Top SEO Trends To Rank Your Website in 2022

SEO: It’s a combination of art and science, wherein the primary objective is to build trust.


– Jason Acidre, Author, Kaiserthesage

2021 is about to end and the secret to being number one Google is still the same i.e. search engine optimization. What actually has changed this year is we have some new rules to play this game and come first on the SERPs. I’m talking about the SEO Trends to rank your website in 2022 and ahead.

The year is coming to an end and a lot has happened in the world of SEO as Google decided to bring some new algorithms, updates, and rules for ranking a website. All this is for better searchability of content and the only goal is to give users the most relevant search results.

By the way, did you know while I was writing this blog there were over 4.3 billion searches made this year and the number is constantly increasing?



While so many searches are made every second the CTR is significantly higher for the first result only. The #1 result on Google has a CTR of 31.7% and if you’re on the second page there’s only a 0.78% chance of getting clicked.



All this leads us to believe that SEO has a very important role in bringing traffic to your website. Today, we’ll see what SEO trends have changed the rules for webmasters to rank their websites in 2021 and further.
Is SEO Still Relevant In 2022?

The first question that comes to mind is that is SEO still a relevant concept in 2022? The answer is no doubt yes.

Though it might happen that some of the tactics have ceased working but it’s just because SEO has constantly evolved over the years. To keep up with the latest SEO trends you have to reinvent your SEO strategies to better match with the user intent to rank better on the SERPs.

If you’re posting useful content for the users without an SEO strategy chances are you might fail. A well-defined SEO strategy is what it takes a website to rank on the first page in 2022.

With so many searches that are regularly done on Google, it will be a mistake if we say it is dead. If you write a long-tail search phrase such as “banana nutrition facts and benefits” in the Google search bar you’ll see 6 million results.



Well, let’s see some 2022 SEO updates and understand how you can reinvent your strategy to rank your website.
Top 2022 SEO Trends You Have To Focus For Your SEO Strategy

The search engine optimization landscape is constantly changing and all credit goes to Google. The search engine giant is putting these efforts to make the search experience efficient, relevant, and easier for the users.

While there are some new introductions this year by Google, there are some trends still not out of date and still relevant in the year 2022. Let’s check them all.
Top 7 New SEO Trends For 2022?

So before we learn about some evergreen SEO trends that were trendy in previous years we’ll see some of the latest 2022 entries that will change the game to rank #1 on the SERPs.

Let’s begin!
1. Passage Ranking Will Override Keyword Ranking

Google launched the passage ranking update on February 10th, 2021 initially for US English SERPs only, and eventually, it was available globally.

What is passage ranking?

Google’s page ranking update is an efficient method for ranking long-form content. It examines content to determine its context and return more meaningful results to the searchers. Google ranks passages that are directly related to what people have searched for.

For instance, you searched for “how to set up google home”. Originally the top results would have been some article but after passage ranking, you will see the result that answers the question succinctly.



Passage ranking is Google’s initiative to help you find exactly what you are looking for. If I have to say Google’s own words, “by understanding passages in addition to the relevancy of the overall page, we can find that needle-in-a-haystack information you’re looking for.”

So here’s what you can do:
Firstly, do a solid analysis of your target audience. Ask yourself “who is your audience?”, “what are they looking for?”, and “Why are they looking for it?”.
Don’t compromise with the quality and uniqueness of the content. Any update by Google is to make the search experience for users more relevant.
Focus on writing heading with long-tail keywords because headers are very pivotal for helping Google understand the context of the content.
2. Surge Of Video Content

One of the top SEO trends of 2022 is to include video content in your strategy. Video marketing has the power to make your customers stay tuned with the content it displays. The best video content includes a storyline of the incidence and situations that can be linked to your audience.

Videos are one such medium that can help you in showing your products in action to your visitors. Although a video is not one of the cheapest forms of content out there, it is definitely more engaging with a high ROI.

