Has SEO stopped being relevant in 2022? Is SEO as effective as it used to be back in the days? These are some of the questions frequently asked in the online space.

So, is SEO really dead?

There are many misconceptions about SEO, and one of them is that SEO is dying.

Don't be fooled. SEO is not dying but evolving. The only difference is that SEO has been changing and what used to work before doesn't anymore.

If you are unsure whether or not to invest in SEO for your business, read on to understand why SEO is not dying but thriving in 2022.

How Has SEO Changed Over the years?

There are a ton of components you need to work on to improve your website's SEO. The search engines look for elements like tags, keywords, image tags, internal links, and external links.

As much as on-page SEO matters, site structure, and design, visitor behavior and off-site factors also determine how well your site ranks on the search engine results pages.

So, how has SEO changed?

Today, SEO is not about including as many keywords as possible in your piece of content.

SEO is about giving value and works best when you use keywords that match your target audience's search intent.

Therefore, you should create content that matters to your target audience and not worry about the number of times your keyword appears in your piece of content.

You should include keywords naturally in your text. Therefore, if you feel you are forcing any keyword, you should leave it out.

Will SEO disappear any time soon?

SEO is the only marketing technique that will give your business a chance to appear in front of its ideal customers even if you are not running any marketing campaigns.

Which business doesn't want that?

According to Hubspot, 75% of marketers feel that their SEO efforts play a significant role in helping them achieve their marketing goals. This is the reason why every business should embrace SEO

Here are the top reasons why SEO is not dead and is here to stay.

SEO Guarantees a High Return on Investment

Great SEO efforts translate into increased return on investment.

When done right, SEO provides the highest return on investment for an extended time compared to other marketing tactics and strategies.

The results are long-lasting.

People go to the internet to either look for an answer to their query or make purchases. If your website ranks on the first page of the search engine results page (SERPs), you are more likely to get more sales.

Compare SEO with paid ads. As soon as you stop paying, the traffic and sales suddenly stop.

SEO Guarantees Consistent and Relevant Traffic to Your Website

There are thousands and thousands of businesses online. Everyone is competing to become visible. This is not easy. So, how do you cut through all the noise?

That's where SEO comes in. SEO guarantees you traffic by putting you in front of your target audience when they are searching for your products or services.

SEO is consistent and works 24 /7 and works to make you visible on the SERP.

Anytime your target audience searches online, your website shows up. This results in consistent and quality traffic that helps you increase leads and sales.

SEO Gives a Long-term Competitive Advantage

SEO is the only marketing tactic that provides a competitive advantage that cannot be easily taken away.

For example, if your competitors get all their traffic from paid ads, they will get all the visibility and you miss out. When they stop running the ads, they miss out on visibility.

This is not the case with SEO. SEO is the only marketing tactic that evens the playing field. Once your website ranks, you will get continuous traffic in the long run.

Ranking on the first page of the SERP is not easy. But once you are there, it's equally hard for your competitors to outdo you.

What does this mean?

It means you will get more traffic and sales due to ranking.

Top SEO Strategies That Will Help Increase Website Visibility

SEO is vital for all businesses that want online visibility. Google algorithms keep changing continuously, and it's important to focus on tips and SEO strategies to increase your organic traffic.

Here are actionable SEO tips to help you gain more organic traffic in 2022.

Focus on UX

Past Google updates focused on content. However, the June 2021 Core Web Vitals focused on user experience (UX).

The Core Web Vitals update by Google are page experience signals that measure the UX of websites by looking at the following things;

The loading speed of websites
Responsiveness
Interactiveness
Stability

Why has Google decided to focus on UX?

Well, Google focuses on delivering its users the best experience and engagement regardless of the device the user is using.

Today, Google focuses more on mobile signals with 100% mobile-first indexing.

According to SEO expert Ruth Everett,

“It’s important to look beyond rankings and rather ensure a website is usable for everyone.”

Embrace Internal Linking

Image source: Wordstream.com

Internal linking is a strategy used to link different pages within a website using relevant keywords. It helps distribute traffic evenly across websites.

Websites can utilize the benefits of internal linking to help them improve their position on the SERP without any content updates.

Embracing internal links gives Google a chance to understand your content better through clickable text, known as anchor text, to show the page's value.

When internal linking, you can use a 'related article' to showcase an article related to the content you are writing.

However, having too many internal links can be harmful. It becomes difficult for Google to understand the site structure when cross-linking every page.

Don't Forget About Backlinking

Web pages are connected through links. When a website connects to your website, you earn a backlink. The more backlinks you have, the more you will rank on Google.

However, not all backlinks are good. For example, backlinks from spammy and untrustworthy sites can hurt your ranking.

Google doesn't rank all backlinks equally. So, for example, linking to a site with a high DA will increase your chances of ranking more than linking to a site with a low DA.

In addition, backlinks can either be classified as reputable, not reputable or sponsored.

