22 Vital SEO Tips from the Experts for 2022

By Georgi Todorov founder of ThriveMyWay, a place for online entrepreneurs, bloggers, SEO specialists, and freelancers to find success in their own way. Being on the first page of Google is vital for website traffic. Three out of every four searchers will never look past the first page on a search engine. Therefore, ranking on the first page through excellent SEO practices is just as important today as it has ever been. The problem is that Google does a small algorithm change at least once a day. Keeping up with these changes is challenging even for the best SEO experts. So, it is more realistic and vital that you focus on the essential SEO tactics for your business. Therefore, we asked industry experts for their SEO tips and collected them here for you.

Pete

Pete is the founder of OutreachPete.com, a blogger outreach agency that helps agencies get coverage and links from relevant publications in their clients’ niches. Never repeat a non-branded anchor text more than once Managing your anchor text can have a huge influence on your rankings (both good and bad), which is why so many SEOs spend a lot of time carefully trying to include their keywords when building links. However, repeating keyword-based anchor text, even if it’s a partial match can send a red flag to Google that it is being manipulated or controlled. Therefore, it is best practice to carefully track your anchor text usage and search against previous links before you place any link that isn’t a brand name or URL-based anchor. You can still include the same keywords but never have an exact duplicate of a previously used anchor text that includes your target keyword. Mix the order around, include new supporting words, and always vary the phrasing. This is the best way to continue to add value to your links without creating an easy-to-spot footprint.

Jayson DeMers

Jayson DeMers is the founder & CEO of EmailAnalytics, an app that visualizes email team activity to help optimize productivity. Publish research reports. You can do this in a few ways:

Use your own primary data
Aggregate external data into one unifying report
Survey your customers or email list

However you do it, creating research reports that provide unique, interesting, valuable insights is the best way to get links, traffic, eyeballs, and build a new audience. And all of that boosts your SEO results. Then, promote your research report. Here are a few ways to do that:

Publish a press release
Announce it to your email list
Share it on social media
Get other people to share it on social media
Promote it on your website (such as through a link, pop-up, or slide-in)

Consistently release new research reports that provide value and insight, and you’ll earn inbound links and traffic, which will boost your SEO results in 2022 and beyond.

Miles Anthony Smith

Miles Anthony Smith, a tech keynote speaker, SEO consultant, and founder of Why Stuff Sucks®, delights in delivering invaluable content to people hungry for answers to their most vexing questions or challenges. Create new content (for sure), but don’t miss opportunities to optimize existing pages for “striking distance” keywords. To use a boxing metaphor, you need to be within “striking distance” to outpunch your competition. If any of your pages are ranking on the 2nd half of page 1 (positions 4-10) or on page 2 or 3 of Google (and I’m almost certain you have many of these pages since most of my clients have these when I start consulting with them), you are leaving money on the table. When you identify 1 single keyword phrase per page where you are close to more SEO traffic, in perfect striking distance, it’s time to land an SEO “one-two punch.” The jab: You need to inject only that 1, but very important, keyword phrase in “striking distance” into 5 fields for that existing page:

Meta title
Meta description
H1
Body copy below H1
Url slug

The cross: Use high-authority internal pages (must be relevant) to link to your newly optimized pages and boost their authority. These two powerful boxing punches will dramatically increase your odds of a quick boost to your SEO rankings for those pages. Once you publish the changes, you will typically see a bump in rankings and traffic within 2-3 months.

Nick Malekos

Nick Malekos is the SEO Manager in LearnWorlds, focusing on quality content that converts into revenue. He is a well-rounded Digital Marketer with a focus on eLearning and education markets. A rising trend we see in how Google ranks keywords is based on Topic Clusters. A website or an article is ranked for multiple related keywords based on a web of correlations it recognizes between the words and the topics covered or linked to by the website. We expect this to be hugely important in 2022, and SEOs who will take advantage of it will see their rankings grow. How to act on Topic Clusters?