As per wyzowl, 83% of businesses believe that video gives them a good ROI.
Not only this, the online video viewers were 228.8 million alone in the U.S., and this number is expected to reach 248.9 million by 2022.



Videos give you the power of creating versatile content which helps the marketer to paint a real picture of the product in their prospects’ minds. Customers also love videos because they are easy to digest and save their time by not having to read long-form content.
3. Seek Markup and Clip Markup

The introduction of Seek and Clip markup has made the surge of video content even more important. For video creators and video SEO experts, Google has a lot to offer in 2022.

What are Clip markup and Seek markup?

While click markup manually tells the timestamp of your video, seek markup automatically communicates the same to Google and returns the result as a special snippet in the form of a rich result on the SERPs.


Clip Video Markup

To optimize your website for Clip markup you must manually tell Google what timestamps to be displayed as key moments. To do this you have to embed the information to the Video Object element of the structured data.
Check out the technicalities in more detail from Google Search Central.

The required properties that have to be added to the structured data are:
name: This is a descriptive title of your video.
startOffset: The start time of the clip is expressed as the number of seconds.
Url: A URL that points to the start time of the clip.


Seek Video Markup

The Seek markup is more straightforward. The job of Seek markup is to tell Google how a URL structure works so that the search engine can automatically identify the key moments.


Check out the technicalities in more detail from Google Search Central.
4. Continuous Scrolling

This is the most recent entry in the list of SEO trends 2022. Continuous scrolling update rolled out in October 2021 by Google for restructuring the search engine result pages specifically for mobile users.

Just like major social media platforms, Google will now allow the users to access the search result with a seamless and intuitive continuous scrolling. This means when you reach the end fresh results will automatically load.



So there is nothing specific that you can do for optimizing your website for the continuous scrolling trend because it is more about enhancing the browsing experience.

Here’s what Google has to say about the update:


While you can often find what you’re looking for in the first few results, sometimes you want to keep looking.

To get clicked when a user searches something on Google you still need quality content to rank on the top.
5. Core Web Vitals

One of the biggest entries in 2022 is the addition of ranking signals to Core Web Vitals to enhance the page experience.

The only priority of Google is to enhance the user experience with every passing year. Thus, it demands its webmaster to provide content that is relevant and information-rich at the same time. But this year providing stupendous content won’t be enough.

Surprised??

Yes, according to the upcoming update factors like;
Page design
Page weight
Media inputs
Media inputs
External embeds

Everything will be counted as ranking signals and will be a part of the web vitals.Source: Google

This year’s main aim is to include all the signals responsible for making people engage and interact with web pages. So as to say, the goal is to make the information easily accessible along with an inclusive web experience.

As defined by Philip Walton,


Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

Thus, to make your website shoot upwards through the SERPs in 2022 and in the coming years as a webmaster you have to consider the core web vital signals.

Learn the SEO efforts you need to adapt for the Core Web Vitals
Click Here

To help you out the Google Search Console has included a new report known as the Page Experience report. The Page Experience report provides you with actionable insights that are combined with the Core Web Vital components. Some of the insights are as follows:
Safe browsing status
Mobile usability
HTTPS usage
Ad experience
Security issues



In addition to the page experience report, the Performance report has also been updated. As a result, you can filter pages with a good page experience. Thus, allowing you to compare these pages with other pages on your website.
6. BERT Update For Matching Search Intents

The BERT update rolled out in October 2019 and by end of December, the websites could see the negative impact on their website.

Before we understand what went wrong let’s understand what the algorithm actually is.

So BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and it uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to understand the searches made by a user in a better way.

The purpose of the introduction of this algorithm is to make the search engine bots have more conversation so that the searcher’s intent could be interpreted.

According to most SEO Experts, it is depicted and proven that Google checks the overall reputation of the website through YMYL (Your Money Your Life) and EAT(Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) factors.

