Top SEO Trends for 2022

Things you need to be aware of this year

Google rolled out a few major updates over the course of 2021, including core updates over the summer and a product review update in December.

It’s impossible to know exactly what Google has up its sleeve for 2022, but there are a few main trends that I think we’re going to see play out.

AI content

You can expect to see increasing adoption of tools that use AI to automatically generate content (such as Jarvis).

There are some sites that are spinning out complete articles with AI, but the problem is that the technology isn’t quite good enough and a lot of this content sucks. I personally use human writers for all of my long-form content.

What AI is great for is automating smaller tasks. Think of things like email headings, post titles, etc. I’ve also had great success using Jarvis as part of my AI linkbuilding strategy (and so have some of you, judging by the DM’s I’ve been getting!).

If you haven’t tried any of these tools yet, I recommend experimenting with them in 2022. The technology is getting better and it’s something you want to keep tabs on even if you aren’t getting much use out of it at the moment.

More competition

COVID accelerated everything. Instead of taking 20 years for everything to move online and remote, it happened overnight.

This means that anyone who ever wanted to start a website did so in 2020-2021 and now they’re ramping things up to the point where they have a serious chance at stealing some top spots.

I think that this trend will continue and that more people will try to start a second income online, which will lead to even more competition for the lucrative page one positions in Google.

Topical authority

Topical authority was one of the biggest SEO buzzwords in 2021, and I expect that it’s going to continue to be extremely important in the future.

Going forward, it’s important to think about your site as not being a single niche but rather a collection of micro-niches. You want to saturate your site with content about one of those sub-niches to start with, and then expand out to others once you start ranking.

Videos

Google’s recent product review update reiterated the importance of “proving” that you actually tested the product out. Obviously that’s not always possible (you’re going to have to write reviews without physically trying the product, there’s no way around it).

If you read between the lines, what they really want is unique images and videos on your page. This will show the algorithm that you aren’t just spinning out content with stolen images from the manufacturer’s page.

Video is an important element here. If you can create a quick video for each product that you review and embed the video in the article, it’ll help show the algorithm that you have unique content that other reviews don’t have.

Another benefit is that your site’s domain authority can influence how well your videos rank in YouTube search. YouTube videos also show up at the top of the SERPs for some queries.

The trend of Google wanting unique content isn’t going to change, so 2022 is the year when you need to start taking video seriously.

Conclusion

It’s getting more difficult to rank highly in the organic SERPs. There is more competition and Google keeps rolling out updates that make things more difficult.

The days of quick wins are coming to an end, but if you take your SEO seriously then you can easily destroy your competition. I’m telling you, if you put the work in now then at this point in 2023 you will be extremely happy with the results.

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