Redesign your website around major topic clusters –> Breadcrumbs, menu, blog categories, category pages, etc
Map out the topic, with various keywords around it. Write articles with multiple keywords in mind.
Write multiple blogs/pages on the topic linking them internally (it’s similar to the skyscraper technique, but having multiple keywords as the focus)

Paul Granger

Paul Granger – Digital Marketeer at Website Promoter UK, a site that provides online marketing services and free advice on how to grow your reach and traffic online with better ROI using SEO and Pay-per-click. SEO Competitor Analysis When you know who your competitors are and what they offer, you can set your prices and strategies competitively. Besides, you can find out whether the new businesses that enter your market and the current competitors hold any threat. Knowing this will help you to be realistic about how your business will fare. There are two main competitor categories that you should focus on. The first category is direct competitors. They are brands in your sector who market similar products and services like yours. Indirect competitors are those who solve the same customer pain points as you but in a different way.

Tom Riley

Tom Riley – Lead Gen Specialist and Head of SEO for UK-based financial advisor site Joslin Rhodes. Climb the Authority Ladder When trying to rank for new topics, you can build authority in your niche by targeting low competition search terms. ‘People also ask’ is a great way to find Q-A style content where you directly answer people’s questions in a post. Interlink your Q and A posts together and insert a contextual anchor up to the main page you are trying to rank to pass some authority. For example – If you want to rank for ‘Retirement Planning Advice’, then when not, write content around low competition search terms relevant to your niche, such as ‘how much do I need to retire at 55’. This will allow you to bring relevant traffic to your site, which gives Google more reason to trust your domain. As you begin to become more topically relevant, you can slowly start to progress and write content for more competitive search terms.

Apostolis Lianos

Apostolis Lianos is a Growth Marketer at ON.marketing & a full-time SEO geek. He has bold experience in growing retail, eCommerce & SaaS companies and in the past has been in the shoes of a (failed) startup founder, twice. In his spare time, he enjoys ristrettos, weiss beer, chess, gaming, sports & traveling. Never skip SERPs analysis. Right after you define your focus/target keyword based on the findings of your keyword research, the very next step should be checking who’s ranking at Google’s top positions for that keyword. However, the most important of all is to understand how they do it. This process provides you with valuable data about how the top results achieved these rankings and then by tracking their content strategy (headings, URL backlinks, LSI keywords used, word count, etc), you can confidently know what you have to do to outrank them. Best Part? You can also get it done even with free SEO tools as long as they provide SERPs data.

Cristina Moraru

Cristina Moraru is the Digital Marketing Strategist at Media Training. She’s got almost 5 years of experience in marketing and has been working with various startups in Denmark and the US. In her spare time, she enjoys going to the theater, a nice hot chocolate in the cold weather, traveling, and swimming. Leverage Your Local SEO There are billions of people searching for local information or products/services that are nearby. Google My Business can help companies become more visible and focus on what people are really searching for. The nearest drug store, petrol station, or vegan-friendly coffee shop: once you concentrate on the right keywords and optimize your pages for Google search, you’ll have higher chances to reach potential customers. There are a few benefits of Google My Business that you should be aware of. For example, It allows people to leave reviews that show what people are really thinking about your business, which gives more confidence to the new buyers. Another benefit is that GMB provides insights on whether your information is correct and trustworthy. Finally, it’s free and easy to use. You don’t have to spend millions on updating your profile as long as you’ve got the designated person to monitor the performance.

Nick Jordan

Nick Jordan is the founder of Workello.com. He’s taken 4 brands from 0 to 100,000 organics/month with the largest growing from 0 to 1.5m organics/month (and a $210m series B valuation) in less than two years. If you look at the biggest SEO outcomes on the internet, they all have one thing in common. Yes, their DR is high, but more importantly, they all have a lot of content. I analyzed some of the most high-profile brands crushing SEO, and they have an incredibly huge moat of content.

