Latest SEO Trends & Tactics: Know How Google Updates Impact SERP

SEO could not be more relevant currently, considering the fact that close to 95% of traffic actually starts with a simple Google search. We also don’t need to look further than how the field continues to evolve over time to see the value placed on it by companies and any digital marketing agency. The Latest SEO Trends & Tactics serve as solid proof of this.

Naturally, you need to always be in the know when it comes to these trends and tactics if you want your business’s online presence to always be a step ahead of the rest. We’ll be discussing the most relevant ones at present, including the most advanced SEO tactics. But first, let’s look at what the figures say about SEO as a whole.

The Latest SEO Statistics Reveal How Far SEO Has Come

If we’re going to compare SEO’s relevance during its early years to now, it would be an understatement to say that it has simply grown. What’s even more spectacular is the fact that its growth hasn’t really shown signs of slowing. These stats tell as much:

• Close to 70% of online experiences start with a search query. 
• Organic traffic from Search Engine Optimization is prized by a little over 60% of B2B marketers for the simple fact that they enjoy better leads from it. 
• 70% of online marketers as a whole think that SEO is better than PPC for conversions.
• 75% of people only stick to the first page of search results. 
• Over 65% of people like to perform online research before deciding to buy a product or avail of a service.
• The average word length of content on the first page of search results is 1,447 words.
• 76% of consumers like to search for local businesses in their area then proceed to visit that establishment. 
• Over 70% of consumers prefer to watch a video rather than read the text to look for information about a particular product or service. 
• Close to 80% of people trust online reviews.

These are but some of the figures, but you undoubtedly get the picture. New trends in SEO are more or less always influenced by these stats. 

The Latest SEO Trends and Tactics for 2022

1. Core Web Vitals

Measures and analyzes the visual stability, speed, and responsiveness of a website. These are termed as vitals for their fundamental role in setting your SEO efforts up for success. At best, there are three main factors that you shouldn’t miss out on:

• Largest Contentful Paint – measures the time it takes for the largest content element to be rendered, from the exact time the user makes a URL request. 
• Cumulative Layout Shift – measures the sum total of every unexpected layout shift that occurs on a page. 
• First Input Delay – measures how long it takes for the site to make a response the moment your user first interacts with a page.

Recommended Strategies:

• For LCP, the loading time should not take over 2.5 seconds. Best practices include optimizing the server, compressing images, reducing CSS blocking time, and minimizing Javascript. 
• For CLS, you want to keep it totally minimal to zero. For this, you may need to start using a CMS and use the most optimal sizes for your images and videos. Be aware of how ads may impact your page’s layout, too.
• For FID, Google recommends a loading time speed of fewer than 100 milliseconds. It’s always best to break up long tasks and keep JavaScript execution time to a minimum. 

2. “People also ask”

This is the section in a search results page where questions relevant to the search queries are listed down and provided with the most appropriate answers, usually from blog pages. The “People also ask” section in the SERPs is actually highly tactical since, one, it’s actually placed close to the top of the first page. Secondly, many people actually interact with them.

Recommended Strategy:

You need to know the common questions related to your niche and provide the most complete answers to them. Use a keyword research tool to know the long-tail keywords questions then add a FAQ section or provide a detailed answer with its own subheading. 

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3. Keyword Clustering

Keyword research always complements SEO. However, since Google’s NLP (natural language processing) technology has since undergone vast improvements, keyword targeting has only become trickier.

This is where keyword clustering comes in, which involves making a list (or in this case, cluster) of keywords with the same search intent. For example, a “senior living community” is no different from an “assisted living community”.

Recommended Strategy:

Create web pages that target clusters rather than a mix of related single keywords.

4. AI-Generated Content

While full-scale AI copywriting is still far off, that hasn’t stopped companies from capitalizing on what’s available to them through AI-assisted SEO tools like Jarvis, CopyAI, and Headlime. Its most positive impact lies in the fact that it saves you the time needed to brainstorm titles, topics, and meta tags or even create an entire draft.

Recommended Strategies:

Use AI tools to create a rough draft of a possible article made from the topics and titles they have suggested to you. Save time and effort by making the most out of the titles and meta tags they can provide to you. 

5. Rich Snippets

SEO services have been loving the way you can optimize your site using schema markup for a good reason, and one of them is the chance for a site to be on a rich or featured snippet on search. Schema markups are actually encouraged by Google so naturally, and sites that implement a schema markup often enjoy better organic traffic as a result of the snippets. 

Recommended Strategy:

Use the most specific class and markup only the content found on the page. More importantly, connect your content as much as possible to maintain optimal structured data. 

6. Importance of Videos and Video Structured Data

Adding videos to your content to raise engagement and video search as a whole could not be more important now, considering the stats outlined above. As a response to that, Google has since announced structured data guidelines for videos to earn more prominence in search.

These include clip markup and seek markup. Both allow you to indicate timestamps to point your audience to the most appropriate and relevant segments for their queries.

Recommended Strategies:

Start indicating timestamps and putting labels in your video with regards to people’s search queries.

7. Passage Ranking

Google is now able to pinpoint exact passages in your content that will provide the most relevant answer to a user’s specific search engine query. It now independently indexes and ranks that passage.

Recommended Strategy:

Aim to create content that provides the most veritable and detailed answers to all the queries it wants to rank for.

Advanced SEO Tactics You Need to Implement with These Trends in Mind

Knowing SEO current trends is only as good as the tactics you implement with their requirements already in mind. Content marketing and influencer marketing can only go so far, so it’s high time to start looking at more advanced strategies like:

1. Pay more attention to your website’s structured data. Take the time to mark up your content. This goes for both text and video.
2. Use free tools like Answer The Public and SEMrush to know the search intent of your audience and look for long-tail keywords.
3. Show your dedication to helping users with their questions by expounding on your answers without adding fluff and focusing on informing with every sentence.
4. Come up with a great internal linking strategy. Figure out the most linked-to pages on the site using Majestic then link internally from it to other pages with poor visibility.
5. Boost your site’s security and credibility. If you haven’t switched your site to HTTPS, now is the best time to do. Listen to the basic website security recommendations as well. For credibility, you need to adopt better external linking strategies.

Conclusion

Given its history as a search engine, we can only expect more Google algorithm updates to come in the future. As always, the most ideal response to them is to equip yourself with the necessary knowledge with regard to SEO trends and tactics. Marketing strategies never remain static, so it’s equally vital to introduce your own twists to stand out.