5 SEO Tips You MUST Focus on in 2022

In this actionable blog, I’m gonna lay out the five most important SEO strategies that you need to focus on in 2022. And I’m gonna explain these SEO tips step-by-step so you can apply them for huge traffic gains on your website.

I’m about to share some of the recent things I’ve learned with you right now. And one thing I’d like you to know before we get started is that this is indeed an SEO tips blog specifically written for 2022. Next, this is not a basic blog teaching you SEO advice you already know. Stuff like if you create quality content, then Google will love you. You know what I’m talking about. This is an advanced blog, specifically tailored for what’s changed and what’s working in 2022. And I’m going to share everything super actionably so you can get started implementing these changes today.

There will be 5 SEO strategies served up to you on a silver platter. But make sure to read it till the end because there will be a bonus tip that is absolutely critical as well, especially considering how much SEO is going to change in the future. Let’s get started.

1. Master Topical Authority

The first SEO strategy that you need to focus on in 2022 is creating topical authority for your website. Your website achieves topical authority status on the topic when you completely cover that topic in your content as compared to your competition. And another important factor is if you cover that topic for a longer period of time. When you hit topical authority status, Google will rank you faster and higher than everyone else in the niche.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you want to become a topical authority on protein powder. It’s not enough to simply create a single article on the Best Protein Powder or What Is Protein Powder. Protein powder is a vast subject. If you can cover all those topics like, “Is it bad to drink protein powder daily? How much protein powder should you eat in a day? Does protein make you fat?”. Once you start covering them to a high degree, you approach topical authority status and Google rewards the heck out of you. 

People have been noticing the topical authority effect more and more these days. This dude, Talha, noticed this one-month-old website that posted 721 articles and hit 30K visitors per month. Then there’s the godfather of topical authority, Koray Tugberk, posting up crazy traffic boners like this all the time. 

What’s more is that topical authority is such a powerful ranking factor that it can overcome other website weaknesses. I often see crappy sites publishing garbage articles, but it’s working just because they publish a ton of them.

So, here’s my advice to you. Make 2022 your year to break your own publishing records. But stick to one topic at a time, and hit it with everything you got. Bear in mind, it starts with generating a complete topical map on your niche.

Here’s what I do. Go to answerthepublic.com, type in your topic, and get a headstart with 100 or so topics. Type your keywords into Google itself and get tons of topics from the People also ask feature. You can use a tool like SEO Minion to download hundreds of them in a single shot. Go to the bottom of the search result and pull tons more topics by clicking around and exploring the related searches, and leverage the Google Search bar’s auto-complete function to get even more topics. And here’s where the gold is. Look at your competitors to see what kind of topical coverage got them to the top of Google.

I said this a million times before, the answer to SEO is always written on page one. How do you do that? You dig through their site map and do a search for your keyword. Then when you’re done, remove duplicates and put your long list of results through a keyword clustering tool like Keyword Cupid which is going to organize which topics need to be written in the same articles as opposed to separate articles.

Topical authority doesn’t stop there though. You need to make sure all the things are written well. For that, I 100% recommend using SurferSEO's Content Editor Tool, which is going to look at who is ranking on number one for a given keyword. And it’s going to tell you exactly which words, entities, and phrases you need to have in your content, and at what frequencies too. 

2. Start Playing with AI-Generated Content

My next SEO 2022 advanced tip is to get your hands dirty with AI-generated content. In 2021, Jarvis and other AI content-generation tools hit the market. They allow you to literally click buttons, and content magically comes up on the screen. Is this the best content you’ve ever read in your life? Not even close! But we’re talking about machine learning here. It’s going to get better. And there’s sites out there that are publishing 100% AI content, and they’re kicking ass. Why? Because they’re posting 500 times a day and covering topical maps like it’s no one’s business.

So, my advice here is to at least start playing around with AI-generated content. The tools are gonna get better over time, and you wanna make sure you can take advantage of that wave. Start setting a goal of creating at least 2-3 AI content pieces per month. Half of entrepreneurship is being in the right place at the right time. This applies here.

By the way, in my 2022 SEO prediction video, I mentioned that it’s gonna be hard for Google to deal with the rise of AI content. In turn, they’re gonna have to turn up the volume on other ranking factors outside content. And I’m gonna touch upon that later.

3. Focus on Engagement

Next, you need to focus on engagement. No, you don’t need to propose to your girlfriend. Bad dad joke. Sorry! You need to pay attention to how your users are behaving on your site. Google is learning a lot of lessons from the success of YouTube. And YouTube is all about engagement. Don’t worry, I’ll define what engagement is right now.

Instead of relying on ranking signals that can be manipulated or don’t truly represent if a piece of content is good or not, why wouldn’t the algorithm just look at people’s behavior on the article? Did the reader actually read the article and get what he or she came for?