				# of Pages Published Per Month to Catch Up in 12 / 24 / 26 / 48 months
Website	Organic Traffic / Month	Pages	Traffic Per Page Per Month	12 Months	24 Months	36 Months	48 Months
ThePointsGuy.com	1,500,00	30,000	50	2500	1250	833	625
DoNotPay.com	1,000,000	10,000	100	475	238	158	119
HubSpot.com	2,200,000	12,000	183	1000	500	333	250
FreshBooks.com	900,000	2,400	375	200	100	67	50
NerdWallet.com	14,000,000	17,000	824	1417	708	472	354
WireCutter.com	5,500,000	2,800	1964	233	117	78	58

To catch up to:

Kinsta, you would need to publish 267 pages every month for a year
NerdWallet, you would need to publish 472 pages every month for three years
The Points Guy, you would have to publish 625 pages every month, for four years

Viktor Ilijev

Viktor is the owner of content production house bbdirector.com, helping websites publish 100 + top 10 SERP LHF ranking articles per month. He also runs viktori. co where he helps individuals and companies pitch deals and fundraise by crafting their pitches.

Build an in-depth topical cluster covering all variations of a particular topic – become the ONLY source of information that Google needs to serve queries on a specific topic.
Increase E.A.T. by having real authors contribute articles to your site. Google wants information that is written by real people. More importantly, people with the right experience and background to back up the content on your site.
Think 2 steps ahead and create custom internal images that people can link to. Forget deposit photos – Use Canva and create easily shareable internal images that people will link to. These images can simply be a summary of a specific paragraph OR a list of headings paired up with your site branding and an illustration.
Publish as much as possible as fast as possible. First come first served, particularly if you see a niche that is still young.

Qhubekani Nyathi

Qhubekani Nyathi aka The Click Guy, founder of Wholesome Commerce, is a pillar content strategist for SaaS, Marketing, and e-Commerce brands. He helps B2B brands drive ROI through actionable pillar posts that drive traffic and build authority. He’s been featured on top sites like Search Engine Watch, Get Response, Crazy Egg, and ClickZ. Build Organic Links Fast Through Statistics Posts “Every SEO knows getting links is an arduous task. It involves several time-consuming steps like finding target sites, searching for contact info, crafting a personalized outreach email, following up, social media exchanges, and more. But there’s a painless way of getting links: statistics posts. By writing a blog post about vital statistics in your industry, you can get people to link to your website organically. Content creators need research numbers to back up their views. So if you produce a timely stats resource, they’ll gladly link to it in droves. One such post I wrote generated over 200 backlinks naturally.

Zero outreach. Zero paid promotion. Zero social media DMs. For the strategy to work, make sure your stats are:

Fresh: use the latest numbers, not dated ones.
Credible: reference trustworthy sources, not unreliable ones.
Startling: showcase astounding figures, not the usual ones.

Try the stats resource link-building strategy today. The results might surprise you!”

Saravanan P

My name is Saravanan and I have 7+ years of experience in Digital Marketing. Currently, I work as a Senior Digital Marketer at Animaker taking care of organic marketing for our latest product Vmaker which is a screen recorder and video creation tool. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Optimize content for user intent As an SEO Analyst, I am passionate about learning new things every day in SEO. A page can rank for many keywords, not because they cover a certain topic, but because they address many user intents or many variations. Today, I am going to give you one SEO tip that helps to optimize your existing web page content for user intent and also, gain more organic traffic to your website. For that, you need a Google Search Console. Follow the steps given below to optimize your existing page or blog. Step 1: Go to Google Search Console and click on the Search results. Step 2: Set a Date range to last 3 months and click on the New to Add a Page filter.

Step 3: Add a page URL that you want to optimize into the filter and click Apply. Step 4: Export Data as Google Sheet Step 5: Open that Google Sheet and Apply the filter for the “Impression” column as greater than 100 and for the “Position” column as Between 4 to 30.

Now you have the list of keywords that users search to visit your site or the keywords that your website is getting organic impressions from. With this data, you can optimize your content by adding these keywords into content or adding content related to these keywords which helps to improve the ranking for the keywords that are currently ranking between 4 to 20 and convert this impression into clicks. Also, satisfying the user intent. I hope this helps.

