Top SEO Trends to Keep Up With in 2023

With Google’s spam update in 2022, the way SEO works will change, and marketers have had to rethink a lot of what they were doing.

Many companies reported a sudden decline in organic traffic after the update was completed. It has cemented that Google’s focus on user experience has increased significantly and will continue to increase in 2023.

With the update coming in the last quarter of the year, it gave marketers more reason to get their hands dirty and solve all underlying issues with the peak period on the horizon. Be it optimizing their local SEO strategy or nationwide SEO strategy, marketers had to be quick to respond, or they would lose a year’s worth of effort they had put into it. It also gave them an opportunity to start fresh in the coming year and capitalize on the opportunities that come with the update.

As we prepare to step into the new year, here are a few important SEO trends to keep yourself ahead of the SEO game.

Trend#1 Voice Search and Long-Tail Keywords

Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have brought about a paradigm shift in online searches. Technology has improved over the years and has become more popular than ever. It is expected that by 2022, 55% of homes will have a smart speaker or a digital assistant. How does this translate to you and your business?

Your website must be optimized to cater to audio searches. You can do so by using relevant keywords. These keywords will be long-tailed to help rank the content for phrases commonly used during voice searches.

Voice commands are different from text-based searches as, when we write, we write targeted words and omit many of the supporting phrases like verbs or adjectives. Voice search, on the other hand, involves complete sentences. So, you have to be very smart with how you structure your content.

For instance, we can use this article as a use case. When typing, you would probably search “SEO Trends 2023”. Whereas, using voice search, it would be “What will be the SEO trends in 2023?”

This trend forces SEO experts to be more intuitive. Long-tail search terms will be our strongest allies, and we will have to be equipped to get the most benefit out of them.

Trend #2 Make the Most of Featured Snippets

Since their implementation in 2017, featured snippets have been a game changer. They are brief summaries of topics that Google puts high up on SERP, and having these summaries can make your website gain relevance on Google. They are called position ‘zero’ and can provide your company with a 35% increase in organic traffic.

How to get featured snippets?

The fact is Google has not answered this important question categorically. No one knows what the exact formula is to be able to appear in these snippets. What we do know is that it is a sample of the power of Google’s Artificial Intelligence and observation alongside expert opinion over the years. It tells us that it is about how you have structured the content on your website, how comprehensively it covers the search intent, and how well it answers the search query. Featured snippets will continue to improve as time passes on, so as an SEO expert, it is vital to keep a close eye on how you can make the most of them.

But here comes experience.

Generating share-worthy content for our clients for 10 years now, we have broken the code of ranking for a featured snippet. And the key is to answer questions from People Also Ask in as simple words as you can.

Basically, Google’s algorithms use NLP structures. In the abbreviated version of Natural Language Processing, NLP structures run content pieces and rank answers that are as understandable for humans as they can get.

Trend #3 Artificial Intelligence and SEO

The simplest answer to the question is, you won’t rank on SERPs without quality content. But that, we understand, is an oversimplification. There are various factors at play when it comes to SEO, and content is one of them optimizing content should be a marketer’s primary focus.

The most important characteristic of quality content (as previously discussed) is that it should be audience-centric i.e., focuses on what the user wants to read rather than what you want to write.

While not an exhaustive list, the following are some key advantages that you can reap with quality content.

Trend #4 Third-Party Cookies Sunsetting

Third-party cookies going away has been a debate for the past three years now. The process will be in its fourth year in 2023 and remains a vital point of conversation for digital marketers.

With the COVID buying Google some time to sunset them completely, the company has announced that they will not be there by 2024 and will be slowly phased out during 2023, giving advertisers the time to adjust their marketing strategies.

With data collection on your target audience changing and becoming more complex, SEO is expected to gain more traction as paid ads will become more expensive and less efficient. This translates into a great opportunity, but how paid advertisers will adapt to this change during the year will be key for SEO marketers during 2023.

Trend #5 Mobile-only Indexing

The past three years have been about implementing Google’s mobile-first indexing for all online businesses. Updates to algorithms have forced people to make their websites as mobile-friendly as possible, and lacking in this domain results in heavy penalties in terms of SERP rank.

When it was first announced, it was thought that the index meant that if your website had different mobile and desktop URLs, Google would use the desktop URL for desktop searches and the mobile URL for mobile searches, but we have now come a long way. Google has confirmed that there is only one index and regardless of the search medium, only content on the mobile URL is indexed.

With the evolution of mobile devices and the increase in mobile usage, mobile-first indexing appears to be on the verge of another paradigm shift. By 2025, it is expected that more than 73% of the searches will come from mobile phones, and this points to speculation about how Google will go from mobile-first to mobile-only indexing. Certainly, something to keep up with in 2023.

While the digital marketing environment is evolving by the second, and there are a hundred other trends we could talk about, these are some of the hottest ones that we’re going to keep a close eye on. If you want to learn more about how you can benefit from SEO, get in touch with us today and learn more about our SEO services.

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