2022 Top Content Marketing and SEO Trends
Search
Sep 27 2022
The sheer volume of products and services available online in 2022 is far too vast for any one-size-fits-all strategy to “solve” digital marketing. Your audience, your voice, and the channels that most resonate with your message will vary by industry, by company, and even by individual product lines.
What marketers can (and should!) do is take an occasional step back from their campaign dashboards to note some of the crucial new directions content and SEO each appear to be moving. Here are some of this year’s most significant trends in how users are searching and evaluating products online.
Content Marketing Check-In
Content marketing’s star trend in 2022 fits neatly under the umbrella of “interactive content.” Whether this means the implementation of AI-powered chatbots to relieve customer service lines of simple fixes or advanced tech like augmented and virtual reality, there remains a certain novelty between users and interactive branded content for the time being.
That’s not to say banner ads and other standard digital ad practices are out just yet — what it does mean is practices introduced quickly by pandemic safety concerns back in 2020 have found their stride in several industries. A virtual tour of a new apartment or a full 360-degree inspection of a vehicle soon to be purchased entirely online is becoming less of a fun feature and more of a necessity to maintain customer interest.
How to Approach SEO in 2022
Customers aren’t just changing the way they interact with served ads. Search engine optimization and page ranking algorithms continue to evolve thanks to new, smarter methods of gauging a user’s experience on branded websites. Expect to hear more about “Core Web Vitals” in the months ahead, a combination of three key components Google’s algorithm uses to determine whether a site adds value to a user’s search query. These metrics include the amount of time it takes for your landing page’s largest content to load and respond to a user’s initial interaction with it.
Beyond page load times, brands are trading in their simple sales-pitch level ads for authoritative, self-built content that positions their respective business as an industry expert. The value of unique, insightful, data-driven content is rising in the eyes of customers and search engines alike.
Finally, SEO marketers are placing special emphasis on Google search’s most-used feature: the “People Also Ask” dropdown. A data sampling of 2.5 Million search queries last fall clarified just how crucial Google’s SERP tool is for users looking for simple answers. The feature, which extracts relevant results through a web page and attaches the link to the source, was responsible for more than 48% of the sampled search queries.
What’s Next for Content Marketing and SEO?
In regards to the digital marketing landscape, there are a few safe bets based on the data advertisers have collected thus far. Whether it’s deepening your brand’s wealth of content to earn Google’s favor or investing more heavily in AR as it becomes more accessible, current content marketing trends appear to be strengthening as the technology driving them forward improves.
Simple as it may sound, it appears ads in the near future must find a way to answer the question “Is this content valuable?” in the affirmative. For one business this could look like an original case study, for another it might mean designing content to be interactive and engaging; no matter what medium fits your brand best, the message has to include the real-world value your customers can sense almost immediately.
Understanding Trends Will Guide Your Future Campaigns
The trends defining this year in marketing are hardly shocking; AI and VR tools and applications have been building steam for a while now, as is the case with interactive and authoritative content. Users have long desired quality over all else, only now there are clearer ways for audiences to determine which online brands are paying attention. Optimizing an existing marketing strategy likely means allowing these trends to confirm the data you’ve already gathered from your audience, and recalibrate your targeting levers accordingly.
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