Heading into the new year, I’m usually full of cautionary notes about SEO, keywords, rankings, and organic traffic, all tied to search engines like Google.

These days, I’m optimistic because technological advances could be a real win for companies that keep up with SEO best practices.

The work will be more time-consuming than difficult. You (and your team) will need to focus on multiple types of content, from blog posts to podcasts. Yes, you need to work on page load speed and secure featured snippets. But expect your content – website pages, videos, images, and audio – to work for you to a greater degree as long as you’re creating it to meet strategic goals.

Google seems relentless in unearthing the best results for searchers. Enter the Google Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update, an AI-based algorithm designed to streamline searching.

MUM compares complex queries to give people what they want the first time they search. For content marketers, MUM will increase the odds that your content (not necessarily a text-heavy page) will be selected for a search result.

Keep these quick tips and reminders at the ready as you make your SEO plans for 2022. (As always, make sure to test any changes with your own data.)

 

The MUM update from @Google aims to give searchers what they want on the first try. That’s good news for search-optimized #ContentMarketing, says @mikeonlinecoach via @CMIContent @semrush.CLICK TO TWEET

Understand searcher intent

With MUM, Google advanced its ability to understand what someone wants from a search query. You should do the same. It’s easy to attract the wrong kinds of visitors and prospects to your content. That often leads to low click-through rates, few conversions – and complaints about low-quality leads from sales (and marketing) colleagues.

Think about creating content with an understanding of your ideal searcher’s intent. Is it informational, transactional, or navigational content?

You’ll probably need to create content for all three types, with most visitors arriving in research mode.

Of course, you can’t anticipate every content scenario. For example, a search for “heat exchanger” could lead to a visit from someone ready to place a sizeable industrial order. But sometimes, the searcher is someone who has a question about a heat exchanger in their home. It happens. But your goal is to minimize worthless, time-consuming leads from the “wrong” kind of visitor.

In many cases, keyword phrases are a dead giveaway about the types of websites someone hopes to visit.

Enjoy traffic you never expected

In 2022 and beyond, you may find your content ranks for keyword phrases you’re not targeting. In some cases, the words won’t even be in your content. You may get some top rankings and learn some phrases to focus on in future content.

In some search results, you may rank for keyword phrases that aren’t even in your content, says @mikeonlinecoach via @CMIContent @semrush. #SEOCLICK TO TWEETCMI, for example, ranks well for 3 Stunning Visual Storytelling Examples. The word “web” doesn’t appear on the page, but the article ranks No. 11 for “visual storytelling for the web.” I expect that kind of ranking to occur more often as Google refines its algorithm.

Make your passages count – Google can look at them all

Sometimes a passage in your content will be the driving force for a search engine result since Google can now index passages as well as pages. Here’s how I described this indexing capability in an article last year:

Picture a website page with 15 paragraphs. Before this change, the 14th paragraph likely had little value in the eyes of Google. After all, it’s a small part of the content and is near the bottom of the page. Maybe, at most, it helped define the overall point of the content on the page. And yet, that paragraph may be the answer to an often-searched question … Now Google says it can pinpoint that useful passage, which drives the page up in the rankings.

Neil Patel goes into depth about passage indexing for anyone who’d like to read more about it.

Be the authority

If you’re the established expert for a topic, you have a better chance of ranking well.

Don’t expect to rank well for every page on your website – competition may be fierce from phrase to phrase.

But you may get rewarded if Google detects overall themes over multiple pages. You can also build authority by seeking and attracting backlinks from relevant and high-quality websites.

Page titles and headers still matter

You can ill afford to make content that you never change, though scores of websites do exactly that. Why not at least revise something like a content header?

When you’re close to ranking well (maybe No. 15), why not rework some words to attempt a higher ranking?…