Dario Zadro

Dario Zadro has 20+ years of experience as a full-stack web developer and is the owner of Zadro Web, where they provide custom web development, technical SEO, and fully managed web hosting and cloud solutions. Build a proper SEO foundation! My SEO tip is to ensure your SEO foundation is built correctly before starting other SEO strategies. Like building a house, a poor foundation would be disastrous. Most people want to go straight to generating content and building links. And yes, those tasks are essential, but the foundation is vital. Some questions to consider:

Is your tracking correctly set up to monitor event behavior?
Is your UX tested and optimized?
What is your plan to build brand authority?
If you’re a local business, are your GMB and other citations consistent with NAP?
Did you triple-check your XML sitemap, robots.txt, and other crawling directives?

Don’t get me wrong, authoritative and relevant links are excellent, and stellar content is a must. But, it’s the SEO foundation that will set up your website for long-term success!

Chris Labbate

Chris Labbate is the Owner of SEOBANK, a Digital Marketing Agency in Canada. With over 15 years of Search experience, we help companies become more profitable via data-driven marketing and specialize in Entity SEO and advanced schema markup. Want to Cut Your Link Building Budgets in Half? We all know relevant links move the needle, but do we have a solid process to acquire them at scale? We have been killing it in the SERPs lately with getting more niche-relevant links. Here is how… Start by Googling the main keyword you want to rank for, export the list of domains with an extension like MozBar or the SEO Toolbar by Ahrefs. ProTip: (you can easily use the same method with your competitor links as well!) You will need an Ahrefs account to export the backlinks for the top 10 domains you exported from Google. Now we are going to apply some filters to get the list down to a manageable number, using the best metric to dial in what we need:

Dofollow
One link per domain
DR 25 and higher
Domain traffic 200
Backlinktype filter: in content

This list on its own can be gold, but we are going to run it over to my new favorite tool for SEO in 2022. On-Page Ai is really marketed as, well… as the name suggests an on-page tool.

However, within the tool we see this feature “Link Relevancy Tool” and without going too far into the technology, it uses “Google NLP Categories” to quickly filter out any irrelevant links, and keep the best link opportunities using category relevance (direct from Google).

The tool filters link both on the domain level and the page level for topical relevance. You can quickly see your best opportunities and only pitch the links that matter, hence drastically reducing wasted time and link budgets.

Nikola Roza

SEO for the Poor and Determined My one SEO tip that always works is to work with Google, not fight against it. Namely, out of a given set of pages on your site, most will rank decently, some will rank poorly, and some incredibly well. The third group is the ones that simply soar and are on the second page of Google with you barely doing any SEO. Google loves you for those topics so you need to focus on them. Here are the steps.

Find those key pages using GSC;
Do perfect on-page SEO- everything you can to make your page hyper-optimized and relevant;
Send as many contextual internal links as you can;
Once the dust settles and your rank improves, calculate how many backlinks you need to build and start building those.

This method works every time and produces fast rankings as you’re working with Google, not against it.

Sam Browne

Sam Browne is a serial entrepreneur with a portfolio of successful 6 & 7 figure sites. His secret sauce is combining SEO, Copywriting, and UX to supercharge conversions and achieve #1 Google rankings. Expert Response Link Building Sites like helpareporter.com, Terkel.io, and Qwoted offer marketers a simple yet powerful way to contribute expert opinions and experience to some of the largest websites in the world. These contributions are then quoted in blog posts, with a dofollow link back to the contributors’ website. This is called Expert Response link building. Through HARO, our agency has built links for our clients on sites including shopify.com, realtor.com, cloudways.com, parents.com, home.com, bhg.com, and many more. These sites have millions of monthly unique visitors and extremely high domain authority. Business owners can contribute responses themselves, or work with agencies such as HARO SEO to outsource their responses. Typically, it takes around 20 responses to build a single link, but the quality of the links is second to none. We are regularly placing links for our clients on DR70, DR80, and DR90 websites. Expert Response link building is by far the easiest way to build top-notch, completely safe links to your site in 2022.

