technical seo trends

If there’s one quality that distinguishes SEO professionals, it’s their persistence. Google’s algorithm continually evolves, making months of work ineffective once the ranking criteria change. That is why industry gurus are concerned with the latest SEO advancements. Each significant upgrade — such as the Maverick update, the BERT update, and so on — added new SEO strategies. And the year 2022 is no exception.

So, is search engine optimization still essential for 2022 or the upcoming years? It is. It is becoming more clever. Its emphasis has changed (from keyword stuffing to user preferences), and ranking in the Google Search Engine has become more demanding. So let’s have a glance at the most effective Seo trends, which you’ll have to know about for the year 2022 (at least for the first and second quarters of the year before Google modifies everything once more!).

Google shopping is the future: Shopping Graph.

People had to shop online during the COVID-19 outbreak. Google’s online shopping capabilities were weak until recently. Their shopping search engine had been there for a while. Still, it never gained the same popularity as Shopify or Amazon. Google now appears to be taking online shopping seriously.

Google recently unveiled the Shopping Graph. A dynamic, AI-enhanced model that grasps a constantly changing set of products, retailers, brands, reviews, product details, and inventory data (received directly from distributors and companies). Not only this, but it will also rasp how those aspects relate to each other. It operates in real-time, allowing users to find and purchase things that are currently available.

Google also increased its cooperation with Shopify, allowing its 1.7 million merchants to showcase their products across Google’s marketplace. This resulted in a 70% increase in the size of Google’s digital storefront and an 80% rise in retailers.

Locate Fantastic Offers:

Google added a new feature to its Shop tab that displays the latest discounts from various stores for shopping-related terms.

Relevant Deals: 

Search terms such as “Black Friday deals” or “Cyber Monday sales” will appear as a new segment with relevant discounts and sales information.

Carousel of Low-Cost Options: 

On mobile searches with the phrase “cheap,” Google has begun testing “affordable selections” carousel. For example, if you type “cheap projectors” into Google, it will return the best projector offers accessible online.

Loyalty Programs That Are Linked: 

Google will also allow businesses to link their loyalty programs to their users’ accounts. Brands will be able to reward their most loyal users across Google’s ecosystem with this new service.

Tabs for the Shopping Cart: 

Google also unveiled a new Chrome browser mobile feature that displays your open shopping carts every time you launch a second tab.

We don’t know what kind of results online businesses may expect until most of these are introduced by the end of 2021. In terms of e-commerce, this could be the start of a new era.

User experience is essential: Core Web Vitals.

Although on-page optimization and link generation are still crucial in SEO, they are no longer the only criteria to rank a website. Page interaction is a new member of the ranking criteria family. It is defined as a set of signals that assess how people perceive the process of engaging with a web page (in addition to its content value).

Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that quantify a website’s loading time from a user experience standpoint. This is the most visible aspect of its new page experience upgrade. Three factors determine it:

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a metric that measures how well a site page loads. After a page begins to load, Google advises aiming for an LCP of fewer than 2.5 seconds.

First Input Delay (FID) measures interactivity. The value should be less than 100 milliseconds, as recommended by Google.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is a visual stability metric, and it should be less than 0.1. This is the recommended score by Google.

Google combines Core Web Vitals with additional characteristics like:

  1. Page’s mobile-friendliness.
  2. Use of the HTTPS protocol.
  3. Lack of intrusive interstitials to create measurements that prioritize UX.

You’ll be obliged to optimize your site to meet the suggested Core Web Vitals scores in a user-centric world. If you haven’t yet made your website mobile-friendly or secured with HTTPS, now is the time to do so because Google will not wait.

BERT and introduction of MUM

Google’s algorithm grew wise enough to understand the relationship between words and the purpose behind the exact search term with the introduction of BERT in 2019.

BERT was a revolutionary idea that helped Google to serve users of voice assistants better. People were speaking their search queries rather than entering them. Because people’s communication is much more conversational and dynamic, Google needed to update its algorithm using NLP and AI technology.

