Website Trends to Look Out for in 2022

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The digital publishing industry, like much of the internet, is rapidly changing and growing. With that in mind, the new year can bring new worries about keeping up with the trends and making sure your site is equipped for any changing digital landscapes. 

To help you address some of the coming changes and get your site ready, we’ve compiled a few trends to look for relating to website revenue. Read on to find out what you can control to improve your site and stay relevant in the ever-changing digital world.

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The best approach for making improvements to your site is trying to pick aspects that you can control. The two areas you can best control are these: monetization strategies and marketing your content.

While you cannot control what is going on in the wider internet sphere, you can control your approach to getting your content out there. You can also control the approach you take to monetizing your various content – are you using affiliate marketing to your advantage? Do you own your own video on your site, or do you have it on a third party website? 

Before we go on, it is an important caveat that you should not sacrifice something that is working for your site in the name of trying a trend. At Ezoic, we have publishers with many different types of sites, across many different niches. There is no one perfect site, but we hope that these tips on upcoming trends can give you some ideas to incorporate onto your own website.

Trend 1: Video Content

This year, like last year, website owners who employ video are likely to see more and more success. According to a statistic from Invideo.io, “By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic.” 

We’ve talked about the benefits of video a couple times recently (you can check out this blog to see how one website increased revenue with video and this one for best practices your website, including video tips), but in a nutshell: video is growing faster, less competitive, and has appeal from audiences outside of Google.

We are getting to a point where website owners who do not employ video content on their own site may be leaving money on the table. 

At the end of the day, the benefits of employing video include  improved SEO, increased video views, earned traffic from your videos that are indexed, and maximized ad revenue.

The reason video is where to look is something Ezoic CMO Tyler Bishop wrote about in a blog about starting a website in 2021: “There’s a large delta between written content available versus video content. To me, that’s a big opportunity if you have a site or are building a site on a topic that lacks the same depth of content in video form.”

Let’s break that down. You, like many other publishers online, likely have a majority of your content on your site in written form. But video content is only getting easier to create, and the quality of that content in search is much, much higher. If we are to take cues from the popularity of streaming content like Hulu, Netflix or Disney +, or even the popularity of video content as entertainment on TikTok or YouTube, we are likely on the precipice of a big move toward video content across websites, too. 

This recent blog details some of the advantages of hosting video content on your own site. Ezoic’s Video Player is one way to get your leg up on video content. With the Video Player, you own your own content, rather than simply donating it to a third party platform and not controlling your content or its monetization. 

Coming soon, we’ll also be releasing something big that could change the landscape of video creation for good. Stay tuned for a major reveal this year.

When users navigate the web for answers, answers are increasingly easy to find, making it even more important to rank as high as possible. Part of this is because “rich snippets” – or the different elements that make up the Knowledge Graph in Google, come up at the very top of the page, before websites even rank. 

An example of a rich snippet

The emerging idea of rich search offers unique advantages and opportunities. If you can figure out a question that nobody else is answering, and you can provide a great, succinct answer, you can rank before the competition easily. We wrote some more detailed tips on getting into the Knowledge Graph in this recent blog, but the gist of it is this: pick something with low competition, provide unique content in the article, get it in the Knowledge Graph!

Another trend in rich search to keep an eye on is the potential for search inside of native apps. Take a news app or a financial news app, for example. They are beginning to use their own algorithms in-app to get answers for their users more quickly. A lot of shopping and clothing apps provide the latest news to provide better in-app experiences to users. The idea here is that users will like it, and it will convince them to use their apps for more than buying things or just checking on it for quick statistics. 

Examples of apps featuring content that is relevant to their audience: here is Robinhood sharing stories from various publications about the stock market.

Here are a couple practical applications for you if you want to go down the native, in-app search route:

  1. Reach out to popular relevant apps and offer to cater to them, make them exclusive content, format posts to meet their standards. This tip applies to the apps or sites that may only work with a handful of sources.
  2. Optimize schema markup on your pages that it is applicable to. The protocol keeps expanding, so you could be surprised by some of the new types of schema that your site’s pages are eligible for. This would enable these pages to be pulled in via API (application programming interface) by many apps that are seeking open graph results that include really specific schema for various topics. This includes video!
  3. Use the Google Discovery Standards for new articles. These standards are somewhat standardized among apps and developers for displaying results curated for users (i.e. is your image size big enough for a thumbnail, etc.). Additionally, check in on popular apps in your niche to see if they publish standards for publishing news or info partners that you could use to ensure you meet the criteria.

Trend 3: Creating Truly Unique Content

The standards for content that ranks in Google search are increasingly high. Whereas a list roundup used to be enough to rank high, now the algorithm seeks other content within the article in order for it to be high quality enough to rank. Google adjusted their algorithm by weighing the rankings of things like reviews heavily towards reviews that include real unique product pictures, experiences, demos, and disclosures. 

What does this mean for you? Your site will need to work harder than ever to provide unique content.

The main thing that makes your content more unique is adding value that others do not have. For example, if you can feature an infographic or a video on a certain topic, not only does that lend your piece more credibility, but it also gives you something that other competitors are not doing. In general, adding a variety of media types is a great way to make your content unique. 

Content that is basically a vessel for ads with no unique quality added will not perform well. This actually clears a lot of junk out of the ecosystem and presents a really great opportunity to create uber-high-quality content in these spaces that focuses on quality over quantity. It will, however, require an investment in time and energy, but it is something that will only work to benefit your site in the long run.

Wrapping it up

Although we don’t have a crystal ball to peer into to tell the future, we do have a number of insights into our industry that will help you prepare yourself for what could be coming in 2022. 

Overall, get ready to leverage your site’s monetization strategy and marketing your specific content. Get ready for more video, more effort into SEO, and more effort into the quality of your content.

In addition to sharing some tips about what could be coming soon, we at Ezoic also want to share some tools that you have at your disposal to be situated in the best possible place this year:

  • Scores: Be sure that there is nothing preventing your site from being the best it can be in terms of monetization potential, user experience, speed and more. Check out what your site score is and cross off anything that has been holding you back here.
  • Ezoic’s Video Player: This is key for setting your site up with quality video content, and with content that will make it stand out in search. Check out the tool and more about it here.

For more content on the upcoming trends we’ve talked about here, and other ways to improve your site, check out these other blogs by Ezoic:

Linden

By Linden O'Brien Williams

Linden is a former journalism graduate of the University of Missouri turned social media and content marketer. She speaks fluent English, Spanish, and French and is responsible for Ezoic social marketing strategies.