Here are some link-building tips that will come in handy with your backlinking strategy.

Focus on getting links from websites with high DA to get the most out of your backlinking strategy. Use Ahrefs' free backlink checker to see all your competitors' backlinks. From your findings, reach out to their editorial team to propose publishing content to be at par with them.

Too many dead links can reduce user experience and ruin your reputation.

If you take nothing else from this article, remember this quote from Helen Pollitt.

The best source of a link is a website that is both considered authoritative and relevant to your website.

Update Existing Content

Think of an SEO blog that you published in 2020. Will the content still be relevant in 2022?

Definitely not, considering the digital world keeps on evolving every single day.

With time, old content loses its ranking. This is why it's crucial to keep content as updated and fresh as possible to maintain your ranking.

Today, Google prioritizes the most relevant and recent content to users.

Here is how you can update content on your website to remain relevant.

Update your existing blogs posts

Below is an image that shows how traffic drastically improved after updating content on a blog post. The spike on the graph shows how web traffic increased after the content update.

However, you must understand that content updates don't mean changing your old blog post date.

It's about revisiting your old blog posts and changing the data and content to the most recent and up-to-date content.

Image source: Orbitmedia

Updating Images

Imagine updating the content of a blog post from 2013 with screenshots of the old Instagram interface.

Image Source: Techcrunch

The content already feels old because of the screenshot, even though the content is still relevant.

For your content to feel fresh and relevant, you need to change the images to something readers can relate to.

Improve Ranking With Long-Tail Keywords

Using long-tail keywords is a perfect way to get significant traffic for highly competitive topics. Long-tail keywords are less competitive, more specific, and are not searched as much as your target keyword making them stand out in a crowd.

According to Aleh Barysevich:

“If you don’t have a long-tail SEO strategy, you’re missing out.”

Example:

Instead of going for a competitive keyword like "dog food," you can target a less competitive keyword like "organic dog food." The long tail keyword has the keyword "dog food," and you have the chance to rank for both keywords to attract even more traffic.

Targeting a keyword with massive traffic makes no sense when you have a slim chance of outranking the top pages.

You can also find long tail keywords by looking at the "people also asked" section, which appears on the SERP when entering a search query on google.

Match the Search Intent

Search intent also referred to as user intent or audience intent, is used to describe the purpose of an online query. It addresses what searchers want to see when they search for a question on Google. Search intent is one of the most important things in SEO and the most underrated thing in SEO.

When conducting keyword research, you must ensure the keywords you choose match the search intent. Therefore, you need to match the below search categories when selecting the keywords for your content.

Informational
Transactional
Navigational
Commercial

Over the years, Google has worked hard to understand the searchers' intent by updating its algorithm. As a result, they want to rank pages that match the search intent. This is why you need to ensure the content on your website matches your audience's search intent.

You can use the below table to help you understand and match your keywords to the search intent. It will give you a great idea of what type of content to produce.

Source: SEMRush

Don’t Forget About Technical On-Page SEO

On-page SEO maps the users' journey from when they land on your page in the SERP. Therefore, you should ensure that your on-page SEO is perfectly done.

When you don't follow the best on-page SEO practices, all your SEO efforts will go to waste.

Here are some crucial on-page technical SEO you should consider.

Run Pagespeed insights to catch and fix all the technical errors.
Write great meta descriptions that influence the CTR
Embrace the proper internal linking structure Optimize your images by compressing and adding alt-texts
Use short and descriptive URL slang
Use a great internal link structure

Perform Site Audits

It would be best if you did site audits to analyze what needs to be fixed and improved. For example, you must check and fix broken links, images, canonical errors, indexing issues, improve on-page SEO, etc.

You can use tools like Ahrefs to help you audit your site and provide you with crucial SEO insights that need your attention and overall website performance.

After verifying you are the website owner, Ahrefs will crawl your website pages and give you a summary of all the problems your website has, like broken links, HTML tags, content quality, and suggestions on how to fix them.

Keep off From Black SEO

Black SEO is an SEO strategy used to help websites rank by using SEO practices that go against the search engine guidelines. These unethical tactics don't care about searchers' search intention but only concentrate on ranking the website leading to huge penalties from the search engines.

Black hat SEO includes keyword stuffing, cloaking, sneaky redirects, spammy blog comments, abusing structured data, and paid links.

Every business owner wants their website to rank on Google. However, using black SEO to speed up the process will do more harm than good damaging your presence on the search engine.

Wrap-up

Is SEO really dead? From this article, we can see SEO isn't dead, It isn't dying, and it isn't going to die anytime soon.

SEO it's just evolving, and website owners need to evolve with it.

With Google updating its algorithm and concentrating more on page experience and user experience, this is why some SEO tactics that used to work are irrelevant today.

Any website owner who does not keep up with the changes will definitely feel like SEO is dead.