What were the biggest SEO changes in 2022?
Helpful Content Update
In August Google rolled out its “helpful content” update with the view to connect users to content that is helpful, answers their intent, and is written by people. This hasn’t paved way for AI to take over, the human touch will still be important when writing web content.
Product review update
Google also kept up its work on prioritising in-depth and authentic product reviews. In March, an update was made to improve the identification of trustworthy product reviews first. This is important for anyone operating an e-commerce site. Lengthy reviews with pictures to prove the product was used are invaluable in the e-commerce world.
Video indexing on Search Console
Video content has been on the up over the last couple of years, so it makes sense Google would provide tools to check if your videos are indexed. A new report in Google Search Console permits you to see where google identified pages with videos. It tells whether they’re indexed and, if they aren’t, you can see how to fix this. This is very useful for anybody with lots of video content on their site or anyone who wants to start investing time into video content for their business.
Above is a screenshot of how the new video indexing report looks.
GA4 migrations
The move to GA4 gets closer every day, with only six months to set up a GA4 property. By July 2023, Google Analytics (non-GA4 properties) will stop tracking data. If you need assistance getting set up on GA4, we can help.
From Webmaster Guidelines to Google Search Essentials
If you needed guidance on best practices for owning and running a website, the Webmaster Guidelines were the go-to resource. Google decided to refine this and call it “Google Search Essentials.” For all technical requirements, spam policy, and best practice queries this is the place to go.
EAT gains experience
The popular Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness framework for ranking content gained experience in December 2022. Where relevant, content should be written from experienced positions. That’s either experience of a product or service or of an industry as a whole. This all feeds into positive ranking in the search results.
It has ruined our fun office poster!
Local Search
Google My Business was renamed to Google Business Profiles losing its easy-to-search acronym GMB to GBP already taken by much bigger topics like Great British Pound. We can assume that the UK-based SEO team were not in the meeting at this point.
New attributes were added to Google Business Profiles, including Asian-owned and LGBTQIA+ owned. You can now also mark if your business has recycling services available. After the conflict in Ukraine, Google also added emergency help attributes. This allows businesses to mark if they employ refugees, need volunteers, accept donations, or offer free products and services.
Since 2020, supporting local businesses and strengthening local communities has been at the forefront of people’s minds. With new attributes making it easier to find what you need in local search we saw this going from strength to strength.
More rebranding
Google also made the decision to change Google Data Studio to Google Looker Studio. This is an interesting name change. It’s a bit ambiguous compared to data studio which described exactly what the tool did. I.e. it gave you a studio to pull data into graphs and charts to make data analysis a much easier task. However, Google likes to do interesting things every now and then to keep everyone on their toes.
Google added continuous scroll to desktop
Continuous scroll has been on mobile for over a year now but has recently started to be rolled out to desktop. This feature means more results are included before a user needs to click ‘more results’ creating a smoother searching experience.
Keep an eye out for our next blog as we think about SEO and Digital Marketing going forward into 2023.