Learn About YMYL And EAT Factors In More Detail
Read Here
How to prepare for the BERT update?


There’s nothing to optimize for with BERT, nor anything for anyone to be rethinking. BERT update focuses on providing the relevant search results to its users, which means the only method to overcome the BERT update is focusing on creating high-quality content.

Understanding what Danny said here’s what you can do:
Provide your target audience with the content that answers their search query. For example, if someone searches for “home remedies for cold”, then the user must see pages that have some tips for curing a cold at home.
Start focusing on your context rather than the keyword density. Gone are the days when search engines could be fooled by stuffing keywords. They have grown much smarter and only relevant content is what attracts them for ranking.
BERT update checks the content for sentences and phrases, which means the site owner should back the site with relevant content-specific questions of the searcher.
7. Aim For The Featured Snippet

The search engine result pages or popularly termed as SERPs are not the same as they used to be in previous years. While browsing for information on Google you must have seen some noticeable differences like:
The percentage of ad share has fairly increased.
Even the answer boxes and featured snippets are getting a lion’s share in the SERPs.
Google has also started giving more importance to the ”People Have Also Asked” section and “FAQs”.

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To enhance the search experience, Google has also added carousels for video results and snippets for showing “Top Stories” and “Q&A on Google.”

Due to the introduction of all such features, gaining traffic through organic clicks will be much more difficult in the coming years. So in 2022, SEO will revolve around zero-click searches. This means you’ve to focus on giving important information to users on the SERPs themselves and optimize your content for the featured snippets.

Strategies To Boost Organic Traffic On Your Website In 2022
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To maintain consistent traffic, start focusing on long-tail keywords.

You can consider long-tail search queries that are used for performing voice searches. For example:

Text Search: “pudding cake recipe”
Voice Search Query: “How do I make a pudding cake at home?”

Now you can tailor content around these long-tail keywords and get your content featured in the snippets. So here’s what you’ve to do in 2022 and in the coming years start investing in conversational queries.

So these were some of the new trends that were introduced by Google in the year 2022. From these updates, I can conclude that Google is working incredibly well for enhancing the users’ search experience and increase the relevancy of the results. Also, the introduction of continuous scrolling shows how Google is particular about enhancing their browsing experience.
Evergreen SEO Trends

Under this heading, I’ll be sharing with you some trends that were introduced before 2021 but are in use to date and have to be rigidly followed in the coming years too. This includes:
1. Provide What Your Audience Wants To Read

Relevancy is something that will always be a priority for Google to rank a website on the search engine result pages for a particular keyword. That’s why SEO experts say that start writing for your audience instead of the keywords.

So whether it is any year providing content that is relevant to your audience will be an evergreen SEO trend for ranking a website.

As per Google’s algorithm updates, it is found that keyword stuffing in the content will not bring good conversion and rankings. It is noted that search engines look forward to delivering the right message to the right audience.

Here are some recommended tips that you can use while weaving your website content:
Identify your audience and then generate your content. This will help you in keeping your content natural and ideal for your visitors.
Add keywords at prime SEO spots, such as meta descriptions, meta titles, alt tags, etc.
Break the monotony of your keywords by adding long-tail keywords. Optimal content is one that has a good mixture of short-tail and long-tail keywords.
2. Technical SEO And UX/UI factors

Writing the right content is not what all SEO is all about. There are many technical aspects that cannot be overlooked. One such technical aspect is UI and UX.

To make your website rank it is very important that your website is accessible to users and they can browse it efficiently.

If you are familiar with SEO then you might also know that it has completely moved away from solely ranking a piece of content just over a few search queries. It is very necessary for search engines to provide searchers with a page that is user-friendly.