Engagement starts with CTR (Click-Through Rate). This is the percentage of time that people click on your article when they see the listing in a search result. It influences if your article actually gets read in the first place. If I didn’t have a good enough title and thumbnail for a YouTube video, it wouldn’t have this many views. Improve your website click-through rate by optimizing your title and meta description. Put your keywords towards the front of the title and add clickbait, like here with the current year, towards the back. For your description, add keywords in there to get them bolded. With any luck, you’ll get jump links like I have too. A table of contents help with that.

Time on Page

Next we have time on page, which is a decent indication that an article is good, but it’s not the whole story. Just because someone have spent 10 minutes on an article doesn’t mean they liked it. Maybe an article that someone was on for one minute got them their answer quicker, hence a happier searcher. Nonetheless, more time on page is better than less. So here’s what you can do. Have a strong introduction paragraphs that hook the reader by being interesting, entertaining and informative. Have no walls of text on the page. Break up things with images and eye-friendly paragraphs – one to two sentences per paragraph. And have a great design. I’ll touch upon this in the next section.

Goal Completion

Next, we have goal completion. Before we talked about how someone spending a minute on a page is a good thing in some cases. That’s when their goals are met. If someone finds my How Many Links Do I Need website and they click on this Start link-analysis link in 20 seconds, that’s a freaking happy searcher. They got what they came for.

My advice here is to focus on your call-to-action CTA buttons and get them clicked. Have great content that actually sells your CTAs by being informative but not too salesy.

4. Pay Attention to User Experience (UX)

Next step on your list is to really pay attention to user experience (UX). In June 2021, Google rolled out the page experience update, which was an update completely dedicated to user experience. That’s an odd thing for sure. But you can bet your buns it won’t be the last time they add new user experience-related ranking factors to the algorithm. Here’s what you need to look at when it comes to user experience: core web vitals. These ranking factors are the new kids on the block that they patched in with the page experience update.

• It includes Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This is your loading performance. You wanna get it faster than 2.5 seconds. Get a great host, pre-size your images, and defer or remove slow-loading scripts.
• First Input Delay (FID). When someone interacts or clicks on your page, you want it to be faster than 100 milliseconds. Again, this comes down to hosting and your server response time, and optimizing slow code on the page.
• And lastly, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). CLS is all about visual stability. When the page loads, you don’t want boxes and colors jumping all over the place. You want this number to be less than 0.1. This comes back to scripts again.

For UX optimization, you also want your site to be mobile-friendly. This means that when people look at your site on mobile, it looks normal. Everything fits on the page. The fonts aren’t too big or too small. Stuff like that. Use Google’s free mobile-friendly checker tool to see how your site performs in Google’s eyes.

Also, make sure that your site meets all of Google’s safe browsing standards. That includes keeping clean of malware and hacked content. Google provides another free tool with their Security Issues report. I’m sure you have this already, but make sure you’re all set up on HTTPS.

And lastly, in the UX category, make sure you don’t have any intrusive interstitials. This is when you have a bunch of pop-ups and display ads freaking dominating the page on mobile. Don’t do that. In fact, I’d turn off all pop-ups on mobile. It’s just not worth it.

5. Backlinks in 2022

Now, I could never write an SEO article discussing important ranking factors without mentioning backlinks. Do not sleep on backlinks in 2022. And Google has made this blatantly clear.

Let me explain you what I mean. Do you know what psychic is? Google this: Psychic cash money. Psychic reading is one of the most lucrative affiliate niches there is, and it’s very competitive. Look what happens when you Google free psychic readings. Look who comes up here: “The Daily World,” “Herald Net,” “Peninsula Daily News”. Do these look like authorities on the topic of psychic readings? You can bet your lucky stars, no. It doesn’t take a tarot reading to figure out that what these new sites have going on is a ton of backlinks. When I turn on the Ahrefs toolbar, you see what I mean: DR 68, DR 78, DR 72. Backlinks are beating relevance in this SERP, and many, many more. So build links and build lots of them. And be diverse with your link building.

Following list illustrates where I’m putting my backlink efforts in 2022.

• 30% of the links I build are in the category of White Hat Link insertions. I’m manually outreaching to websites that I wanna link from, and asking to get a link placed into articles, preferably with some links going to them.
• 5% of my links are coming from directory citations, even for my affiliate sites. And for that I’m using my own business, Authority Builders.
• 15% of my links are coming from editorial-level sites. We’re talking about DR 70 and above. For this I’m using HARO, link exchanges with high authority competitors, and digital PR campaigns.
• And lastly, the main bulk of my link building, 50% is coming through guest posting through Authority Builders as well.

Bonus tip: Level-up Your Masterminding

Here’s my bonus advice for ranking in 2022. Make 2022 your year to level up your networking and masterminding. SEO is forever changing. And it’s changing faster than ever. What I plan to do is to stay in touch with as many smart people as possible. No single person could possibly figure out the algorithm by themselves. But together, people can combine and share ideas and accomplish way more than you could by yourself. Join Facebook groups like The Affiliate SEO Mastermind and subscribe to awesome SEO channels like Matt Diggity, to stay on top of all the SEO developments before your competition.

This is a transcripted YouTube video, courtesy of Matt Diggity