Are you looking for an SEO strategy that will help boost your rankings and visibility in 2023? If so, then this blog post is for you.
SEO is one of the key pillars of all marketing strategies. 2023 brings with it a rapidly evolving SEO landscape. If you want to reach out to potential customers, you must be in sync with users’ search behaviors and continually develop your SEO strategy and efforts.
Here are the biggest 2023 SEO trends that you need to know as it’ll help you change the way you strategize and develop an action plan this year.
- Embrace Chaos
Expect lots of chaos and dynamism as SEO undergoes a major overhaul this year. We’ve been seeing traces of this trend last year with Google rolling out even more updates than it ever did.
Google will continue to roll and finish fresh updates as the year progresses. It’s wise to stay on top of these search updates. It might seem chaotic at the outset, but it’s what will precisely bring the much-needed order to the SEO landscape.
At Webtage, we’d like to add the caveat that while it is our job to stay on top of search algorithm updates and Google’s guidance, great SEO is about improving user experience – if users find your website relevant and useful they will keep coming back and Google will notice! And that’s the reason we don’t lose page rankings to algorithm changes.
- Get Acquainted With ChatGPT
Talking of Google, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the new AI-powered chatbot, has revolutionized search engine optimization.
The potential of ChatGPT is huge with its easy, human-like conversational interface with users that answers all their queries. It’s no surprise that Google has recently announced its product Bard to compete with ChatGPT.
If you’re an SEO professional who’s not using ChatGPT, we highly recommend using it for your business’ benefit. From keyword research, writing meta descriptions, and using it as a search assistant, to a generic brainstorming tool.
At Webtage, we use ChatGPT to consolidate research on topics, create meta tags for search engine visibility, and boost our copy creation process for blogs, ads, and the web. However, we strongly advise against using ChatGPT to create content without bringing in your first-hand experience, deep expertise, pointers, evaluation & refinement to make the output useful.
But you can use it to aid you for insights and even outline your content marketing strategy with a bird’s eye view of tactics for content related to your niche. However, if your competition is also using ChatGPT for their content strategy, then they would follow the same thing and create similar content like you.
Google search engine’s stance on AI-generated content continues to evolve with time. Initially, Google was against any kind of AI-generated content. Now Google’s stance has been that it will penalize any “spammy automatically-generated content.”
Curious if the content you generate can trigger a spam (read “fake content”) alert? Check it here: https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/
- Create Content For People, Not Robots And Spiders
Google released its first “helpful content update” in 2022, urging marketers to create web content that prioritizes people and offers users with a meaningful experience. Google prefers content created for people by people and it views AI-generated spammy content a violation of the company’s guidelines. It states you can use AI for insights and optimization, not long-form content such as articles.
In 2023, Google is going to favor unique, fresh, relevant, purposeful, and user-centric content. The search engine algorithms are highly sophisticated, quickly spotting content that doesn’t satisfy the readers and has been spun by automated tools. Don’t go that route as there are high chances of getting penalized.
Google also made an addition to its popular EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) acronym in December 2022. The updated acronym reads EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust). This makes sense in a digital world where there’s an influx of AI-generated content. Showcasing the experience of the author or creator builds trust and credibility that it’s written by humans for humans. So, create content that projects your expertise in your subject area. Display an author bio with their detailed experience, a separate author page with a list of all their articles or content, and social profiles. But it’s not just the experience of the author or creator that counts, but also topics of their content should be related to their experience.
With Google’s new guidelines showing a clear preference for long-form resourceful content, fix pages and posts with thin content. For example, product pages can have more details such as dropdown menus, FAQs, and testimonials apart from descriptions.
Focus on quality and not quantity with content creation in 2023.
- Focus on Technical SEO
In 2023, companies that focus on the improvement of the technical aspects of their websites will grow significantly. Google is incentivizing sites with better user experiences. Better user experience (UX) means higher ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are other key SEO metrics that mean more than ranking and that’s organic traffic via Google Analytics and lead conversions (Leads / Revenue). Unless ranking is affecting a company’s bottom line, it’s not the most important SEO metric to report to your clients. So, organic traffic and lead conversions are standard go-to SEO metrics to focus on. Other factors to measure your SEO performance include indexability, search visibility, time spent on the site, and the bounce rate.
However, which SEO metrics to measure depends on your marketing goals. Have a bigger picture when analyzing SEO metrics and track a few related ones only. For example, a long time spent on the site might look impressive at the outset, but if it’s not leading to conversions, you’re probably attracting the wrong audience.
Keep an eye on and stay on top of Google’s Page Experience Update, Core Web Vitals, and Link Best Practices to fix technical SEO issues regularly within a certain time threshold. These include monitoring the page loading speed, browser response time, and content stability during loading for a seamless user experience.
Like content, you’ll see many SEO automation tools and platforms that you can use to perform routine tasks and track technical SEO metrics.
- The Rise Of Visual Or Multisearch
With the increased popularity of TikTok and Instagram, people are steering towards visual content.
Multisearch was announced in April 2022 to help people view images and text at the same time when they search for something online. Multisearch, powered by Google Lens, allows people to use their phones to search images and text, and get the most relevant results. We can expect more advancements in Google’s AI development and Multitask Unified Model (MUM), a modern technology for answering complex questions that don’t have direct answers. It will provide users with a rich, interactive, and engaging experience as graphic cards of imagery and auto-complete features are directly tied into every search result.
You’ll need to balance the content, i.e. text with images and videos. Also, focus on the mobile optimization of these visual elements as it will become the norm in 2023.
- Shoot More Videos
There’s an increased amount of attention to video results when searching for something online.
2023 will be the year of videos and if you haven’t included it in your SEO strategy, we urge you to do so this year.
The best part is that you don’t need fancy equipment to shoot your videos. Videos taken from your mobile also perform as well as professionally shot videos. The focus is more on the content of the video than the production quality.
Conclusion
We’ve shared our SEO predictions and insights for 2023. To apply this SEO knowledge to yield results, you’ll need a dedicated SEO expert team, either in-house or by hiring an agency.
At Webtage, the best SEO Company in Chicago IL, we excel in delivering one of the most comprehensive, realistic, and proven SEO strategies plans with an excellent and consistent track record of implementing the SEO requirements to help our clients achieve their desired results.