Here are 4 tips for improving UI/UX to boost your SEO:
Analyze your bounce rate regularly and figure out the reasons for your high bounce rate. Common reasons might include:
the usage of unrelated keywords
poor loading speed
page errors while interacting with your site

As per The Rocket Blog Study, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 is considered perfect for your site.
Monitor the session duration of your pages to know how long the visitors last on your page. If the results are not good then try checking your page elements and perform A/B testing. This will give you an idea of whether your page elements are performing well or not.
Craft headings that create a curiosity in the user to read further. Headings a road map to guide the visitor through your content.
Work on your site’s navigation by avoiding complex menu items, including a navigation menu on all pages, a clear and descriptive navigation bar, and adding a search bar for easy access to your site content.
3. Take Special Care Of Small Screen Users

Let me share some numbers with you.

According to Statista, as of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide – 59.5 percent of the global population. Of this total, 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices.



This leads me to the conclusion that AMP version compatibility is a must for any website to survive in this competitive era and take over its competitors. Here are some best practices that you can follow to step up your SEO game in 2022:
Optimize your pages to AMP up your mobile page speed score by leveraging reduced redirects, browser caching, and implementing minified codes.
Add special effects to your mobile page by using HTML 5 instead of using plugins like flash, as they are not supported by small screen pages.
Design responsive pages for your site for better UI/UX on mobiles.
4. Fast Loading Of Pages

The first impression is the last impression.

Thus, instead of hampering the mood of your customers with slow-loading web pages, try to optimize your loading speeds.

Take the help of PageSpeed Insights by Google Developers to know your current page speed score and start making improvements.

In PageSpeed Insights, have a look at the following metrics to get an in-depth idea of your mobile page speed:


First Contentful Paint

First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures how long it takes your browser to render the first piece of DOM(Data Object Model) content after a visitor navigates to your page. This includes images, SVGs, etc.
First Meaningful Paint

First Meaningful Paint (FMP) measures when the primary content of the page is visible to the user. It basically registers the time when the content within the iFrame is visible.
Speed Index

Speed Index measures how quickly the content is visually displayed to your users during page loading.
First CPU Idle

The time taken by a page to become minimal interactive for the user is measured as First CPU Idle.

A page is considered minimally interactive when:
Most of the UI elements are interactive on the screen.
The page responds to most user inputs in a reasonable
Time To Interactive

Time To Interactive (TTI) measures the time taken by a page to become fully interactive. A page is considered fully interactive if:
It displays useful content as measured by FCP.
The page responds to user actions within 50 milliseconds.
Event handlers are registered for most of the page elements
First Input Delay

First Input Delay (FID) measures when a user first interacts with your site elements such as clicking on a button or any other JavaScript-controlled element and when the browser actually responds to that interaction.

Having gone through the definitions of the above-listed metrics, here are a few tips or hacks you can use for improving your page speed:
Use the compressed form of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. Try compressing files that are above 150 bytes.
Reduce redirects so that your visitor does not have to face additional waiting time by the HTTP-response cycle.
Leverage browser caching so that the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire for a visitor returning to your site.
Improve your server response times by searching for various weak areas such as slow routing and database queries.
Distribute your content delivery load with the help of a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Lastly, optimize your images by ensuring they are in the right format and used where they are necessary.
5. Welcome The Dawn Of Voice Search

With the prominence of artificial intelligence and chatbots in the main domain, voice search is an important entry in the SEO trends. Clubbing up real-life examples of voice searches like Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant, user experience has incarnated with such communicable devices.

Due to the increased number of mobile users, voice searches have shown massive growth in the recent past.

We can see in the stats for global voice searches, alone in the first quarter of 2019, 42 percent of the online population conducted a voice search via any device.

This raises an alarm for site owners that their content should welcome the dawn of voice search in 2022 and coming years.

Here are some tips for optimizing your content to make it voice search-friendly:
Start using the flavour of natural language in your content, fed with concise answers, satisfying the users’ voice search query.
Start including long-tail keywords and the practice of writing long-form content. It is found that voice search queries are usually longer than typed ones.
If you want to rank on “near me” searches, start including correct addresses or locations for your local listings with the correct structured data.

