SEO 2022 in Review: E-E-A-T, ChatGPT, Search Essentials and More

08 Feb, 2023 Google News

If you are running a business online, you cannot ignore SEO if you hope to attract a steady flow of customers to your business. While you may have succeeded in optimizing your SEO, keeping up with changing trends is important, as SEO tactics are constantly evolving. What worked a few years ago may not be the best approach today.

2022 saw several significant changes in the SEO landscape that may greatly impact how businesses approach SEO. The most notable change is the introduction of ChatGPT, which many players in the digital marketing space view as a game-changer in AI content creation and generation.

However, ChatGPT was not the only notable change in the past year. Below are some of the biggest news updates in SEO for 2022 that are worth paying attention to.

Search Essential Updates

Google has the largest market share among all search engines at 84.04 percent. This means that any changes in Google will directly impact SEO across the board. One major change Google made in 2022 was a revision of its 20-year-old Webmaster Guidelines. The revisions included renaming it to Google Search Essentials and streamlining and simplifying the guidelines to ensure users understand them better.

In addition to Google Search Essentials, the most significant change undertaken by Google in the year was the update of several Featured Guides documents. These include author markup best practices, guidelines for Q&A structured data, learning video rich results, and specific time requirements for recipes. Google also dropped support for job training structured data and updated its spam policy.

E-E-A-T Updates

Google updated its quality rater guidelines (QRG) twice in 2022, first in July and again in December. In July, Google reframed its definition of Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) by updating what it considers low-quality pages.

In December, Google made an important update to its quality rater guidelines with the introduction of the letter E to E-A-T, a concept employed by Google to evaluate the quality and credibility of a website. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and is a key factor for ranking YMYL websites.

Following the update, Google will also consider experience on a certain subject matter as a ranking factor in YMYL subjects to protect users from content that could compromise their finances.

Google’s Continuous Scroll

Ranking on the first page of Google has always been the goal of every marketer. Being at the top of the page is still important. However, ranking on the first page may be irrelevant following the introduction of continuous scrolling on desktop search results. The continuous scroll feature helps users get more helpful results with fewer clicks.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT has been the talk of the SEO world since November 2022. This AI tool from OpenAI is a game-changer in content creation and can only get better with the launch of its update ChatGPT-4, which may not be too far off, according to OpenAI.

While an excellent content creation and research tool, you may not want to rely on ChatGPT for content creation, as it may produce low-quality content that ranks poorly on Google SERPs.