Nicholas Rubright

Nick Rubright is the founder of New Reach Marketing, an SEO-driven content marketing agency based in Tampa, Florida. New Reach Marketing helps their clients’ websites grow to millions in monthly organic traffic with epic blog content. Internal Links Internal links are hyperlinks from one page to another on the same domain. Optimizing your internal links is an essential part of a successful SEO campaign in 2022. Why internal links are important: Google uses internal links to help discover new content. Linking from an indexed page to a brand new, non-indexed page directs Google to index your new page quickly, and start showing it in the SERPs. Without internal links, Google can’t see the page and it remains undiscovered. Pages with no internal links are called orphans. Internal links also assist with the flow of PageRank around your site (And yes, PageRank is still a thing in 2022. Source: Ahrefs.com). For the most part, the more internal links a page receives, the higher its PageRank. With that said, both quality and quantity play a part in a page’s PageRank. Internal links also aid the flow of PageRank around your site. That’s a big deal. Generally speaking, the more internal links a page has, the higher its PageRank. However, it’s not all about quantity; the quality of the link also plays a vital role. Here are some best practice tips for easily optimizing your internal links:

Use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text
Link from heavily linked pages (home, top-performing content, etc) to pages you want to rank
Don’t Use The Same Anchor Text For Two Different Pages (it confuses Google)
Put Links High Up On Your Page
Use dofollow links (hopefully, this is obvious, but still)

Erin Neumann

Erin Neumann is the CEO of Be Aligned, a Veteran and Woman-Owned SEO Agency located in St Louis, MO. Focus on Core Web Vitals Google launched Core Web Vitals in June 2021. Core Web Vitals measures your website’s UX by focusing on 3 main factors:

Largest contentful paint
First input delay
Cumulative layout shift.

These three intimidating sounding titles can be simply summed up:

Above the Fold Page Load Speed (Largest contentful paint)
User Ability to Interact with Your Site (First Input Delay)
Visual Stability as Pages Load (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Here’s what each one actually means in practice: Above the Fold Page Load Speed (Largest Contentful Paint) Core Web Vitals does not focus on page speed, but on the user’s perceived loading speed. Specifically, LCP focuses on the time it takes for the largest element above the fold (imagery seen without scrolling) to load. You can check your LCP score using Google PageSpeed Insights, but I recommend checking it in GSC (Google Search Console). Search Console will let you know how your LCP is doing for your entire site, rather than just page by page. User Ability to Interact with Your Site (First Input Delay) FID measures the time it takes for a user to interact with your page. Examples of interactions include:

Clicking a menu option
Clicking a button
Opening a menu on mobile

Visual Stability as Pages Load (Cumulative Layout Shift) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is the stability of a page as it is loading. Put another way, if the elements on your page are jumping all over the place as the page loads, you have a high CLS. Your goal is to get your CLS as low as possible.

Steve Pogson

Steve is the founder of First Pier, an SEO and digital marketing agency focused on e-commerce businesses based in Portland, OR. Recreate Blog Posts as Videos It’s a no-brainer to convert your blog posts into videos and offer the same content in two different formats. Here’s why:

In 2022, 33% of all online activity is spent watching videos.
Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.
45% of the US watches 60+ minutes of video on Facebook or YouTube per week
Videos on social media generate 1200%(!) more shares than text and images combined
Video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from Google
Videos on landing pages typically increase conversions by 80% or more.

In short, you will pick up a ton of additional organic traffic by repurposing content you already created. Some things to keep in mind when turning a blog post into a video: Choose the Right Blog Post Not every blog post makes a great video. We recommend avoiding turning any company news into video content unless that news is fun and entertaining. Instructional/how-to blog posts make great videos. This is the type of content that will perform best in video format. Do a “read it aloud” check While using the text from the blog post as your script generally works, we recommend reading it aloud first to identify any sections that would benefit from being simplified or removed altogether. We recommend using short, simple words, and breaking a long sentence down into 2-3 simple sentences. Use a mic to capture professional sounding audio While a modern laptop typically has a built-in mic, the quality is not intended for video voiceovers. We would recommend either investing in a simple mic setup, or outsourcing the reading of your revised blog post content to a voiceover actor on voices.com.

