Whether you are a blogger, manage a company website or sell online through an eCommerce, all SEO activities will allow you to position yourself better on search engines and, consequently, increase visits to your site.
The Google algorithm is constantly changing, so it is essential to stay up to date. Doing SEO in 2022 means always keeping in mind some key aspects on which all the SEO revolves in the last period.
We know that it is necessary to earn the best possible position in the SERP ( Search Engine Results Page, that is the results page on Google) because the vast majority of users inevitably click on the first results (if you want to deepen the topic, I refer you to this study published on Smart Insights ).
To help you achieve this goal, we have created a community dedicated to this. If you are motivated to increase the popularity of your website, you should sign up for free SEO lessons every week.
Undoubtedly, there are sites that receive most of the traffic from other channels, without making particular efforts in the SEO field. For example, bloggers who have a strong presence on social media or major brand sites.
In any case, knowing the basics of SEO and gradually implementing them on your site over the long term will bring great benefits to your online presence.
What To Do For Improving SEO in 2022
1) Optimize your site for mobile devices
In addition to ensuring first of all that your site is absolutely responsive, and therefore that you choose the right WordPress theme, there are other tricks you can follow.
AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
More and more people are accessing the web from their mobile phone and Google is rightly adapting their algorithms so that sites optimized for mobile devices are better positioned.
Indeed, Google has even decided to restructure its indexing rules based on the “mobile-first”, that is, taking into consideration first of all the mobile version of the websites.
A tool that can help you in this is definitely AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it is a project that aims to provide content to users who browse the web from mobile even faster. AMP is an open-source project, but there is a Google AMP cache that contains AMP pages.
If you are interested in adding it to your site, try the WordPress plugin from AMP.
Limit pop-ups
One of the elements that most disturb mobile browsing are full-screen pop-ups. For this reason, Google will penalize sites that show full-screen pop-ups, intrusives and / or need to be closed by the user himself before he or she can continue browsing.
It is important to note, however, that sites that show legally-prescribed pop-ups, such as the cookie information banner, are not penalized.
But all the other pop-ups, for example the promotional ones or those that invite the user to subscribe to the newsletter, should be reduced so as to occupy about 20% of the screen of a mobile device. Pop-ups should not disturb navigation and should be able to be closed easily.
Below you can see examples of pop-ups provided by Google that limit visibility and navigation, and therefore it is not correct to use:
2) Continue to publish long content, even less frequently
Google is also concerned with providing quality content that really is of value. For this reason, doing SEO in 2022 also means paying some attention to what you write and also to what you write.
The length of a text, although it may not always be synonymous with quality, is nevertheless a sign of a certain level of depth in the contents.
For this, it would be better to publish a 2000 word post, very thorough and exhaustive on the subject, even just once a week, rather than 7 posts of 300 words.
It is obvious that everything helps: publishing a 300 word post is undoubtedly better than not posting anything for months and months, but the ideal length of the posts – so that they can be optimized in SEO terms – is around 1600 words.
3) Don’t overdo the keywords too much!
The concept of optimizing your content for a keyword is always valid. That is, choose a topic for your post, select a keyword and enter this keyword in the title, in the meta description, in the text, and so on. In this, a plugin like Yoast SEO can help you a lot.
However, what is changing is that the frequency with which the keyword appears within the content is becoming less important, to the benefit of synonyms. Let me explain: up to a couple of years, optimizing content for a given keyword meant making it appear ‘strictly’ every 100 words within the text.
Now this is no longer necessary. However, Google has become much better at understanding synonyms and related words, so rather than always entering the same keyword, make sure there is a good frequency of keywords related to the main one.
I understand how complicated this can sometimes be and in fact many of the clients who come to us for our SEO services commit – among other things – this error too … very often!
Just keep in mind a concept: Google is increasingly focusing on quality and user experience, so improving the readability of your articles using synonyms and therefore a more natural language (more intended for men and less exclusively for bots) will surely come awarded.
4) Check out the Featured Snippets
Perhaps you have already noticed that for some time Google has introduced the Featured Snippets, in Italian called Snippets in the foreground in the search. Simply put, these are snippets of web pages that are placed prominently at the top of Google’s results page.
Content in Featured Snippet receives enormous visibility, so it is good to be aware of it because it is very important to do SEO in 2023.
In reality, there are no rules that guarantee that the content snippet appears in the featured section of the SERP. That said, there are guidelines you can follow to increase the chances that your site is highlighted:
- First, try to position your content well. The ideal would be in the first position!
- Organize the content well with heading H1, H2, H3, etc.
- If the content in question is a tutorial, try using a bulleted list for the various steps.
- Obviously, it optimizes the content appropriately for the keyword you have chosen.
- In some cases, the Featured Snippet feature can help to significantly increase organic traffic to the highlighted page. This is especially true when only the first steps provided by a tutorial or the first part of an explanation are highlighted.
There is however a possible negative effect: it is true that your visibility will increase considerably, but if the user believes that the response provided by the snippet is quite exhaustive, he will not click on the result, and therefore the traffic on your site may be reduced.
5) Install an SSL certificate on your site
An SSL certificate allows you to encrypt the information that is sent by the user’s browser to the server where your site is located. This is to protect sensitive data that could be intercepted during communication between the browser and the server.
For some time, Google has begun to ‘reward’ sites that adopt this type of security measure, so this is also fundamental for doing SEO in 2023. I have also noticed that more and more users are attentive to the security level of websites.
For example, if you use Google Chrome and have done the last update, you will notice that now for the sites that have installed an SSL certificate, the word ‘Secure’ appears in green in the navigation bar on the left of the URL.
However, adding an SSL certificate to your site is usually quite simple. Many hosting providers already offer it as an included service (for example, on SiteGround even the basic plans have access to a free SSL certificate).
In order to have a higher level of protection, it is possible to purchase premium SSL certificates that have a cost starting from 55 euros per year. Once the certificate is purchased, the SiteGround technical team will take care of installing the certificate.
All major providers offer SSL certificates, so I suggest you evaluate the options provided by your hosting service.
If you need help with SSL certificates, activate Priority Assistance and we’ll get back to you within an hour.
6) Follow the basic SEO optimization rules
The advice you find above is based on the latest SEO news. But there are some basic rules that always remain valid. For example:
- Publishes quality content;
- Optimize images;
- Make sure your site is fast.
