December 2022 SEO Industry Updates

Industry News
Jan 9, 2023
By multiple authors
6 minutes read

Your go-to rundown on the key news, announcements, and changes in SEO and search from December 2022.

While the rest of us were celebrating the end of the year, the SEO industry was sneaking in some final updates before 2023. Conductor has you covered for the latest news around ChatGPT, continuous scroll, the E-E-A-T update, and Google's top trends release.

Google E-E-A-T

By Alex Carchietta

The What: Google has updated their E-A-T acronym to be E-E-A-T. The E-E-A-T acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness .

The Why: Google has stated that there are many untrustworthy pages out there with low E-E-A-T. This update aims to provide the most helpful and useful experience for users on the SERP.

The rise of AI-written content has influenced Google to change its E-A-T ranking factors. With the increasing prevalence of AI-generated content, Google has placed a greater emphasis on the authoritativeness and trustworthiness of the content, as well as the expertise and experience of the author. AI-generated content may not always be of the same quality or reliability as content written by a human expert in the field. As a result, it is important for content creators to demonstrate their expertise, experience, and trustworthiness in order to rank well in search results.

For Everyone:

Learn best practices to optimize content and how to create an SEO content strategy.
Check out Conductor's E-A-T webinar.

For Conductor Customers:

Use Content Guidance within Conductor to ensure that the page aligns with the metadata of the top-ranking pages for target keywords:
- Check if body copy patterns are being used frequently enough
- Make sure that relevant questions are being answered
- Check if the content length is appropriate
Monitor your content in Page Groups to understand how certain content is performing.
Monitor your target keywords in Keywords to measure performance.

Product screenshot view of Content Guidance functionality in Conductor.

Learn more: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/12/google-raters-guidelines-e-e-a-t

OpenAI Released ChatGPT

By Francisco Arnaudo

The What: ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It is able to generate human-like responses to prompts and is trained on a wide range of texts, including news articles, books, and websites. ChatGPT is designed to be able to generate coherent and relevant text on a variety of topics, and it has the potential to be used in content creation and search engine optimization (SEO)

The Why: ChatGPT was released on November 30th, 2022 and it gained 1 million users in under a week. There are a lot of discussions going on about how this tool will impact the SEO industry, but Google issuing a 'red code ' as a response to its release speaks volumes. If you are involved in SEO and content creation you should experiment with the tool. Note that ChatGPT does not fact-check, so every output should be reviewed carefully. Here are some commands to try:

Give me 30 long-tail keyword ideas to target on a post about [your topic]
Cluster the following keywords based on relevancy: [your keywords separated by commas]
Create an article outline for [your topic]
Generate titles, headers, and meta descriptions
Separate unique keywords from synonyms on this list [your keywords separated by commas]

For Everyone:

Learn best practices for keyword research.

For Conductor Customers:

In Conductor, you can use Explorer to identify the search volume of the keywords and then use Content Guidance to better understand who else is ranking for these phrases and what else they have in their content.
Track the relevant keywords we are using in these articles to monitor how they are ranking.
Put these pages into Page Groups to understand if they are receiving organic traffic.

Learn more: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

Google's Top Search Trends 2022

By Janell Lindberg

The What: Google released its annual report of top search trends which includes both global and country-specific trends.

The Why: Monitoring Google's annual report of top search trends is important for creating content because it not only satisfies general curiosity around topics but also allows content creators to understand the interests and needs of their audience. By understanding what users are searching for, content creators can create relevant and useful content that meets the needs of their target audience, which can help to improve the success of their content and increase its visibility in search results.

Google’s report has become even more granular this year with the ability to drill down into local areas. Users will now have the ability to type in a U.S. city or zip code to see the top trends in that area.

For Everyone:

Use Google's report to identify local and global search trends.

For Conductor Customers:

Use Explorer to research monthly search volume of trending topics.
Use Content Guidance to understand how we can improve our existing or new content based on the target keyword.
Create a content brief in the actions panel to outline new content.
Track and monitor these keywords in Conductor to report on the rank of these keywords and understand who else is competing for these phrases.

Learn more: https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2022/US/

Continuous Scrolling on Google Desktop

By Andre Kopacki

The What: Google has added continuous scrolling for desktop search results in the US. This update already exists on mobile search.

The Why: Users may be more inclined to click on page 2 results, potentially redefining low-hanging fruit for SEOs.

Previously, the click-through rate for URLs ranking on Page 2 was virtually zero so it will be interesting to see if this has any impact on the amount of users that end up going to Page 2 to find results.

For Everyone:

Generate a list of keywords that have consistently ranked in position 11 or 12.
- You can even take this a step further by identifying keywords that are ranked on Page 2-3.
Use GSC and Search Console Analytics to look at clicks and impressions for each keyword.
There may be some subject areas where users are more inclined to keep scrolling but since this update recently happened, there isn’t enough information about it yet. Stay tuned to find out which industries this will have the highest impact on.

For Conductor Customers:

Monitor performance by tracking keywords to see if our rank stays consistent but also check to see if clicks or impressions have increased in the past few weeks for these keywords.