Voice Search Optimization
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6. Link Building For Brand Visibility And Engagement

Whether it is 2022 or any year, link building is a timeless technique if you want to crack the first page. It goes without saying, for building quality links quality content is very important.

Without a proper link-building strategy, other SEO trends covered in this article will all go in vain. Perficient Digital conducted a study for four consecutive years on: “Do Links Still Matter for SEO in 2022?”



In their study, Perficient virtually found that links have the same importance as they had in 2016 for ranking a website.

Links are used by search engines for mainly two things:
Uncover new web pages.
Determine how well a page should rank on the SERPs

The search engine crawlers reach other web pages through the link-building process. Later they extract the information from these web pages and add them to their indexes. With the help of various algorithms, Google decides if these pages have sufficient information and quality to be ranked for relevant keywords.

So as you might be aware of the fact that link building can be done in two ways:
External Link Building

This is when you want other websites to link to your website. External link building is time taking and requires a lot of patience.

Keep in mind that there is no shortcut to scouring external website links for your page. With Google’s constant algorithm updates, don’t even think of buying off links or doing any activity that is inorganic and against the guidelines.

How to build external links in 2022?

So link-building rules in 2022 will be pretty the same as they have been in past years. The only difference is they have become even more strict. Here are some tips for building external links in 2022:
Create unique and high-quality content that people want to refer to. Compelling content gains external links naturally and it becomes easy for you to understand the word.
Outreaching influencers in your story for mention and reviews of your products and services.
You can also ask people you know or work with to give you their precious external link. Of course, relevancy matters.
Internal Link Building

While external link building is time-taking on the other hand internal link building is quick and free.

So internal linking is a very underrated method to improve the ranking of pages. The best part; you’ve total control over it.

For making your web page rank with the internal linking approach, a few things should be kept in mind:
Place the link on correct and relevant anchor text. This is the most important factor which search engines take into account in ranking a page.
So another factor that should be kept in mind is linking to quality pages. Search engines always check where you’re sending their users through internal links. Thus, the page which is internally linked should contain some useful and meaningful information.

Thus, in 2022 for internal link building:
Use the correct and relevant anchor text.
Decide which page the internal link should be placed at.
Ensure the quality of the content on the linking page.

With this, we can conclude just like previous years link building is still an important SEO factor in 2022 to make your pages top on the search engine results page.

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7. Social Listening And SEO

Social listening is a process of monitoring your online brand’s social media handles. It involves tracing customer feedback or direct mentions of your brands. It also includes monitoring any discussion on a specific topic, keyword, or competitor relevant to your niche for gaining insights and taking action on those opportunities.

Now the challenge is to use social listening as a search engine optimization strategy. So here are a few you can do:

Look For Unlinked Brand Mentions

So as I’ve discussed earlier link building will still play an important role in 2022. Thus, social listening can be used as a huge opportunity for building some quality backlinks.

If your brand is popular and has been in the online market for quite some time then, there is a huge possibility there are mentions of your brand in blogs, forums, or just anywhere on the web. Thus, now you have to hunt down all those linkless mentions and look where you can request to place a link to your website.

Tools like Awario, Brandwatch, and Talkwalker can be a great help in finding some online brand mentions. These tools use Boolean Search mode which is very efficient in locating linkless mentions.

Search For Guest Posting Opportunities

Any SEO expert will tell you that guest posting is a sound link-building strategy. It is one of the best ways to build a solid brand reputation online. Social listening comes in very handy in finding link-building opportunities.

Just by entering a few keywords (relevant to your industry) in any social listening tool, you will get:



All blogs that talk about the topic.


Social media influencers related to your industry with huge followings. You can outreach influencers who have a blogging website and offer guest posting opportunities.



