Unfortunately for all the busy website owners, business owners and marketing aficionados, search engine optimization (SEO) is a constantly changing field. Specific content, websites, keywords, and trends tend to fluctuate constantly. We wish it was as easy as just doing your best and watching your page climb up the rankings, but that just isn’t the case.  

Search engine optimization is fully reliant on Google’s algorithm, and with this algorithm often tweaked to increase user interfacing, you have to be aware of the changes that are made to the algorithm, and how these can affect your optimization. 

SEO is a long-term investment, and to do it right, it’s important to know what algorithm changes can lead to penalizations, and so, understand what to avoid. To make it easier, we’ve made sure your SEO in 2022 is protected from all possible pitfalls on the horizon.

When it comes to SEO, there are many pitfalls, but we’ve gone beyond the obvious and put forward what we can see to be issues arising in the year ahead. Once you alleviate these issues and streamline your process, growth is basically guaranteed.

When you don’t have a fantastic, well thought out and attainable goal in mind, you can find your SEO process to be meandering, and lacking clear direction. This can lead to a feeling of ‘winging it’ and lead to content and SEO becoming directionless and ill-defined. This lack of defined goals can lead to your strategy not really fulfilling a good purpose, and this is subtly noticeable to people visiting your website as well as Google’s algorithm. 

Ask yourself this: do you know what quality content actually is? It’s not just well-written content, without spelling errors and proper sentences, it is content that fulfils a purpose. Search engine rankings for Google will always favour content that has a purpose. It needs to be useful to your core audience, fulfil a need they have and also be an interesting read, all these factors combined means you will have quality content that helps your SEO strategy be more robust. 

One of the biggest things people forget to optimize on their website is images. It’s not really enough to just put an image on your webpage, you also need to optimize this image. To do this accurately, images need to be the right size, format and resolution. This is because images give search engines information through alternative text, and can affect page loading speeds, which affects user engagement and rankings overall. Well-chosen, well-optimized images can really add another layer of optimization to your website, while also giving your user great images to enjoy at the same time.

Duplicate content is a huge red flag for Google. This content can confuse Google and force search engines to choose which of the pages it should rank in the results, regardless of who made the content. This means there is a vast possibility that the original page won’t be the one chosen for the search results. This is why we love seeing only original content. 

We all know keywords are important for showing search engines the content you have is relevant to search queries. But these keywords shouldn’t just be well thought out or well-chosen, they also have to be targeted. That is, the keywords have to be so specific, they target your key audience. This can be done with tools readily available, but you also have to ensure these targeted keywords are properly dispersed throughout your content.

For a few years now, page loading speed has been a ranking factor. This means it’s important, but did you know what the average speed is? The average load time is 8.66 seconds, though the recommended page speed time for last year is 3 seconds. This means your pages need to load between 8-3 seconds, even less if possible. This is important to Google as it informs user satisfaction, and if your pages load too slowly, users are likely to click on someone else’s results. This is not what you want.             

When your webpage has domain authority, it has trust in Google’s eyes. This means Google believes that websites with high EAT, or effectiveness, authoritativeness and trustworthiness is essential. When this aspect is important to Google, it should be important to you too. With a great selection of backlinks, well-written content and effective website design, you can show Google how trustworthy you are, and climb the rankings while you’re at it. 

We can understand wanting to stick to your ways, when something works for you, it should continue working, right? Although this is a solid business sense, it’s not solid marketing sense. This is because good SEO is reliant on adaptability. This means, to get ahead, you need to know that the algorithm is always changing, and you need to adapt to suit it. Updating your SEO playbook can be the thing that really shoots you ahead of the competition. 

Now there is one last thing to remind you of, which is the fact that BlackHat SEO is to be avoided. Manipulating search engine results from activities such as meta tag stuffing, keyword stuffing, and invisible text are some things to avoid. They can lead to penalization, and that’s the opposite of what you want. 

Now that you know what to avoid, you may be aware that this will change every year, in fact, it may just change throughout the year. If you want to stay on top of things, working with a digital agency might be what you need. This is where Perfect Link Building comes in. We know the ins and outs of good WhiteHat SEO and we can bring it to you.