With 2021 coming to an end, now is a good time to look ahead to the coming year. A new year means new SEO tactics and trends, along with some of the old ones that were effective the past 12 months.
Knowing what to expect for the coming year will help ensure your SEO efforts continue to be effective and help you achieve the desired results.
Focus on User and Search Intent
Now is the time to focus on the user and search intent.
While this isn’t a new concept or trend, you must take the beginning of a new year as your opportunity to refocus. Remember, searcher behavior and intent change constantly.
When someone uses Google (or another search engine), they want to learn more about something or have a question answered. Understanding why people are searching and providing content that answers their questions will benefit them and you.
It’s important to move away from “best practices” that don’t offer as much value. Instead, focus on searcher intent and answering their query the best way you can.
Customer Analytics, Retention and Lifetime Value
SEO is mainly used to drive traffic. While this is true, SEO has evolved into more than this, as well.
You are going to be pushed to improve your efforts to generate traffic. Because generating this traffic will become more challenging, it’s essential to focus on behavioral analytics and data to help ensure you know what people are searching for.
Now is the time to focus on what your customer is doing, how they are doing it, and how you can get them to keep doing it, even more often than before. Once you have this information, it’s time to reverse engineer the data into content.
Brand SERP Optimization and Knowledge Panels
In 2022, you must face the fact that entity-based search begins with how well Google knows who you are, what you have to offer, and what audience you serve.
As a savvy marketer, you must look at your brand as an entity and begin working hard to understand how Google sees your business. After all, this has a huge impact on when your website appears as an answer for a searcher’s query.
Mobile SEO
Mobile devices are the preferred way to search for most people today.
Be sure to see the type of experience your visitors have when they access your content and try to find the information they are searching for via their mobile devices.
Having a mobile responsive and mobile-optimized site is a must to ensure people visiting your page have a positive experience.
Are You Ready for Marketing and SEO in 2022?
As 2022 gets closer, now is the time to focus on your marketing and SEO to ensure you have a plan to help you continue your success. Some elements of your existing plan will need to be changed, as well, to meet the changing needs of potential customers and search engines.