8 Important SEO Trends to Look Out For in 2022

SEO trends are actually easy to predict if you simply look at what went on in previous years and where things are going. That being said, in 2022, there’s 8 major trends I expect to be a big deal and in this post I want to share them with you.

Before I share these, let me first say that as someone who have done SEO for years and seen the long term trends play out, I have noticed a very large focus on Google prioritizing blogs and websites that provide personalized, unbiased quality content on popular subjects and many trends that played out in 2021 were (and are) pointing to this being being the norm moving forward in 2022.

Now of course, for most people who do SEO, hearing people like me say “write high quality content” is one of the most obvious “duh” statements one could make. However, the 8 trends I want to share with you are really going to illustrate why that’s so important in 2022.

Here are the 8 SEO trends in 2022 I expect to play a large role in your success:

1. Manufactured content will likely be phased out.
2. Writing unbiased product reviews are going to be imperative.
3. Guest blogging is something I’d avoid too.
4. Old school backlinking might lose it’s SEO value.
5. Diversified content is going to help you rank better.
6. Targeting low competition keywords that have intent.
7. Make sure your permalinks match your titles!
8. A speedy mobile friendly site will greatly help your rankings.

In 2022, if nothing else, you have to look at the clues 2021’s Google updates brought to see where the main trends are headed and these 7 are (to me) the most obvious ones to look for.

In 2021, Google came out with many different updates and I was hit by at least 2 of them. However, my sites were able to recover in every scenario because I followed many of the same tips I’ll be sharing with you here and it’s because people who understand the SEO game than I do understood the long term trajectory of it and this is the stuff they told me to focus on (and so far, it’s working).

1) Avoid writing or using manufactured content:

Manufactured content can come in different can come in different forms and here’s just a few:

1. Writing nothing but boring product reviews in the same format over and over.
2. Using A.I programs like Jarvis A.I to make content creation easy and simple.
3. Writing robotic content with no unique voice as though it’s an info article.

These types of things worked for SEO in previous years, and there’s a good chance some of them will continue to work in 2022 and beyond, but long term is what I personally look at and I honestly believe these things will slowly be phased out.

How do I know this? Well I am guilty of using the 1st and 3rd method to create content and in 2021, I suspect 2 of my major blogs took hits because of this.

I noticed Google was not indexing several of my articles, my conversion rates were going down and long term, and the more manufactured my content was, I was trading creating quality content with my unique voice for quantity content that had lower quality.

My advice for you with this tip is to honestly develop your own unique voice when you write content, and to diversify the subjects you write about. Don’t just be a robot and write nothing but product reviews. Do some personal info or FAQ posts. Mix it up and add your own voice to it.

2) Write product reviews that are as unbiased as possible:

When you’re like me and you’re trying to make money writing affiliate product reviews, its tough to not seem biased.

But in 2021, one of the things I noticed is that many people who wrote highly unbiased and even critical reviews of products seemed to get higher SERP positions for competitive keywords than others.

Google also came out with a product review update in 2021 that really emphasized the importance of unbiased reviews that also showcase your expertise on the product itself and providing as much content as possible to reflect that (including using pros and cons).

For me, I also noticed some of my product reviews on my travel blog where I reviewed a nice winter jacket was doing pretty well in both SEO and affiliate sales because on one hand, even though I was promoting it, I was coming off as being very unbiased and informative. I had people commenting on how they loved my review and it’s authenticity which really spoke highly of this exact point.

Another interesting case study I have to share with you on this is a Wealthy Affiliate review I did on YouTube in which I didn’t care about format or trying to “entice” people to buy anything. I simply hit the record button on my recorder and spoke from the heart.

This video is now ranked in the top 5 results on YouTube for the term “Wealthy Affiliate review” and in the top 10 for just the keyword “Wealthy Affiliate”, both of which are pretty competitive on that search engine (also owned by Google by the way and thus their SEO trends apply there too).

Point being: Write as naturally as you can (or make videos as naturally as you can). It doesn’t hurt to add images and illustrations, but keep the MAIN emphasis on being natural with your product reviews.

3) Guest blogging is something I’d personally avoid in 2022:

One of the major updates Google came out with in 2021 which signaled what the trend would be in 2022 is that a link spam update in which they included guest blog posts possibly being on the list.

Now this doesn’t mean that if you do guest blog posting, that all of a sudden your site will be penalized and if you’ve been doing it already and you haven’t seen rankings and impressions decline like gravity, then you should be fine, but guest blog posting has often be used and abused for SEO and this is one of the reasons why Google decided to update their algorithm against this.

I can’t tell you how many inquiries I get from people via email about guest blog posting and I always delete these emails. I refuse to do this.

There’s nothing wrong with for example doing interviews or podcasts with other people that have authority sites and sharing links there just for reference, but the whole point of guest blog posting is to be as natural as possible. The second the intent becomes to extract link juice from a site over writing high quality content, the quality is lost and thus the rankings can decline.

4) Old school backlinking might be something you want to move away from:

Firstly, there’s many ways to do backlinking in general and just to get the bad ones out of the way:

• Don’t try to spam people on social media with your blog links.
• Don’t buy toxic backlinks from people who say they are high quality.
• Don’t try to mass spam links all across the internet hoping that someone will do it for you.