Ben Walker

Ben Walker is a CEO, entrepreneur, and visionary leader that enjoys helping others become successful in business and in life. Ben’s company Transcription Outsourcing provides user-friendly and cost-effective transcription services for the medical, legal, law enforcement, and financial industries for organizations all over the world. Ben is a sought-after thought leader and has made contributions to publications like Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc, Forbes, and the Associated Press. Follow Ben’s Tweets: @benjaminkwalker Google’s new, as of the summer of 2021, Core Web Vitals are making a huge impact on sites that don’t meet their requirements. You will need to make sure you have the fastest and best web hosting company you can afford. You need a fast site on both mobile and desktop or you will be penalized by Google’s new speed requirements and lose traffic. Losing traffic means you will lose money. Having a fast site may involve utilizing a CDN (content delivery network), so make sure you ask about that when you are shopping around web hosting companies. If they don’t provide a CDN ask them who they partner with that can provide that and make sure you test it before you commit to it. Think about it when you are going to new sites yourself. Do you like waiting for a new site you’ve never been to take a long-time loading? Exactly, don’t be cheap and go with the lowest-priced web hosting company, instead, go with the fastest, I promise you will not regret it.

Henry Cazalet

Henry Cazalet is co-founder and director of The SMS Works. The SMS Works provides a low-cost and reliable SMS API for developers. He helps companies of all sizes make the most of SMS marketing as well as reduce their costs. Henry’s a two-time entrepreneur and has over 19 years of experience in mobile marketing.

Make the news, don’t comment on it.

We’re all familiar with how tough it is to generate inbound links to our website and content. It’s a never-ending task of pitching and mainly rejection. A major part of the problem is that our stories are just not that compelling and there’s a good chance that others will be pitching the same or similar content. What’s needed is impact. Something unique that no one else has access to. So my tip is to find a controversial topic in your industry and investigate it. Come up with research that challenges the current thinking. Provide evidence and back it up with industry quotes. What is the one subject that no one is prepared to engage with because it’s the elephant in the room? Poke at the problem and expose it. Write up a detailed report on your website with charts, quotes, and images. Then pitch that story to industry news editors, inviting them to link back to the full story on your website. Using this approach, we’ve gained some links with some very powerful sites that have given our link building a massive boost.

Michael Dinich

Michael Dinich is a personal finance expert, podcaster, YouTuber, and journalist. Michael is the founder of Your Money Geek, a rapidly growing personal finance and pop culture website. Use Syndications to Boost Your SEO Syndicating your content is a great way to help you boost your SEO rankings and build backlinks to your site. Content syndication is one of the secrets behind NerdWallets amazing SEO strategy and is why they are beating competitors like SoFi and The Motley Fool. Offering you content for syndication content helps you build great backlinks to your posts, while simultaneously extending your website’s reach. I’ve had many articles explode because of syndications and received links from sites I would never have been able to get links from otherwise. One fear with syndication is that even with the canonical link a syndicated version of your post might outrank your own. However, you don’t have to syndicate your top posts, and you can create new content specifically intended for syndication that links back to your best work.

Irina Weber

Irina Weber is a freelance writer and content strategist at SE Ranking. The importance of Author Pages Google confirmed the importance to prepare for Author Pages and implement their schema markup for rating your website. Good Author Pages allow you to boost your Author Reputation as a significant part of the Google search algorithm that affects your SEO. Quality author and expert pages include bio information, articles, and links leading to other websites. When you link to author pages, you can help these authors improve their expertise in a particular niche. Notice that author pages don’t affect your website rankings, but can increase trust and loyalty with your readers.

Dileep Thekkethil

Dileep Thekkethil, a Journalism Postgraduate, was formerly with a US-based online magazine, is the Associate Director, Digital Content at Stan Ventures. He is a frequent blogger who keeps a tab on the latest updates in SEO and technology arena. Give more emphasis on authority and expertise signals. The internet has a swarm of information. What makes your content unique is the additional value that you provide along with the information that’s already there. When you strive towards achieving this every single time, your website will automatically earn Google’s trust signals, and ranking for even the hardest keyword will become easy.

Takeaway

You would expect that 22 experts would have given a vastly diverse range of SEO tips for you to implement. However, their tips fit into three key areas to help your website rank high. You need to focus on the content, linking, and user experience. By focusing your efforts in these areas using the tips above, you can take your website to the first page of search results. The thing to remember is that you’ve got to prove to Google that you are an authority in your niche. If you can prove it to Google, then you have the chance to prove it to more online users and potential customers.