From Creating Sharable Content To UX Accessibility
As we step into 2022, it’s time to take a look at what trends could be at the forefront of marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of any business strategy and is important to focus on as we head into a new year of business promotion. So the question is, just how much thought have you given your SEO in 2022? Have you been changing up your strategies or have you found a plan that works for you?
If you’ve seen your engagement rate falling and your search ranking remaining fixed, you’ve come to the right place. Prioritizing your SEO has some serious cost-effective benefits for business success that can be easily forgotten as we focus on social and PPC strategies. Not only can good SEO increase your target traffic, but it reduces the need for PPC ad spend, leaving more wiggle room for creative future campaigns. Here are our tips to rejuvenate your 2022 SEO tactics and wake up that sleepy SEO strategy for new year success.
1. Take A Step Back And Review
Before making those all-important changes, it’s time to see what is going well, and more importantly, what isn't. Taking a step back and auditing the success of your SEO campaigns is a great way to monitor what keywords are performing well and what pages are receiving the most engagement. It’s also important to keep on top of your audience and know your demographic inside out. What are the current trends circulating on their social feeds? What keywords are most likely to be searched for within your demographic?
Using audience analytics-based tools, such as Google Analytics and Finteza, is a great place to start when mapping out your audience’s needs and gratifications. Remaining one step ahead of the trends will influence your content creation and keyword optimization, and position you right at the top of their search string.
2. Increase Those Backlinks
Winning over Google can feel like a popularity contest, so the only way to win is to be just that. Increasing your backlink coverage across a range of sites within your niche tells Google that you are an authoritative player within your specialty, or an expert within your subject matter. Google will rank sites with a higher number of wide web backlinks further up than a site that doesn’t have any trace of recognition within their field.
Creating backlinks is a simple, yet effective, process. Whether you introduce guest posting to your strategy that outreaches content to link back to your site, or simply connect and build a relationship with other players in your field, this off-site SEO strategy could seriously rejuvenate your ranking score. Better still, backlinking is a great way to improve your on-site SEO score too, if you position those links strategically. Hyperlinking product pages and consumer-focused content in well-written blog posts can actually drive readers to your site and boost your engagement. Not only will this improve your SEO, but backlink followers are much more likely to become solid sales leads.
3. Create Sharable Content
If you’re looking to switch up your SEO strategy in 2022, it could be time to start thinking less about simply creating content and more about creating the right content for SEO success. Whether you’re writing a blog post or creating a feature for your socials, prioritizing sharability is the key to increasing your engagement, brand awareness, and off-site SEO score.
The theory here is that content that is shared amongst your consumers organically across their own social platforms such as Twitter and Instagram is much more likely to encourage their peers to engage with your brand rather than a paid ad across generalized platforms. Why not incorporate new sharable techniques into your content creation such as newsjacking. The key here is to stay on top of demographic trends and new stories that have the potential to go viral within your audience’s bubble. Jumping on these viral trends early will make your content more likely to be picked up, shared and engaged with, in turn increasing brand awareness and authority for SEO success.
4. Improve UX Accessibility
Did you know that 40% of visitors abandon web pages if they take more than three seconds to load [1]? While content is important in determining your SEO score, Google also takes into account your website’s User Experience (UX) design and user accessibility when ranking you against your competitors. If your site loading speed is too low, you won't only lose engagement as customers bounce, but Google can recognize this too. In order to fix this, here are some of the easiest ways to improve your UX design for SEO success:
- Utilize white space
Removing website clutter will improve the User Experience while reducing the amount of multimedia-based loading time as consumers click on the site. - Prioritize your mobile users
50% of online traffic comes from smartphone devices. If your UX isn’t smartphone-friendly, your mobile-based demographic won’t stick around. - Monitor your page speed
Using online tools such as the Google Page Insights tool will provide you with page-by-page insights that can detect what is working and areas you can make more accessible [2].
5. Optimize Your Images
Images are a great gateway to a high SEO score as they aid site authority and improve the User Experience. However, in order to improve your SEO effectively, they need to be optimized for UX perfection.
In order to achieve this, we need to think about file formats, size, and quality. While having a large-sized image may seem like the easiest way to ensure high definition quality, it’s actually the compression that makes the most difference. Using a lower compression rate results in higher quality images, which is what we want to aim for here.
Ready To Recover Those Search Rankings?
As we step into 2022, recovering your search rankings could be a great way to guarantee marketing success this year. In fact, 61% of B2B marketing experts suggest that SEO strategy can generate more leads than any other initiative, making it the perfect tactic for increasing your conversions and ROI in the new year [3]. Whether you choose to spruce up your content game or focus on your UX design, building up your search ranking score has never been more important as we continue to become more digitalized.