Aside from that, there are still viable backlinking options that work in 2021 and will likely work in 2022 that I’ll point to in a second, but some of them are strategies I’d honestly recommend moving away from. Here’s just a few examples:

• Private blog networks (it’s a SEO ticking time bomb in my opinion).
• Guest blog posting (remember the link spam update?).

I have never been a fan of either of these 2 strategies even though I admit many bloggers and SEO people have used it to great benefit for years. I do however also know more than a few people who have relied on these methods for years and have been hit by SEO updates because of this and I’d just rather not spin that wheel.

Here’s some good backlinking strategies I’d recommend you focus on in 2022:

• Make YouTube videos and link them to your site.
• You can still make fan pages on social media like Pinterest, Keen, Facebook and so forth and share your content there.
• Let your quality content encourage people to share that content. This is probably your best type of backlinking strategy you can encounter because sooner or later, even high quality authority sites may start to share your stuff.

5) Diversify your content people!

I mentioned this in the first SEO trend above, but it really needs to be emphasized separately. If you’re someone who is say writing product reviews for low competition keywords and you’re just doing this over and over again, sooner or later, Google might start to reduce the authority of your site for this.

I know more than a few people over the years (including myself) who have relied on this “tried and tested” SEO tactic. It was easy rankings and it was an easy way to make money: Just write product reviews over and over.

But I noticed that certain sites with the same product review keywords I was chasing were just trumping me over and over, including friends of mine with even higher authority blogs. For example, Authority Hacker is a perfect illustration of what diversified content should look like and their blog is killing it in the rankings (And deservedly so).

They write product reviews, but they rotate their content product to write informative posts on blogging and making money online in addition to that. Try to make your content, on your blog for whatever niche you’re writing about do the same.

6) Target low competition keywords as usual, but include intent behind it:

Targeting low competition keywords will always be the hallmark of good SEO, but in recent years, adding intent behind your keyword targeting has become a huge part of having those keywords rank.

I have seen this numerous times on my travel blog where I could (and still can) easily find countless low competition keywords to write about, but in 30% of cases, when I would target those keywords, I would either not have an index for the post and/or it would not appear on the first page of Google despite the competition for the said keyword being very low.

Once I started adding more flavor and intent behind my titles which included those keywords, I started seeing more faster indexing, more rankings and more traffic, including on Google Discover as well.

What exactly is keyword intent? Well let me give you an example:

If I find that the keyword “best rei trekking poles” is easy to rank for and I write an article whose title is only that, it honestly sucks and people with articles that don’t even target that exact keyword might outrank me (seriously).

However, if I spice up the title to something like “The 10 best REI trekking poles that maximize your hikes”, I’ll likely get better results. You can also look at my blog page on this website and notice that for the past month or so, I’ve really been spicing up my titles vs before. This is no accident and I’ve been seeing the positive results from doing so.

7) Try to make sure your permalinks match your titles folks:

So one of the most disputed and even recognized methods to getting high SEO rankings is to make your target keyword your permalink (the URL your post ranks for). So if my target keyword is “best rei trekking poles” and my title is the spicy one (The 10 best rei trekking poles to maximize your hikes”, my permalink would be best-rei-trekking-poles.

For years, this SEO strategy has (and still is to an extent) viable. But in 2021, I noticed many instances where doing this led to the same bad outcomes such as my posts weren’t getting indexed for MONTHS.

Now this could have also been attributed to my title strategies which is why I simply made me titles much better (more intent) and made sure the permalink was also the same title. This helped numerous posts of mine get indexed and ranked and I don’t think it’s an accident.

In 2022, I expect this SEO trend to be a huge one and personally will be sticking to it.

8) A speedy mobile friendly site will greatly help your rankings:

Another major SEO trend that will continue (and even be more emphasized) in 2022 will be your sites and blogs having good hosting and high loading speeds on mobile.

For me, I made pretty serious changes a month ago on 2 of my blogs by removing a major plugin called Thrive Leads (entirely). It was slowing down my website across the board and people I trust told me to stop using it.

From the moment I removed that plugin, my speeds went up to the low, mid and even high 90’s across the board for mobile and desktop and I expect this to play a huge role for rankings in 2022.

Another major thing I also started doing was:

• I made it so my featured snippet didn’t appear on the top of my page (it loads slower).
• I removed as many plugins as I could to speed up my website.
• I just made sure I had reliable and good hosting (I use the one in Wealthy Affiliate).

Speeds are huge for SEO and will continue to be. Be ready to cut ties with laggy plugins folks and also be open to upgrading/updating your hosting if you want to see success in SEO in 2022.

More basic SEO trends to adhere to in 2022:

• Absolutely continue to make internal links.
• Be consistent in your content product.
• Absolutely pick a topic/niche you know a lot about to help with this.
• Use a fast loading and reliable theme for your site.
• Keyword target images in your posts (this is huge).

These are all core things that have always played a major role in SEO and will moving forward. All this being said, if you have any questions and/or comments on this topic, let me know below!