In a modern day business world, online presence is important for many companies both old and new. SEO is a necessary focus point for many businesses who want to improve their website’s ranking and pages on the search engines.
So what methods are popular for the upcoming year? Your SEO strategy is something that should be adapting to the changes happening online as more people utilize it for both business and pleasure.
In this article, we’ll share five ways to boost your website’s SEO in 2022, as well as some helpful tools that can help assist in your efforts. Here are some of the best ways to boost your website’s search engine optimization in 2022.
The benefits of SEO
According to Bright Edge, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. There are many benefits that can come from focusing on your SEO strategy and are worth considering if your business has yet to make use of search engine optimization practices.
Increased customer traffic
Driving traffic to your website is one of the main objectives when it comes to your website’s SEO. If your website is a source of income for the business, then increasing your customer traffic is a major benefit.
With a growing number of websites popping up every day, the competition becomes more difficult. Maintaining your customers and encouraging new ones to visit your site can be helpful with search engine optimization.
Creates a trustworthy experience
Internet users trust the SERPs and as a result, if your webpage ends up on the top few pages then you’re a trustworthy business. Creating a more valuable and engaging experience is essential for all visitors to your site, whether or not they’ve converted into customers.
Improves brand awareness
Recognition takes a lot longer to achieve than you’d think. It takes 5-7 separate impressions to start creating brand awareness and so that means every encounter with your brand needs to be memorable.
Those opportunities to get noticed can be helped by focusing on your SEO improvements. When you know what SEO methods work, it can help rocket your efforts for more people to see or come across your brand.
It’s affordable
SEO doesn’t need to be expensive, especially when you’re focused on improving organic traffic or making a few changes to what’s already in existence. You may want to hire a specialist to help assist with your SEO, however there’s a lot that you and your team can learn just from what’s available on the internet.
Outside of hiring someone, the tools that are available nowadays also make it easier to implement SEO practices for your business website. These tools are very affordable, making it accessible for both small businesses and start-ups to utilize them.
Five ways to boost your website’s SEO
As you enter a new year, there are plenty of ways that can help boost your website’s SEO. It’s worthwhile looking at the trends that are currently related to search engine optimization, of which there are a few below.
- Research your users and know your audience
Knowing your audience plays a significant role in a lot of your business success in general. When it comes to your users, research and collecting data can be helpful to know your user’s intent.
With this data, you can also understand what your audience are looking for, whether that be down to the content you provide to how your website is designed and presented. Take a look at what keywords your target audience may be using in order to direct your content to their search results.
A good tip is to type in a keyword that’s significant to your business into Google. What comes up? Analyze those web pages and when you create new content or update existing web pages, take inspiration from those top-performing web page results.
- Focus on creating quality content
As part of your content marketing strategy, you may already be looking at what content to generate in 2022. Content is still king when it comes to SEO but it’s important to stress that quality is everything. The better quality you create in your content, the more likely it will be successful with engagement.
Look at your content in comparison to a competitor or a site that’s simply performing better than yours. What are they doing differently that you could also introduce when creating content?
You should also take a look at what existing content is performing well on your site and to use this as a reference point for future content creation.
- Be attentive to the technical side of SEO
Technical SEO is something you shouldn’t forget when it comes to helping rank your website. When your website or particular web pages encounter technical problems, it provides a less seamless experience for your customer. That may lead to them disengaging with the web page in particular or simply exiting off the site completely.
Invest some of your time into the core web vitals to discover any broken links, slow page loading speeds and anything else that might be preventing your traffic from getting the best experience out of your site.
- Improve your website’s accessibility
Accessibility on the web is an on-going concern as many websites and businesses online are failing to provide accessible features for those hard of hearing or visually inpaired.
If you want your site to rank higher, here are a few tips to make them more accessible.
- Make sure all imagery has alternative text or ALT tags as they’re commonly referred to.
- Check your website against the WCAG rules for accessibility compliance.
- Add ARIA attributes to the site so that every screen reader can read text and widgets.
It’s important to ensure the content you publish is accessible and that the site is also accessible across all corners of the website. The WCAG has a lot of information that’s worth looking at in order to make your website more accessible for the majority of your audience.
- Revise your link-building efforts
Link-building is an important part of online marketing and that many business websites will implement. It can help show Google that you’re a site that can be trusted since it’s being mentioned across other sites.
When link-building, you may offer to place these links in the form of free guest posts or paid posts where you pay the website owner to publish the content or link. This sort of marketing can be time-consuming and it’s why many will opt to use an agency to place these links on a regular basis.
These are just a few methods that you can implement into your company’s strategy but you may choose to expand on these suggestions.
Tools to use for SEO in 2022
Whilst SEO can be challenging to get right, it’s beneficial that all website owners have access to affordable or free tools online. We’ve put together some of the best tools that are worth your time and investment when using them for SEO in 2022.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an OG for SEO and has helped many businesses monitor and track traffic coming onto their site. It also provides a more in-depth insight into who your audience are and what they’re engaging with vs what they’re not so interested in.
The platform can help improve your decision-making on content and what will likely drive more traffic or convert more leads to customers.
It’s free and easy to implement into your website, which makes it accessible for every website owner.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast has been ranked as one of the best plugins for SEO on WordPress. If you have a WordPress account for managing your website’s content then this plugin is a must-have. It’s free to use but has a premium plan for those wanting to improve content further.
It’s a great tool that gives you suggestions on how to improve the SEO of the web page or blog post. For on-page SEO, it’s a must!
Moz Pro
Moz Pro is likely one of the most popular platforms when it comes to SEO tools. It’s one of the most experienced when it comes to independent SEO apps and they’ve been around since the early 2000s.
Moz Pro is the paid web version of Moz, which is also worth utilizing. The paid option helps you track keyword rankings, optimize content and run technical SEO site audits. You can also check on your competitor’s backlinks.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a good choice when it comes to the technical side of SEO. It can conduct technical SEO audits as well as detecting server errors like the dreaded 404 error.
Some of its other features include crawling your website for broken links, finding duplicate content and generating XML sitemaps. This tool can also be integrated with Google Analytics in order to pull user data and performance for further insight.
Boost your website’s SEO for 2022
Search engine optimization contributes heavily towards your online presence, so make sure you focus on it in the new year.