And yet BERT was just the starting. In 2021, at the Google I/O conference,  Google introduced a new approach for analyzing and serving its users and named it the Multitask United Model, or MUM.

Simply said, MUM is a model that can recognize a user’s emotions, ideas, and intentions. It then offers suitable responses that are specific to the user’s question. Users won’t have to do several searches until they locate the correct term that provides the desired result, thanks to MUM.

Instead, they’ll get the results they want with just one conversational query from Google. MUM can assess videos, pictures, and text in 75 languages to answer complex search queries. MUM’s multimodality means that users can get accurate results for their searches by combining text, visuals, and voice.

MUM is currently being tested as of August 2021. We should, however, expect to see it in action soon. We can’t be sure of its potency and effectiveness until that happens, and we can’t predict how it will affect search results until it happens. However, we can expect an even greater focus on authority signals (EAT) and a content-centric strategy if MUM is anything like BERT.

Talk to Google: LaMDA

When it comes to SEO developments, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about voice search and the need to optimize specifically for different user queries. Google has only recently started to alter its algorithm to accommodate the latest voice-based technology.

Google also introduced LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) at the Google I/O conference. LaMDA, as its name indicates, is a machine-learning model for conversation that is based on Google’s neural network architecture, Transformer.

LaMDA creates a model that can be trained to read many words, analyze how those words relate to each other, and predict what words will appear next. LaMDA was taught how to converse.

If MUM is all about figuring out people’s emotions and intent behind their search queries, LaMDA wants to dialogue with them. LaMDA will also provide their results depending on what they tell it.

Google’s overall strategy does not only include LaMDA. Larger, more complex AI models that use conversational searches to find and rank pages are coming. If you haven’t done so, it’s time to optimize your website for voice search.

Rank an excerpt if you can’t rank the whole page: Passage Rating

The most sought goal of any SEO practitioner has been to rank their page number one for every search term. Because of the newer “zero-rank” position and the increased amount of snippets competing for the top spot, getting to the top of a search engine has become more difficult.

Fortunately, Google has devised a solution for Seo professionals who are still striving to appear at the top of search engine results.

Google released the invention of “passage indexing” late last year, which allows a page to rank for a particular passage rather than the entire page. The “passage rating,” as it’s currently known, went active in February 2021.

According to Google’s representatives, the best way to rank for a paragraph is to focus on traditional indicators like page names and headings. Even if the benefits for your SEO strategy aren’t visible yet, it’s beneficial to have such passages.

Optimize Your Videos and Create Key Moments: Suggested Clips

Another recent SEO trend that we’ve discussed extensively is the relevance of video marketing for traffic engagement and lead generation. On the other hand, recent improvements have given video marketing a whole new meaning, which positively impacts your SEO approach.

Two new video structured data formats were announced at Google I/O, which you may use to retrieve a piece of the “Suggested Clips” tab from your video. One is “Clip markup,” and another one is “Seek markup.” Using the new structured data, you can now extract key moments from your videos.

Google started providing video extracts with timestamps and titles within their search engine to launch key moments in 2019. however, they built key moments automatically from YouTube videos. You can now create timestamps and labels for your videos thanks to the addition of new structured data types.

With these two changes, whether you host your videos on YouTube or your website, videos will play a significant part in ranking for competitive searches.

Conclusion 

For SEO specialists, the year 2022 promises to be a memorable one. Even though Google announced most of the upgrades in 2020, they significantly focus on AI-based outcomes containing webpages, video, and other multimedia.

UX is more crucial than ever before. Only those marketers who can go beyond the technical components of their SEO job will be successful. 

Applying a few SEO trends from above will help you stand out from the crowd and take advantage of the competitive SEO field. If you’ve read this far, you would pretty much admit this fact.

By Anurag Rathod

Anurag Rathod is an Editor of Appclonescript.com, who is passionate for app-based startup solutions and on-demand business ideas. He believes in spreading tech trends. He is an avid reader and loves thinking out of the box to promote new technologies.