2022 Search Engine Optimization Hacks
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) hacks that you can implement today
In this post, I’m going to give you an advanced SEO to-do list for 2022, which is going to go over in-depth tactics that you aren’t seeing anywhere else. These strategies will give you a distinct competitive edge and can help you get that much sought-after boost in the SERPs.
Plenty of businesses comb through blog posts, online courses, and webinars that all promise to help them improve their on-site SEO, only to find themselves reading the same basic information over and over.
You already know about meta descriptions, title tags, and primary keywords. You’ve implemented tips like removing dates from URLs and understanding why you need to create great content. You’ve done all that and more… and yet you’re still not outranking your competitors
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is vital for any publisher. In today’s oversaturated landscape and constant change of algorithms, it’s important to focus on the right tips and employ the right strategy to increase organic traffic.
We’re going to help you change that.
Get rid of the”fluff”
Speaking of fluff, this may be the year that you want to nuke the SEO fluff. You know what I’m talking about with SEO fluff. It’s those flowery keywords. It’s those descriptions and it’s recipe pages. “Oh, I was walking along the Irish countryside thinking about my bread and biscuits.” That is your fluff. We’re finding that it may not be necessary, and it may even be detrimental to your SEO.
Glenn Gabe wrote a great case study where they reduced a lot of their fluff on category descriptions and they actually saw an increase. Google is removing fluff from title tags. So this marketing, flowery, SEO writing stuff, may not be helping you, and, in fact, it may be hurting you. Today Google is rewarding sites or seems to be rewarding sites that provide quick answers and more direct engagement.
Better engagement, it’s usually better for your customers as well. So experiment with losing the fluff in 2022
Google title rewrites
Google title rewrites, number three. I don’t think there is any topic more discussed in 2022 than Google rewriting titles. A lot of studies, show Google rewriting 60%, 70%, or 80% of a site’s titles. It can be frustrating. But what we’re finding is a lot of people aren’t evaluating those Google title rewrites. When you do, you can learn a lot about your own titles.
Why is Google rewriting it? Is my title too long? Am I missing important keywords? Do I have fluff in there that Google doesn’t like? Or in some cases you can go back and try to correct the title that Google rewrote if they’re doing just a terrible job. So Google title rewriting, do an audit of those Google titles and learn what you can do.
Author pages
Author pages are great because Google this year updated some of their advice around author pages and their schema markup. It’s an important part of our strategy and a lot of websites that we use. A good quality author page helps Google evaluate your authors, which can be used for E-A-T and other things, and helps link them with their expertise.
So linking your articles to a good author page usually includes links to other websites, author profiles, links to the articles they wrote, some biographical information. It can help establish your authors as expertise in a certain space. So take a look at your author pages and try to improve them and make this a task.
Link building tips for 2022
All right, let’s talk about everybody’s favorite subject, links because you need links to rank in SEO. But what a lot of smart SEOs know and talk about is you need links to rank in SEO, but you probably don’t need as many as you think.
High ROI link building
High ROI link building. There is a great presentation from Ross Simmonds from earlier this year, the Coolest Cool, on link building with assets and determining the ROI of each of them, because everything you build links with, whether it be a tool, a blog post, a free PDF, it has a cost and that cost has an ROI.
Ross found that certain things have higher ROIs than others. Tools have an incredibly high ROI, but they’re also expensive to create. Pages with stats on them, are not that expensive to create, but also have a really high ROI.
High ROI link building, know the cost of everything you’re producing and how much value you’re getting out of it.
Google Discover
On the flip side, a lot of people are flocking to Google Discover.
Google Discover is interesting. It’s not traditional SEO traffic, where you research a keyword and people are converting. It’s a little bit more like social media traffic. In fact, social media sharing seems to be one of the ranking factors that can influence how much traffic you get from Google Discover.
But what we’ve seen in the last year is some publishers are optimizing for Google Discover, publishing those stories, and seeing huge amounts of traffic for that. Great for like news sites, blogs, popular things, things that talk about popular topics.
If you haven’t tried it yet, it may be a channel for you to explore in 2022.
Local SEO GBP categories
We’ve got to squeeze in one local SEO tip. If you have a local site and you just have five minutes to do one thing, the number one SEO tip for 2022, get your GBP categories in order. Ranking factors studies show that it is the number one thing that can influence rankings.
Do an audit of your Google Business Profile categories. If you need help or want a second opinion contact us for free tips and audit.
Be the last click!!!
Final tip of 2022, this was the final tip of 2021. It’s my favorite SEO tip of all time. Be the last click. That means satisfying your users. When someone is searching Google or any other search engine and they’re presented with a list of results, they’re clicking around, looking for what they want to be, make sure you are the last site that they click.
Why? Because when they clicked to your site, they found what they were looking for. You satisfied them so much that when they see your site again, you’re going to be the first one that they click on because you gave them the answer. Provide awesome experiences for your users. Think of them first. Give them everything they want. Give Google no excuse not to rank you number one in the search result.
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All right, HACKS for 2022. That’s all we’ve got… For now. Send us an email or call us with any questions or inquires