hovers around the 500-word mark, do it.
Refresh and Re-index your older content
While you’re creating new content, make a plan to deliver a little TLC to your existing website content – starting with the oldest to the newest. Giving your existing website content a refresh is an incredibly easy way to gain organic traffic. When a pre-existing page is updated with new content, images, video, or even METAdata, Google will inevitably re-index the page, giving it a chance to gain more relevance. This holds true for both your higher-ranking pages, and those dead ducks that are stuck on page two or beyond. So, say it with me, RE-fresh = RE-index.
Conclusion
While SEO may be a never-ending battle you don’t have to enter the arena blindly. If you make sure that your website stays quick and nimble, plan to regularly update old content, and routinely drum up fresh and exciting takes with new content, you’ll be all set to dominate the rankings in 2022.