As a search engine marketing company UK, we often tell our clients that search engine optimisation, or SEO, is an ever-changing beast. Google is constantly updating its algorithm to help it understand searches and how it processes them better, and so we need to be constantly monitoring your SEO strategy to ensure you stay competitive.
In this article, we will take a look at our SEO agency UK predictions and some of the things we are taking into consideration when looking at clients’ SEO strategies for this year.
Three SEO trends that may impact your SEO strategy in 2022.
SEO Trend 1: Online Shopping
The first main trend we have identified for 2022 is the increased growth in the world of online shopping – with Google shifting its main focus to creating a much better online shopping experience at the end of last year.
Google made some changes to their shopping platform in December, eliminating the need for business owners to pay commission fees and also making it free for businesses to sell on Google, which has made selling on their platform more enticing.
They also implemented the “shopping graph” to help eCommerce businesses get their products in front of more customers and to help customers to find the right product more easily. The Google Shopping Graph is an AI0enhanced model that can understand the differences between different brands and products and can analyse how these products relate to one another in order to make it easier for Google to show the right product to the searcher.
The shopping graph takes into account such information as:
- Price
- Reviews
- SKU and inventory data
- Website
- Video
Once it has gathered all of this information, the Shopping Graph delivers the most relevant products to the searcher in real-time – and this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what it can do.
When it implemented the Shopping Graph last year, Google also implemented the ability for users to be able to search using a screenshot. So, if someone views a screenshot in Google Photos, they can search the photo using the Lens feature and find out where they can buy the product in the photo.
How this trend will affect your SEO strategy in 2022
This trend is really important for eCommerce companies, obviously, as it means they are going to have to ensure all of their product descriptions are keyword rich due to the fact that Google will be using the product description to determine how relevant your product is to the item the searcher is looking for. And, having a keyword-rich product description can also help your products to appear in Google Lens searches as well.
This means you should ensure relevant keywords are integrated throughout your product pages, and all of your photos have keywords as part of their alt tags as well.
SEO Trend 2: Conversational Queries
The next SEO trend for 2022 on our list is the conversational queries trend. As Google is continually focussing on improving the user’s search experience in order to help them find more relevant information more quickly, they are spending a lot of time and energy on trying to understand the complexities of language much better.
In fact, Google launched LaMDA last year – Language Model for Dialogue Applications, which allows them to focus on understanding dialogue better in order to deliver search results more efficiently. This model uses a process to understand how users use language when they are trying to find something as well as helping Google understand vernacular better.
How this trend will affect your SEO strategy in 2022
We’ve talked about voice search in the past, but there will be even more emphasis placed on it this year. Voice search focuses on natural language processing (NLP) to understand how searchers search verbally as compared to what they would type into a search engine. Since Google is moving the focus towards making sure it understands conversational searches by its users, it is in your best interest to ensure your website is optimised for voice search queries.
Some of the ways we can optimise your site for voice search include:
- Considering vernacular – vernacular is the name given to specific phrases used by different regions to describe objects or places
- Keeping your answers short – help Google to deliver your answer to searchers questions quickly by keeping your answers short but helpful
- Targeting conversational keyword phrases – the words that someone uses to search for something with their voice are usually different to what they may type into a search engine, so you should ensure your site targets conversational keywords as well
SEO Trend 3: Video marketing
The last SEO trend we predict being large in 2022 is the video marketing trend – especially as over half of consumers surveyed state that they rely on videos to help them make purchasing decisions. With so many people watching videos now, you need to make sure it is part of your marketing strategy – if it isn’t already. Google is also starting to roll out more features that will help users find information in videos much faster too. These features include:
- Clip markup – allowing publishers to highlight key points of the video in order to enable searchers to hop to the most relevant part
- Seek markup – tells Google how your URL structure works allowing Google to display the key parts of your video automatically.
How this trend will affect your SEO strategy in 2022
If you don’t have any video on your website yet, you should make sure that you start to incorporate it into some of your pages to help boost engagement, rankings, and traffic to the site – making sure you use keywords as part of your clip and seek markups.
If you want your SEO strategy to help your business be more successful then you need to work with a company offering website optimisation services in manchester that will keep an eye on how you are performing against your competition and tweak your website to make improvements. Get in touch today to find out how SEO MCR can help your business to grow.
