How To Perform Effective SEO In Utah In Six Steps

The world of SEO is one that is in constant motion. Strategies come and go within months and with so many SEO tips out there, it’s understandable that some users maybe overwhelmed by all the advice online.

It can be difficult to sort through the clutter and decide what works and what doesn’t. Is link building still a thing? Does on-page SEO even matter anymore?

On the plus side, through all these changes remain several fundamental strategies that have largely unchanged.

For instance, including keywords with the sole purpose of improving your search engine ranking is a strategy that doesn’t work. However, choosing and using the right keywords is still an essential part of the puzzle. And keywords continue to tell us a lot about users and what they are looking for on the internet.

So, what are the best SEO tips you should know in 2022 to deliver effective results in Utah? Keep reading for the complete rundown!

Outline:

• Google Passage Ranking Is The Next Big Thing

• Increase Loading Speeds

• Featured Snippets Are Important

• Include Long-Tail Keywords

• Use the E.A.T. Principle

• Continuously Update Old Content

Google Passage Ranking Is The Next Big Thing

It was October 2020 when Google announced Passage ranking, a system where individual passages in an article would be analyzed and ranked along with the whole page.

So, what was the big deal?

Well, this allowed Google to pull relevant excerpts from a page and display it to any user looking for that particular information – even if the overall article was covering a different topic.

For example, you may have written a blog post on B2B marketing where you covered topics such as social media marketing and cold email strategies. It could result in your page ranking for cold email strategies although that’s not what you even optimized the blog for. This happens because Google is now indexing passages and noticed that the excerpt was relevant to other searches.

But to carry out a successful advertising strategy, it is necessary to understand the digital world and thus deliver valuable content to potential customers. Although the basic marketing principles are still the same, it must know how to adapt them to the Internet world.

Increase Loading Speeds

At this point, this shouldn’t even need to be said anymore. While in the past, you could get away with slightly slower websites, that doesn’t work today. In 2022, it is more than mere frustration; take too long and your customers will probably close the webpage and look elsewhere.

If you don’t believe it, research by Strange Loop has proven that a loading delay of one second can cause you a 7% loss in conversions!

Featured Snippets Are Important

If you haven’t already added them to your 2022 strategy, it is high time you did. Called the holy grail of search nowadays, featured snippets are displayed in Ground Zero – at the very top of all search results.

You cannot choose what content appears in a featured snippet but you are able to optimize your content in a way that increases the chances of it appearing as a featured snippet.

Let us explain.

As always, any content that you create should be done while keeping the end user in mind. This is because, when most people use Google, they ask their queries in the form of questions. If you are able to create questions by envisioning these questions and answers, you will definitely be able to appear as a featured snippet more often.

A study by SEMrush has found that questions including, “why”, “do” and “can” result in the greatest number of snippets. On the other hand, “where” triggered the least.

Include Long-Tail Keywords

One of the fundamentals of SEO, long tail keywords have remained crucial right from the onset.

Recently Google announced that its AI can understand subtopics within keywords. For instance, brands focusing on exercise equipment used to spam all relevant keywords. Now though, Google understands that “home exercise equipment” also includes other subtopics like “budget equipment” and that topics like “small space ideas” are also relevant to that particular search.

So, what does this mean for SEO?

Increased competition for shorter tail keywords is guaranteed. But, if you were to focus on long tail keywords and investigate more specific keywords with at least three words, you are better positioned to see your page rank higher when someone searches with a relevant query.

Use the EAT Principle

Google’s constantly shifting algorithm can throw a spanner to your SEO strategies but mastering the EAT principle is a great way to ensure you stay on track.

Sounds pretty cool but what really is EAT?

Here is a video from Neil Patel:
How to Optimize For Google’s E A T Algorithm

An abbreviation for expertise, authority and trustworthiness, EAT is basically a measurement of how reputable your brand is online. It is important because Google ranks trustworthy, brand authentic and established websites higher than unknown websites.

Now this can seem like a daunting task if you are in a saturated industry with long-term, well established competitors. However, they are a few steps you can take to establish a reliable imprint online.

• • Ask or give your customers an incentive to leave a review of their experience on Google, Amazon, Yelp, etc.
  • Earn high quality links from trusted websites in your industry
  • Get active on forums and social media to encourage mentions
  • Drive new customers towards your positive experiences through testimonials, reviews and other forms of digital proof

Continuously Update Old Content

It is normal for many of us to write a blog, optimize it, post it and just completely forget about it. But, though you may be continuing to churn great new content in 2022, it’s time to give some attention to your older posts again.

Instead of letting your old content become irrelevant, add a bit more effort to capitalize on the opportunities they provide.

One of the easiest ways to refresh old articles is to do a link audit where you find and relax all external articles that are either dead or outdated. This also ensures you are not penalized by Google for adding too many broken links.

Interested in an SEO Audit of your current website?

Let us run a full SEO audit to see where your room to grow is! We will find all the places we can improve your SEO and come up with a detailed plan to stay within your SEO budget. While we are at it we will scope out your competitor’s website and see what they are doing right so we can better come up with a plan.

If you choose to run an SEO Campaign, we will credit the cost of this audit back to your first month!