Two SEO Pointers to Boost Traffic in 2022

 1. Stop focusing on things that don’t matter

Here’s the reality in 2022: Half of the stuff you read online about SEO is nonsense.

Given the increasingly busy world we live in, this is hardly surprising, but it does imply that it's simple to waste time adopting SEO advice that won't make a difference. Let's quickly go through some of this advice:

Employ LSI keywords. There are no LSI keywords. John Mueller, a Google employee, has stated as much. Find out why in my LSI keyword guide.

Yoast, get the green light. Although it won't injure anything, this isn't likely to be very helpful either. Avoid wasting time. Because it ranks higher, create long-form content. This is untrue. In my article on long-form vs. short-form content, I explain why (and what you should concentrate on instead).

Use an exact-match domain. This advice is straight from 1999. Branded, memorable domains are better.

Get social signals. Google says they’re not important. At best, social engagement can indirectly lead to things that help SEO, as Sam explains in this video.

If you want to take your SEO to the next level in 2022, spend more time focusing on what matters and less on what doesn’t. Leave time-wasting nonsense like “LSI keywords” to your competitors.

2. Refresh declining content

Even though the organic traffic to your website increased dramatically last year, certain of your pages inevitably experienced a reduction. Rankings don't typically endure indefinitely, so you must make an effort to update and republish information that begins to lose its relevancy. Here's how to use Google Search Console to discover dwindling content:

1. Go to the Search results report

2. Click the Date filter and select Compare mode

3. Choose “Compare last 6 months to previous period”

4. Hit Apply

5. Click the “Pages” tab in the table

6. Sort the results by “Clicks Difference” from low to high

From here, look for pages that probably depend on freshness. In other words, pages that might no longer be valuable or useful after being published. Our list of the top Google searches, which has drastically decreased over the past six months and might use an update, serves as an example for us. Making sure your page still matches search intent is the greatest place to start when figuring out how to do this (see #2). Whether nothing seems wrong there, check to see if you missed any crucial subtopics that users might be searching for on your page. For Ahrefs, follow these steps:

1. Paste the URL of your page into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer

2. Go to the Content Gap report

3. Paste in the URLs of two to three similar top-ranking pages

4. Click Show keywords

A list of keywords that other pages rank for but you don't will now appear in front of you. Check them out and see if you can identify any subtopics. For instance, if we perform a content gap analysis on our article about the most popular Google searches, we find a good number of terms associated with these queries:

This isn’t something we included in our post, so it might be worth refreshing the content and adding it to make it more complete.