What’s New In SEO for Small Business?

That means if you’re at the top of the rankings, one in every three people making that search will click through to your site. Even if you only convert a fraction of those people, you’re still talking about potentially huge numbers.

How do you get to the top of those searches? By using SEO.

Unfortunately, SEO doesn’t stand still. You need to keep on top of all the latest trends if you want to boost your rankings.

Read on as we take a look at some of the latest trends in SEO for small business.

1. Longer Content is King

One of the most important criteria in determining your position in the search results is the quality of the content on your site.

High-quality content is key, but the days of filling your site with 500-word articles are over. The most successful posts are now more than 1,000 words long, and if the trend continues, that number is only going to rise.

That’s why it’s important to focus on producing not just high-quality content, but high-quality content of the right length to maximize your chances of moving up the rankings. Longer content is able to offer more depth, and can be more useful to the people searching for it. It gives you a chance to give potential customers the content they’re really looking for.

That’s not to say that shorter content doesn’t have its place, but it shouldn’t be your only focus.

2. EAT More Important Than Ever

EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

Expertise is a measure of how knowledgeable the site owner is on the subject that’s being written about. Authority is a measure of how credible it is that you would be writing about this topic. Trustworthiness measures how trustworthy the site publishing the content is.

For the best results from your SEO, you need to be hitting all three of these measures. That’s why you should focus on content that’s in your wheelhouse and that allows you to offer a high level of EAT.

3. Page Experience Matters

You should always aim to have a website that offers a good user experience, but this has now become increasingly important for SEO purposes too.

Google is taking into account page experience when calculating rankings. This includes mobile friendliness, usability, navigation, load speed, and more. The better your page experience is, the better chance you have of rising up the rankings.

4. New Search Trends

There will always be other businesses out there trying to find the same potential customers that you are. If you don’t move with the times, you may end up getting left behind.

That’s why it’s vital to keep up to date with all the latest search trends and try to leverage them to your benefit. What may have worked perfectly for SEO in the past may no longer be nearly as effective. Find content gaps and answer the questions that people are asking, and you have a great chance of boosting your visibility.

5. Focus on Voice

Voice search has been growing in popularity for some time, and in 2022 it’s only going to increase further.

The issue with voice search is that people use significantly different search queries when searching with voice compared to on their phone or computer. You need to factor in the more natural language that is used in voice search and try to optimize for more conversational queries. This is where long-tail keywords are vital, as they’re more likely to match natural language searches.

By making your content more conversational in tone, you may be more likely to rank highly for voice searches.

6. IndexNow

IndexNow is an open-source engine that is used by search engines such as Bing and Yandex, and is being looked at closely by Google.

It is designed to change the way that search engines gather information about websites and webpages. Traditionally, search engines have crawled the internet looking for content and adding anything new that they find. This is an intensive process that involves searching through billions of web pages.

IndexNow is a protocol that allows websites to push information to any search engine that is using the same protocol. In other words, when you add a new page to an IndexNow site, that page will be pushed out to the search engines who will become instantly aware of that content and be able to add it to their search results. The same applies if a page is updated, or even if a page is deleted.

Using this method, search engines can reduce their crawl load, which makes them more efficient. With more search engines signing up to the protocol, this could become a game changer.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence already plays a major role in the automation of PPC and social media marketing, but it is now having a major impact on the world of SEO, too.

AI can be used to conduct keyword research automatically, helping you to keep up with all the latest search trends and spot gaps where you can get ahead of the competition. It’s also being used by search engines; where previously Google used solely algorithms to determine rankings, it now makes use of Google RankBrain. This is a component of their algorithms which uses machine learning to determine query intent and provide the most relevant results.

Harnessing the power of AI is something that is only going to become more prevalent in SEO.

Need Help Keeping Up With SEO for Small Business?

If you’re looking for some support with keeping up with all the latest trends in SEO for small business, then we’re here to help.

We offer a wide range of services, including world-class local SEO services, citation building and cleanup, backlink packages, professional web design services, and more. For more than a decade, we’ve been helping small businesses, SMBs, and large enterprises to grow by increasing their presence, rankings, and visibility.

Book a free SEO strategy call with us today.