- (1) Check your UX pulse with Core Web Vitals.
- (2) Build variety into your keyword strategy.
- (3) Keep search intent top of mind.
- (4) Drop the stop words in your URLs
- (5) Write more accurate meta descriptions and page titles.
- (6) Format posts for featured snippets.
- (7) Level up your almost high-performing content.
- (8) Repurpose older existing content.
- (9) Add engaging thumbnail images to videos.
- (10) Build backlinks organically.
- (11) Make sure your website mobile and desktop versions match.
- (12) Follow mobile site image best practices
With page experience becoming such an important ranking signal, Google has thrown marketers a bone with a new tool – Core Web Vitals – that will help you measure the load time, interactivity and visual stability of every page on your website. This list is the perfect place to start with your revamped 2022 SEO strategy. After all, before you know what you need to fix, you have to first know what’s actually broken.
Historically, marketers have optimized web pages around specific high-search-volume keywords and blog posts around lower-volume, long-tail keywords. These days, that distinction is blurred. Instead, strive for a healthy mix of both across all your site. Additionally, to meet the growing popularity of voice search, look for opportunities to work in multiple variations of your keywords, including synonyms and related keywords, for the best results.
We already know that Google is getting really good at figuring out user intent to deliver the most personalized and relevant results. Interestingly, the format of your content plays into that relevancy. For example, someone searching for cars will probably rather see a listicle blog post evaluating different car models – not specific car product pages.
Common filler words like “of,” “or” and “the” take up valuable space in your URLs. This makes it harder for both readers and crawlers to skim quickly and can cause lags in your page loading time. Try to keep these stop words out of your URLs unless they are a necessary part of your keyword, and limit your URLs to no more than 100 characters.
Google has recently updated their search results page to 600 pixels, allowing for longer titles and descriptions on both desktop and mobile. However, be careful with this. Nothing is more frustrating for a searcher than clicking on a link that looks promising, only to realize the content is not at all what was promised page title and meta description.
The top-ranking spot on SERPs is no longer search result #1. Instead, Google’s Featured Snippets — which show up after ads but before organic results — are the new prime position. There are several ways to land a featured snippet spot, but one of the best ways is to answer a keyword query directly in your content.
Review your content analytics and identify posts that are doing okay with traffic but aren’t as popular as your highest-ranking ones. (A great way to do this is to set up an advanced filter on Google Analytics to show how your keywords are ranking in SERPs.)
To continue with this theme of levelling up your SEO strategy, now is a great time to rework your older content, especially if the topics are still relevant to your audiences today.
For example, consider turning an existing blog post into a new video that provides an engaging summary of the key points. Combine multiple blog posts on the same topic into a new ebook that offers a more comprehensive look at the topic.
Thumbnail images are the first thing people see when your video is indexed and have been showing up more often in Google searches. Sites like YouTube generate their own previews, but you also have the option to create custom thumbnails. Your thumbnail image should be high-quality and accurately reflect your video’s content to increase engagement and clicks.
Backlinks, or inbound links, are still an important part of SEO ranking. But rather than falling into the trap of paying for links via black-hat tactics, instead always be looking for opportunities to create new backlinks organically.
Google has now switched to mobile-first indexing for all websites. Now is the time to examine the desktop and mobile versions of your website to make sure all copy and content, including text, images, videos and links, are the same on both versions. Use Google’s URL Inspection Tool to see if there are any pressing discrepancies you need to fix.
In addition to #11, you’ll also want to optimize all website images for mobile-first indexing. Make sure all images are the proper size and resolution, and that all your formats and tags are supported on mobile. Also, double-check that all alt text, image titles, captions and file names match what’s on the desktop version of your site.