Learn From Your Competitors

Another effective way is to keep a close eye on your competitors. Discover where your competitors are getting links from and with which influencers they are working with. All this information can be used in building your own SEO blueprint for 2022 and in the coming years.

With this, we come to the conclusion that social listening is a highly effective SEO strategy and is not fully explored. It is full of opportunities and will definitely impact the way we do digital marketing in 2022 (and coming years).

While we learned about SEO trends that are contributing to the evolution of search engines, there are some outdated trends that are not relevant, and following them can actually harm your rankings.

Let me shed some light on SEO trends that you no more need to follow if you want maximum traffic in the coming years.
SEO Trends That Are Invalid For 2022 And Coming Years

So what are the trends that you need not follow in 2022 and in the coming years? Let have a look:
1. Keyword Stuffing Or Irrelevant Keyword Targeting

Keyword stuffing is a practice where SEO experts and webmasters try to fit their content within the confines of their keyword research.

As a result, the content and meta description are generated that only represent keywords and aren’t coherent with the user’s intent. It can lead to a loss of interest among your target audience before you even convey the real message to them.

Understand that Google has evolved and no longer depends on keyword density; instead, its updated algorithm strives to determine the intent of your web content.
2. Article Directories

A very traditional technique of content marketing that was used by marketers to increase the reach of their content was the article directory.

The article directories worked wonders for a very long time and were pretty darn good for a long time. But eventually, Google brought down the technique with the introduction of the Panda algorithm update in 2011.

The Panda update made sure that content that is either crappy or copied and pasted on directories shouldn’t rank on SERPs.

In 2022 and coming years I would recommend focusing on creating content that is original and isn’t copied.
3. Content Spinning

Content spinning is a black hat tactic that is still done by many webmasters typically with the help of software. In content spinning an individual uses software to recreate quality content using different words and phrases.

The end result is often a messed-up article using a lot of passive voice made with the same points as in the original article. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the technique is outdated and is a strict no by Google.

While Google invests in AI technology to analyse web content, anything generated by a tool or software will always be of lower quality.
4. Buying Links

Link-building is an important off-page SEO tactic that shows Google how many people are talking about your content. Backlinks show the search engine robots that your content is a reliable resource of information for a particular topic or a search phrase.

But at one-time buying links was a prominent practise among SEO professionals to increase the volume of links pointing towards their websites.

In the present scenario, Google has evolved so much that it can easily identify low-quality websites and with too many outbound links. As a result, it can be dangerous for the health of your website and can bring down the ranking of your website.

Focus on earning links and not on buying links to maintain a good profile of backlinks.
5. Overusing Anchor Text

Link building as I mentioned before, can be done with internal linking too. Internal linking is the definition of a good website structure. Typically internal linking is done by placing an HTML element on an anchor text that allows you to tell the reader what kind of content can be expected on clicking the link.

However, overusing internal linking on anchor text is now considered a major SEO hazard. So after the introduction of the Penguin update, Google has the superpowers to identify over-optimized content. Therefore, it is highly recommended to not place links on every keyword-rich anchor text instead make it look natural as if you’re writing for humans.

These were some SEO trends that were followed by webmasters in the past to rank their websites but are now obsolete in 2022. If you’re still following these practices chances are you might have lost your rank and if not Google makes sure to not rank your content for harming the search experience for its users.
Ready To Count Upon The Web?

So these were some 2022 SEO trends that can help you in framing your strategy to rank your website #1 in the coming years. While some trends are not new but have evolved with time to provide users with relevant search results, there are some new trends to enhance the user experience.
Whether your goal is to publish more research-based content or increase organic CTR, your focus should be on giving relevant information to the searchers and go by the saying:

“Write for humans, not for robots.”

Which SEO trend has fascinated you the most, share with us in the comment section. Also, tell us if you were using any outdated SEO trend that you’re going to stop today.

  Resource:-https://makewebbetter.com/blog/google-seo-trends-rank-higher-your-site/