7 Tips to Kick Off Your SEO Strategy in 2022

A new year is here, but many of our worries are still the same: there’s a raging global pandemic, I’m still not sure what TikTok is for, and Google is reshuffling the SERPs every 48 seconds.Â

An effective SEO strategy can protect you against these wild times pertaining to Google and SERPs, making you a site that Google always wants to rank and understands well enough to rank well. So what should an effective SEO strategy consist of?

SEO is often divided into three pillars: technical, content and authority, which are crucial elements for improving organic results. Let’s look at some tips to consider for your SEO strategies in 2022 as you build on these pillars.

Become a Destination in Your Own Right

Being a homogenized, commoditized â€œone of manyâ€ means Google loses nothing by putting you anywhere it likes in its SERPs, from position one to page three. Sites that reliably perform well in organic have the content that causes users to seek them out, and Google can’t help but notice and reward that â€” it’s in Google’s best interests to show results that people want to click on, or in other words, good results. How Google might identify sites like these remains controversial to SEOs. But my colleague Cyrus Shepard talked about some potential signalsOpens a new window last year â€” being the first click, the long click, and the last click. In other words, think about how your site can be the obvious and final answer to a user’s problem.

See More: Why Null Search Results Shouldn’t Keep Us From Our Big Rock Candy Mountains

Take a Long, Hard Look at Your Sitewide Navigation

SEO teams will do almost anything to get a few links, increasing the authority passing into their pages. Usually, though, they could improve the strength of their key pages by just focusing on the strength of their own sites. If your top nav has 300 links in it, it’s sending less strength to key pages than it could be doing. If your site doesn’t focus on relevancy within subjections with more specialized navigation elements, you’ve squandered a valuable opportunity to be more relevant than your competition.

Repurpose and Relaunch Existing Content To Maximize Its Effectiveness

SEO and content go hand-in-hand, which is why it’s essential to have content that hits the mark and keeps site visitors coming back. Relaunching top content is one way to do that. Content is often here for today then forgotten about tomorrow. But instead of moving onto the next blog post, white paper or infographic, take the pieces that performed well, update them where applicable, and then relaunch using their same URLs to maximize their effectiveness.Â Â Â Â

Pay Attention to Title Tag Rewrites

Titles are often the first impression of a site users get during their searches, which explains why site owners were less than enthused when Google started implementing title tag rewrites in 2021Opens a new window . Google’s reasoning for changing titles is to create better ones by removing the fluff, making for direct titles and providing straightforward answers. There’s no way to stop rewrites from happening, but you should note the changes to create better titles in the future.

Don’t Forget About Core Web Vitals

Google’s Core Web Vitals weren’t well-received in 2021, but they’re here to stay and likely to evolve significantly. This page experience update is becoming increasingly important to ranking, so sites should be mindful of each signal â€” Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift â€” but not at the expense of user experience. One way to optimize for Cumulative Layout Shift, for example, is to add placeholder elements that occupy space while slower content is loading in.

Use Focused Sitemaps for Improved Crawlability

Instead of listing every single page on your site in a series of 50,000 URL sitemaps, consider what role sitemaps play on your site. Do they ensure obscure content is eventually discovered and that new content is rapidly indexed? Or are they for hreflang and to debug indexing issues in Google Search Console?Â

If it’s the former, a smaller sitemap containing only very recently updated pages may be checked more frequently by Google. On the other hand, sitemaps whose primary purpose is hreflang or debugging must be exhaustive.

See More: 3 Local Search Marketing Decisions You Should Weigh To Succeed in a Changing Landscape

Take Advantage of Passive Link Acquisition for Better Link Building

Finally, link building is known to be the bane of many SEOs’ existences, but it’s still essential for ranking nonetheless. Passive link acquisition is one tactic to build links. It’s dependent upon creating content that appeals to those who come across it. In turn, the expectation is that they’ll like it and find it credible enough to link back to it on their own sites. Developing content that contains original research and data, is geared toward beginners (i.e., introductory information) and has curated resources (i.e., compiling stats and facts into one place) are a few methods we’ve had success with at Moz.

Ranking is as vital as ever going into 2022. But it doesn’t have to be a scary ordeal. Hopefully, these tips will get you off to a good start.

What steps have you taken to improve your website rankings in 2022? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .