Because of its resilience amid turbulent economic circumstances, SEO took off in 2021. And a large majority of marketers (89%) anticipate even more SEO investment this year, according to BrightEdge research. This growth in SEO highlights the growing importance of the customer experience (CX). And budgets confirm the increased importance of consumer loyalty, with CX spending projected to reach $641 billion by the end of 2022. As marketers review these trends and approach the last quarter of 2022, some may be wondering how much of a role SEO should play to play in their strategy is moving forward.
To determine the importance of SEO in 2022 and beyond, marketers should consider the predictions that industry leaders called for in the face of this year’s economic uncertainties. At the top of this year, industry leaders predicted that marketing teams would prioritize SEO geared toward improving CX and omnichannel SEO strategies that optimize visual formats such as audio and video. Experts also predicted that marketers would focus on ROI-demonstrating business metrics and implement more AI and machine learning (ML) technologies this year.
If these predictions come true, the rest of the SEO strategies of 2022 will be CX-focused, contain omnichannel interactions and include sophisticated data collection.
Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Laura Connell, Consumer Trends Manager at GWI
1. Combining CX and SEO
Page expertise rankings are an even bigger component of an SEO strategy than at the start of the year. Since launching in March 2022, page experience rankings—determined by Google’s Core Web Vitals—finalize the content that mobile and desktop users see on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google engineers decipher multiple streams of information to determine the CX quality of a website’s content. These measurements include mobile friendliness and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures the amount of unexpected movement that occurs when scrolling a page. A page with a high CLS score will have a low quality CX. Pages with inappropriate load logs now regularly appear at the bottom of the rankings as a result.
Core Web Vitals like CLS provide search marketers with the information they need to make smart content decisions. If marketers notice that their page loading time is decreasing organic performance, they can pivot spend to improve their CX and online performance. Marketers who take the time to adequately address CX and SEO issues will see better performance in 2023 – but only if they are aware of the buggy performance and improper loading. It is imperative that marketers look for a platform to identify and address these issues intuitively.
As of early 2022, there have been significant developments in no-questions-asked search, including improvements and additional countries to the Google Discover tool. This tool provides mobile users with a native panel of articles based on their interests and browsing history. Search marketers who want to earn content on Google Discover must follow the age-old principles of expertise, authority and trustworthiness (EAT). Importantly, Google Discover differs from many other search functions in that it often contains older articles. As a result, new and existing web content can benefit from CX and SEO optimization. Smart search marketers will take advantage of this feature by optimizing all web content, new and old.
2. SEO across platforms
In 2021, Google released the Multitask Uniform Model (MUM) implementation, which adds to the language processing capabilities of AI Bidirectional Encoder Representations of Transformers (BERT). This platform helps to converse and add context to search results by creating intelligent connections between multiple search hits for over 70 languages.
MUM transformed the SEO landscape in 2022 by analyzing data from text and non-text sources. In other words, it raised the importance of content such as video and audio. But how can marketers apply modern SEO protocols to their non-textual content?
Search marketers are trying to figure out how to use current SEO protocols for non-text content. To accomplish this, marketers should increase their adoption of AI- and ML-enabled technologies, allowing these tools to provide insights into top keywords and industry trends. Search marketers can retroactively apply these insights to decide which pieces of non-textual content perform best across multiple platforms.
MUM’s linguistic search will also improve the traction of semantic SEO, which uses search language to predict a user’s intent or frame of reference. Content marketers can use this search engine to put customized content in front of customers at the right times, leading to desired business results.
3. More and more metrics
In 2022, there was an increase in data collection as marketers sought insights into which campaigns performed best and what content their target market preferred. This data also demonstrates the ROI of marketing efforts, which helps justify marketing spending to executives—especially amid recession worries and record layoffs.
Collecting more data will again lead to the need for AI adoption. AI and ML-driven tools can uncover marketing opportunities by analyzing the organization’s market and providing important information such as potential website traffic, revenue and other KPIs. This information helps marketers prove their value and retain marketing budgets.
SEO marketing in 2023 and beyond
Search engines evolve, and SEO must do the same. Successful SEO development will depend on AI and ML tools, along with more advanced use of MUM and Google Discover. The more complex SEO becomes, the more marketers must rely on the right tools that allow them – and the sales teams they support – to create the most seamless customer journey.
Many marketing tools come and go, but search remains in the growth phase through all economic uncertainty. No matter how high inflation is, consumers will always use search to find answers, and because of this, marketers must align their efforts with the SEO market. Those marketers who don’t use valuable business insights and don’t adopt modern tools like AI and ML will find their SEO and overall marketing strategies far behind in 2023.
Marketing Technology News: Getting Ahead of the Cookie Curve Using AI Relevance Tools