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12 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023 – An SEO Expert’s Guide to Surviving the Competition

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SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore

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While many experts in the digital marketing field try to predict SEO trends every year, the truth is that no one is ever spot on the money. Past trends have been proven to be incorrect, and algorithms can change at any moment, leaving marketers scrambling to keep up.

A clear example is how AI content has kicked up a storm since the second half of 2022 that no one saw coming as fast as it did.

Despite this, predicting trends is still a valuable exercise in keeping up with the ever-evolving digital landscape. As we look to the future of SEO in 2023, it’s important to approach these predictions with a critical eye and be willing to adapt as new data and technology trends emerge.

With that in mind, here are some of the trends that I believe will be important for SEO practitioners to take notice of in 2023 into 2024.

12 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023 to Remain Competitive

There are twelve trends you shouldn’t miss! Many changes happen every year in the world of SEO. Stay on top of your game and ensure that your website ranks high.

1. AI Technologies As A Competitive Edge

You can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday work to improve efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness. Here are some ways AI can be used to enhance SEO practices:

  • Keyword research: AI-powered tools can analyse vast amounts of data to identify high-performing keywords and search phrases. This helps you target the most relevant and valuable keywords for your niche, and now you can do this in minutes instead of hours.
  • Content optimisation: AI algorithms can analyse existing content and suggest improvements, such as the existence and use of entities via Google’s own NLP API.
  • Semantic analysis: AI can help SEO experts understand the context and meaning behind keywords and search queries. This can enable them to create content that is more likely to rank well and satisfy user intent.

2. Voice Search is Still Trending

Voice search is constantly rising in popularity. It makes searching more accessible, convenient, and efficient. Users don’t need to type long inquiries. They can speak directly to Siri or Alexa for whatever they are searching for.

Voice Search SEO means optimising SEO for voice assistants. What does this mean? It means creating SEO strategies so your content appears in voice search results. This is crucial so you can widen your audience scope for all types of searches. Instead of focusing on what users are typing in search bars, you pay attention to what they say.

Voice search optimisation is rising because user behaviour heavily affects SEO. Google is all about providing the best results for voice queries. Moreover, voice recognition technology is vastly improving, making voice searches more accurate.

Voice search improves user experience by making Google searching more conversational and thus natural. Users have more ways to search for something. Not to mention, this feature benefits some challenged people who can only use Google by speech.

Voice search shares some similarities with traditional search. Users still need high-quality, reliable, and authoritative content for both. How do they differ? Say you own a website and want to optimise it for voice search. It means you need to modify and tweak keyword usage. You need to specifically pay attention to how you word content. You also need to add more long-tail keywords to your content. Voice search largely pushes for writers to write the way they talk.

SEO strategists need to pay attention to voice search trends. More people are adding voice technologies everywhere. By 2024, there will be 8.4 billion units of digital voice assistants. That number is double that from 2020, when there were only 4.2 billion digital voice assistants worldwide. It’s an opportunity for marketing companies to extend their creativity by tapping into spaces beyond the screen.

AI companies, specifically voice recognition software, will continue contributing to rising voice search trends. Soon, there will be more AI voice recognition software like Otter.ai, Krisp, and Lovo.ai. There will also be a higher demand for voice tools by voice assistants.

How to Implement this Trend?

Refer to some tips below to strengthen your voice search.

  • Create an FAQ page for your website – FAQs follow the question-answer format. Aim to cover the basic questions that your visitors would commonly ask.
  • Optimise long-tail keywords – Instead of normal keywords, add some long-tail keywords in the content. Questions make great long-tail keywords. They also incorporate the natural way people talk out loud.
  • Apply local SEO – Add your business or website to local search directories. Local SEO is one way for Google to show your website, especially when you want to rank high within geographic-based searches. For example, if a user says, “Best pizza restaurants near me,” you want to be the top result that appears as an indexed location from Google Maps results.

3. Local SEO Will Keep Dominating

Local SEO will continue to be relevant all the time. Users are always searching for things that appear in local searches. Location heavily influences SEO. If you run a website for your business, you want to be the top business that appears in your field, right?

