So you’ve done all the work required and trust your local SEO agency to manage your SEO on a monthly basis… but you still want to improve further.
Then this article is for you! Ideally you should always be seeking areas to improve in, even if your SEO is already performing optimally.
You know there’s always new heights to reach with both of an off-page optimisation, and new goals to soar towards. And remember, you always have to keep on your toes and watch the competition.
Competitors can always overtake you in the SERPs, which directly translates to pushing you down lower in the search results for any of your target keywords.
Just like constant monitoring of metrics is key, you should also make sure your SEO is always up to date and pushing towards, if not beyond your last established KPI.
Before you proceed with the list, make sure to check that you already have these important SEO foundations for 2022 down:
- Check to make sure your site is optimised for Core Web Vitals
- Ensure your most vital SEO metrics are all optimised correctly
Now, it’s time to explore the latest SEO hacks to try this year.
While there are no shortcuts to good, effective, and sustainable SEO, sometimes all it takes is a simple tweak to drive your metrics above and beyond expectations:
1. Regularly submit your sitemap
Normally, Google is already pretty good at automatically crawling websites, however it can sometimes lag a bit behind.
If you’ve done 301 updates, fixed duplicate or thin content, or made major changes to your site, make sure to resubmit your sitemap, especially if the SEO changes you have made do not seem to have taken effect.
While there are no limits on the amount of times you can submit your sitemap each day, we strongly advise you to submit no more than once per day, because submitting more than that might have adverse consequences.
Depending on the optimisation you performed prior to submission of the sitemap, you should see an improved visibility as a result of maximising SEO through sitemap resubmission.
2. Add a Robots.txt File where required
As you might already know, a robots.txt file tells bots which pages not to crawl.
The benefit of putting robot.txt files where they belong is it decreases the amount of time it takes for a search bot to crawl your entire site.
Robot.txt files essentially tell Google which pages to assess and which to ignore. This means that Google can crawl your site faster, which can have a positive impact on your ranking.
For a quick run-down, here are some of the most common places you want to put your robot.txt file in:
- Admin or login pages
- Duplicate page versions (e.g. a printer-friendly version of a page)
- Checkout pages
- Confirmation/thank you pages
3. Ensure your site is mobile friendly!
It is an absolute must for your website to be mobile-friendly, especially since the mobile-first indexing update was rolled out almost 3 years ago!
In 2022, a mobile-friendly website is simply non-negotiable.
Here is a quick overview on how to make your site mobile friendly:
- Clean, clear and visually appealing web design
- Avoiding intrusive pop-ups that are difficult to navigate away from
- Ensure your website loads FAST
- Easy navigation and menus
- Use viewport meta tag
- Clear and eye-catching calls to action
4. Turn top performing blog posts into videos
2022 is the year of video.
Video is fast becoming the preferred choice of information consumption and the demand for it is predicted to increase even further.
According to data from Oberlo:
- More than half of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they like
- 86% of marketing professionals utilise video as a marketing tool
- Video resources boost web traffic by up to 157%, partly due to some pages ending up getting a prize piece of the SERP landscape as a featured snippet
Those reasons should be more than enough to convince you to try this hack today.
5. Keep your content fresh
This is a really easy tip to refresh your website and impact your ranking in a big way!
So, you wrote a brilliant blog post years ago. However over time, it’s faded away, trampled by newer and more updated versions of the same topic by other blogs or sites.
Seize the opportunity to not only keep your post performing well but also revive it in a way that can result in a massive boost to the traffic it’s already managed to pull in.
There are three fantastic ways that you refresh, update, and improve existing blog posts:
Update data
Say you wrote a brilliant case study about a client some years ago. You can now revisit this blog post to follow up on further progress and developments or top it up with additional findings and fresh data.
For example, a case study written in 2019 may have assessed follow-up results 3 and 6 months later. Now some years have passed, so why not add an update for additional timeframes, such as 12 months or 2 years?
It would also be beneficial to update your keyword research on the post.
Finally, remember to update the publishing date!
Refresh your outbound links
If your post is old and you have updated or refreshed it, and added new data, make sure any outbound links follow suit.
Check if you can link to fresher content or newer versions of the content you have used as reference or citation.
And if you linked to your refreshed page in your other posts, make sure to update those too.
Remember to also resubmit your sitemap in your Google Search Console after!
Update your images
Part of refreshing old content is swapping out the images used in it for newer versions, especially if they are screenshots of existing content.
For example, a screenshot of the old version of a tweet from circa 2009 would look quite different from the current look of a screenshot taken from this year.
Old images can make your post look dated.
In addition to making the actual updates, it’s important to know which pages you should prioritise in your update, especially if your website has a lot of pages.
Besides top performing pages, pages with high impression but low CTR are also great to target for a refresh. You can determine these pages in your Google Search Console.
6. Get on the Voice Search trend
Along with video content, being optimised for voice search is also one of the most important optimisations you can do in 2022.
In Australia, 57% of households have a smart speaker in their homes and are using it to search. That’s a lot of traffic you could be targeting, so make sure to optimise your schema markup and target conversational long-tail keywords which are useful for voice search optimisation.
Look for keywords via Google auto-fill related searches as well.
7. Target for low-difficulty featured snippets
Featured snippets are a great way to get yourself to the top of search results, but it can also be hard to snatch that position.
Depending on how competitive the topic or keyword is (along with how well you optimise for it) you can have a shot at the spot.
A good way to try this is to start with searching for relevant, informational-intent long tail keywords (with high to decent search volume – if you’re lucky enough to find such a combination!) and then target that, especially if you already rank in the top ten for those searches.
8. Optimise for Bing search
While everyone is focused on Google, most people forget to optimise for Bing search results.
But don’t ignore this secondary search engine. Bing boasts 1 billion monthly visitors, and that is a piece of the pie that you can be getting.
To start optimising for Bing search results, set up your Bing Webmaster Tools and improve your visibility and indexing from there.
Make sure to take advantage of Bing Places as well, especially if you are a local business.
9. Add structured data
Adding structured data is one of the quickest optimisations that can result in drastic improvements in visibility and ranking.
Make sure your website has the schema markups appropriate for it.
Across the board, one of the most powerful schema markups is the star rating snippet.
Often, websites and pages that have star rating or review ratings show up higher in the search results. That is because reviews and ratings are fast gaining importance in ranking signals in recent years.
The FAQ structured data is yet another one that you should be utilising.
Use the Rich Test Results page as well as the Schema Markup Validator to optimise your site with the necessary and appropriate structured data
10. Fix orphaned pages
Ignoring orphaned pages means that you’re under-utilising parts of your website that could well be contributing to better rankings.
If you have pages on your site that aren’t linked to any page in the site (hence the ‘orphaned’ nickname) they aren’t being used effectively and worse yet, they might not even be indexed.
An easy fix to this is to find your orphaned pages with Screaming Frog or SEMRush and then link them to relevant pages in your site.
If you’d like to supercharge your SEO strategy in 2022, speak to our SEO agency today! Call now: Brisbane (07) 3732 6522 or Melbourne (03) 8842 1250 or reach out online to tell us a bit about your business.
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