Top SEO & Digital Marketing Trends for 2022

As most of the readers of this blog will know and experienced first hand, the start of a new year is extremely exciting for marketers! This is because the new year is the time when you can start analyzing the trends you feel will be coming into fruition in the coming year, and perhaps the more exciting part, implementing these trends into your marketing strategy!

So, with that in mind, what trends do I feel will be the key players in SEO and digital marketing in 2022? Let’s find out!

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Well, the time has come where we can no longer ignore Artificial Intelligence and we must start thinking of ways to implement this into our marketing strategies. Now, I am not talking about building virtual assistants for our marketing departments, there are a lot of things you can do with artificial intelligence that will have a tremendous effect on your SEO and other marketing efforts.

We live in the ‘age of now’, and what I mean by this is everyone wants everything almost instantly! Whether that is same day or next day delivery, a sub 2 second load time or information at the touch of a button, everyone wants it now! If you can’t provide quick and accurate information depending on what your visitors are looking for, the chances are you are not going to convert. And, I must confess, I have left websites on a number of occasions where I haven’t been able to access the information I need within a timeframe that I think suits me. I know, as a marketer, I should be more understanding. But this is the kind of world we live in nowadays, and artificial intelligence can help us with this, and even take advantage of this!

The reality is that most of the live chat features you come across on websites are run by artificial intelligence programs, and you can make use of this too! Artificial intelligence can be utilized to point your visitors in the right direction when they enter your website, to help you reduce bounce rates and improve your rankings.

You can learn more about how AI can increase your business here.

Video Marketing

Videos will truly be the king in 2022. These statistics on the impact of the video really show this off:

1. 70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video.
2. 72% of businesses say videos has improved their conversion rate.
3. 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions.
4. 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video.

The statistics above should really tell you that, if you haven’t already, you need to implement video into your marketing strategy for the year ahead! Not only can video marketing increase the sales your business makes, but they can also increase that personal connection between your business and your consumer.

One company doing this extremely well is GoPro! They truly are the masters of video marketing, and their concept is really quite simple. Share the videos of their customers doing crazy things that are shot on GoPro devices on their social media. That way, the people who have had their videos shared will be more likely to buy GoPro devices again in the future. And the people who are seeing these videos will be inspired to buy a GoPro and go out and do crazy things too!

Influencer Marketing

Have you ever considered implementing a strategy in which you pay people who have a large following on social media to promote your product? Seems crazy, right? But it works. Fitness brands, in particular, do this really well, they pay athletes and other sports influencers sums of money to simply promote their products, often with a discount code. Not only does this work in terms of a sales perspective, as the people who follow these influencers are more inclined to buy the product to be like the influencer they are following, but it also has a fantastic effect on SEO!

Let’s say, for example, that you pay a social media influencer to promote your product on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Within their post, they include a link to your website where they can go and buy the product. Lots of people are going to click on this link, and while a small percentage will bounce, a lot of people will buy the product or at the very least look at your website in more detail. That can give your SEO performance a huge boost as Matthew Barby explains in his talk, here.

There are a whole host of online tools you can use to find influencers in your industry, so what are you waiting for?

Visual (Image) Search

I am sure that, by now, most of you will have heard of Google Lens. This is Google’s visual search engine that recognizes objects, landmarks and other things using the camera on your phone. Now, in 2017 and 2018 this might have seemed like a “gimmick”. However, in 2022, people will be using these kinds of searching apparatus more frequently. The ease of using these kinds of products is unimaginable, and people will utilize them in 2022.

I, for one, have been using Google Lens for a while now, and I can personally tell you that the time you save searching a product via your camera rather than trying to type in something on Google to get the right result is amazing! I also use it every time I am handed a business card as it allows me to scan the business card and add it to my address book, rather than my typing it myself. It all seems very lazy, but it saves me a lot of time that I can spend doing other things.

So how do you take advantage of this? The obvious thing is to ensure that you have a strong online presence. Let’s say one of your sales reps hand a customer one of their business cards, ensure all of your location information is correct across Google so when they scan this business card, they can not only add them as a contact on their mobile device, but they can also be taken straight to your website.

Conclusion

So, there you have it, the 4 key trends that I think are going to be the most popular in 2022.

However, you might have noticed that I didn’t talk about voice assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. There is a simple reason for this, these were one of the emerging trends in 2018 and I do not feel like there is going to be a large enough increase in the number of people using these devices this year (compared to last year) to classify this as a new trend.

Of course, if you disagree with me on this, feel free to drop a comment below with what you think, and I will be more than happy to discuss it with you!

So that’s it, with all that out there within this blog post, we can all now get to work and start implementing these trends into our marketing strategy. What else will you be implementing in 2022? Drop me a comment below, I’d love to hear what you guys will be doing in 2022 and beyond!