Some keywords spark local intent SEO. In 2021, 21% of users in the U.S. used the internet to search for local businesses daily. Local intent SEO continues to trend mainly because many searches have something to do with location and geography. What does this mean? Users use keywords intended for local search results. You need to optimise your website for searches like, “best cafes near me”, “best chicken wings resto Denver” or “Hotels New York”.

Local SEO will keep trending every year. Your business still has a chance to rank high, get leads and gain more revenue even if you don’t have a website. Optimising for local search intent is one way to provide users with exactly what they need.

Local SEO will always be relevant even after 2023. This is an opportunity for companies to create software to help businesses improve Local SEO. Some tools you can use for Local SEO are Semrush Listing Management Tool, Georanker, and Google Business Profile.

How to Implement this Trend?

Refer to some tips below to keep your Local SEO up to a notch.

  • Create a Google Business Profile – Don’t skip out on creating your Google Business Profile. This increases visibility for local searches. It’s free. It increases the likelihood that your business will appear in the top results for some keywords.
  • Optimise website for mobile search – Mobile device traffic accounts for almost 60% of website traffic. Optimise your website for both mobile and desktop searches.
  • Encourage reviews from past customers – Customers and previous clients give the most updated information about your business. One way to encourage new customers is through reviews and feedback on your platforms. The more reviews you have, the more potential traffic you get from future visitors.

4. Mobile-First Indexing Will Continue to Evolve for the Whole Web

Google has integrated a mobile-friendly ranking signal. The priority for mobile-friendliness resulted in a cultural shift. Many businesses were on the lookout for how this affected their website rankings. It benefits the ordinary user since search results will display mobile-friendly results first. The business, on the other hand, will be on the disadvantaged end of the bargain.

The ranking signal earned the moniker Mobilegeddon to signify the (dramatic) end of many website rankings. Google will now look at and index the mobile version of a website first. It became a source of anticipation because millions of websites are optimised for desktop search only. It’s either your website is mobile-friendly, or it’s not.

Google’s mobile-first index continues to be in full force today. Mobile-first indexing means that if your website is not optimised for mobile search, there will be serious effects on your search rankings. It will force businesses to rework, redesign, and re-optimise their website for desktop and mobile searches. Why? Almost 75% of users will search the web via mobile devices by 2025. The number will only continue to increase from there.

The Mobilegeddon trend will continue to persist in the next few years. Some tools that will strengthen this trend are Mobilizer, Google’s PageSpeed Insight Tool, and Screaming Frog.

12 SEO Trends

How to Implement this Trend?

Refer to the tips below to optimise for mobile-first indexing.

  • Keep content the same for mobile and desktop versions of the website – Maintain the same content for desktop and mobile website versions. Google may interpret the content differently. But if you use the same content, you will rank for the same keywords.
  • Check ad placements – Where you place ads can harm rankings. Inspect all your ads and move them around so that users will have a good user experience when viewing your website on mobile.
  • Test the mobile-friendliness of your website – Google has provided a tool for everybody to use. Check your website for mobile-friendliness with Google’s test.

5. Optimising Content For Featured Snippets Is Important

Having a featured snippet is one way to dominate rankings. It’s the coveted Position-Zero out of all results looking to rank for specific searches. “Featured Snippets Get 35.1% of All Clicks.” (EngineScout, 2022). It is your job as an SEO strategist to try landing a featured snippet on Google. It means creating optimised content that has the potential to be a featured snippet in Google.

Google is all about giving users the best result out there. Users will get a featured snippet result if Google algorithms and AI feel like there’s a direct, concise, and valuable answer to the search query. When you optimise for featured snippets, you create content that directly answers specific user searches. The goal is to give snippets that provide value to searchers.

How to Implement this Trend?

Below are some ways to optimise content for featured snippets.

  • Answer questions concisely – Featured snippets answer a specific question that may usually come from the People May Ask portion in searches. There is no room for fluffy content. Answer questions directly.
  • Keep the snippet under 300 characters – Condense your answer into two to three sentences. Make sure it doesn’t go beyond 300 characters. Mind the format of your snippet, as some featured snippets feature bullet points, numbered lists, tables, and videos, among many others.
  • Provide additional information – Many blogs and websites attempt for the Position-Zero of Google. The challenge for you is to give additional information that no other content does. You must also keep everything under the character limit while providing brief, value-adding, well-structured information.

