Both SEO (search engine optimization) and link building (the process of increasing domain ranking through backlinks) are important to digital marketing. But as time goes on, and algorithms change, it’s important to know what your digital marketing needs to alter in order to keep up.

For example, Google’s algorithm changes frequently. This is done to improve user interfacing and can have long-lasting ripple effects on your existing SEO and link building campaigns if you are left unaware, and that is why we have put together all the things you should keep in mind as you start optimizing for 2022.

Based on recent algorithmic changes, we have put together a list of components that will be more important to SEO strategies as we go into 2022. Keeping these in mind can help you stay one step ahead of the algorithm and ensure you don’t get left behind.

In 2022, algorithmic changes mean that captivating and engaging the people who visit your website becomes more important. This means you’ll have to shift to long-form content of 3000 words or more. This content length has been proven to get more traffic than short-form content. That being said, it has to be quality content to be engaging.

For further SEO reasons, it should include interesting images with alternative text, be broken up with H1 and H2 headings (complete with keywords integrated). The goal is to make the content easy for readers to browse, especially on mobile phones. Easy to read, easy to share content is much more effective, and the more SEO optimized it is, the better.

Many people wonder what Google means when they emphasize quality content. Technically, Google states that they want to emphasize the EAT Principle. This stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google leans on these factors to determine if a specific web page contains quality content and is something you should be aware of when developing your content.

Our favourite way to suggest doing this is by creating buyer personas, these can help you better understand what type of content your audience values. These buyer personas can help businesses create content that is interesting to their readers and is formatted to keep users interested. When you pair these buyer personas with the EAT Principle, you can find yourself ranking higher with your content.

Since Google made it a ranking factor in 2015, mobile-friendliness is essential. However, Google has rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2019, this means that the search engine looks first at the mobile version of a website when ranking content, thinking of the mobile version as the ‘primary’ version instead of the desktop version. This is not surprising, as mobile internet usage increases over time.

Thankfully, Google makes it stress-free to check the effectiveness of your mobile site with their free mobile-friendly test, they also provide a Mobile Usability Report to find out if there are issues with your mobile website and what you can do to fix these issues.

Artificial Intelligence or AI continues to change how people interact with web pages online. Most noteworthy is Google’s AI algorithm RankBrain. This is most likely to become one of the most important ranking factors for Google’s search engine results in 2022. Although Google has not disclosed the inner workings of how RankBrain analyzes content, experts have said that user experience is one of its primary ranking factors.

This means that things such as click-through rate (CTR) and the amount of time users spend on a website will be key factors used by RankBrain in the future as it ranks your content.

When you reevaluate your strategy for 2022, keep in mind that everything should be geared towards user-friendliness, so make sure your content is so useful it captivates and engages your visitors.

If you haven’t noticed, video content has become more and more popular as we head into 2022. Many brands now utilize platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to engage with customers and increase their reach. This can also be useful for SEO more than just bringing in new audiences, in that video descriptions and titles can be optimized with keywords.

That being said, it is important not to cram your video descriptions or titles with keywords, it is much more useful to use a few keywords and hashtags to direct your content to its intended audience.

Not that you’re aware of the changes to SEO in 2022, it’s important to be aware that link building is also changing for 2022. Here are the aspects you should be aware of as you optimize your link building strategy for the new year.

Website owners should always be on the lookout for relevant industry statistics to back up their data-driven content. This is why you should get backlinks to your website in order to produce pages with accurate data and well-researched content that people in your niche are interested in.

Companies don’t need to conduct in-depth research to collect this information but mentioning great sources to build a network of connections helpful to your users can help favour you in Google’s eyes. This will save you time spent on researching but will also make sure you remain aware of industry statistics and how they can help you.

As we go into 2022, it’s time to stay on top of who is mentioning you out there on the internet, and make sure they are linking back to you. This aspect of backlinking is must useful for existing websites that engage heavily in social media, as there is a higher chance of these websites being mentioned.

In addition, making sure all mentions of you are linked back to you, can allow you to utilize industry connections. The way to do this is to set up a mechanism to track any references on the internet, this can be done with Google Alerts or IFTTT, from here, you simply have to contact anyone who mentions your brand and asks them to include a link back to you, if they haven’t already.

When it comes to great local SEO, nothing beats links from local bloggers. To do this effectively, you need to start by finding active or trafficked local blogs, these should cover things like travel, fashion, cuisine, or tech. You can also find these blogs via social media if that’s more suitable for your business.

Once your list is put together, look out for a link between their site and yours. You can also speak to them directly for them to link back to you, you can even pay to include a link if that is within your budget. Here, you should avoid spammy or out of date websites in order to not be penalized by Google.

Many people in SEO think guest blogging is going out of style, but in truth, this old school link building method is still as viable as ever and can yield some strong backlinks. That being said, to do this effectively, you should only provide guest blogs for high-quality websites. These websites can’t be link farms, or selling links, and should not have ‘write for us’ sections unless they have high editorial standards.

It is hard to stay on top of algorithmic changes as the years go by, but when looking at Google’s ongoing changes, you can see that they always centre around user-friendliness. This means that as long as you utilize best practice, and focus on user-friendliness yourself, you are likely to naturally align with Google’s algorithm.

That being said, the more you know, the more powerful you are. If you know exactly what to alter, you can alter these things specifically to align yourself with the algorithm. However, this is time-consuming and is best left to the professionals, so you can continue running your business.

If you want to partner with an expert digital agency that stays on top of these changes, you should look no further than us at Perfect Link Building.