6. Search in Social Media

Social Media Marketing has been trending in recent years. The rise of Influencer Marketing changed the way brands promote their products and services. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are instrumental in current SEO trends. You will see top influential figures as you scroll through these online spaces (more often than not).

Don’t ignore the power of Social Media Marketing, specifically Influencer Marketing. The prominence of influential people affects the search activities of many users. The market size for Influencer Marketing is expected to reach up to $22.2 billion by 2025. Moreover, social media platforms play a huge role in bringing in organic traffic. It’s a numbers game. The more followers you have, the more likely new users will come across you.

How to Implement this Trend?

Do you want to try optimising for social media? Below are some tips you can apply.

  • Produce high-quality content – One key trick to starting with good social media following is having good content. It also means creating highly optimised content. Publish compelling content with matching aesthetic visuals.
  • Post content regularly – Keep and follow a content calendar and schedule. Followers may start expecting regular content from you. Some accounts post every day, while others post twice a week.
  • Invest time growing your accounts – There’s no other way to grow an influential account than by giving it time. When you post high-quality content regularly, it will gain traction over time. When your content is optimised for search, users will find you.

7. High-Quality Video Content Is An SEO Advantage

Creating high-quality videos adds diversity and value to your SEO strategy. One way to keep users engaged is by providing videos for different purposes. The effect of high-quality videos doesn’t stop with YouTube. Other platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram demonstrate the power of videos to draw in traffic.

More users now prefer video results in their Google searches. Why? Videos are one way to convey information easily. While you need to read blogs and scroll through paragraphs, and in videos, you only need to watch and listen. Videos are highly demonstrable content where businesses can bring out their products. High-quality videos don’t only serve entertainment value but also educational and informational value.

How to Implement this Trend?

Having high-quality videos is just the beginning. You still need to do some things to improve SEO using videos. Refer to these tips below.

  • Plan your video content – A valuable video brings relevant information and knowledge to users. Producing a high-quality video involves planning, production, and hours of editing work. Take the time to prepare before you publish a video online.
  • Optimise video title and description – Captions should be informative and descriptive. Don’t forget to add relevant keywords in the caption, title, and headings. Add relevant hashtags that users can refer to gain other relevant videos.
  • Utilise clip markups – Google indexes clip markups in your video. These clip markups segment your videos, making them more organised and easy to navigate for viewers.

8. Mobile First Indexing Is A Critical Factor In SEO Success

Mobile Friendliness has always been a crucial factor for a good user experience. The majority of users search using their smartphones or other mobile devices. There’s nothing more frustrating than browsing a website that doesn’t display well, cuts information, and makes searching hard!

More people are using their mobile devices to search Google. You need to create a mobile-optimised website to rank high in the results. Users who have a hard time getting around any website will bounce. Nobody will go through your informational, well-written blog if the entire paragraph takes up the whole screen.

Google prioritises this factor seriously. Google will index a mobile version of a website first. It ensures that users searching through their mobile devices get the best result, including mobile compatibility, optimisation, and good mobile design.

How to Implement this Trend?

Below are some ways to comply with mobile-first indexing and succeed in SEO.

  • Perform a website audit – Redesigning a website to become mobile-friendly for initial indexing takes time. There’s no way to do it apart from doing an audit first. Check all pages of the website. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check your current website’s mobile performance.
  • Double-check links – You may already have some links for your linking strategy. Check all your links on the website. We want to make sure that your mobile links go to mobile-friendly pages.
  • Make websites more intuitive – Some things in mobile devices make sense compared to desktop websites. For example, if you think a button is better than an actual link, change that feature on your website. Transform the website menu to be more intuitive for a mobile device. In short, make it simple for your users to navigate your site on their devices.

9. (VSEO) Video Marketing for Effective SEO Strategy

Video SEO is part of producing high-quality videos. Ranking high-quality videos means optimising them to become searchable in search engines. Your video can land on the first page of results with Video SEO. Why is this necessary? Your goal is to keep users longer on your website. It only takes 4 seconds before the average user leaves a website. However, the same average user can stay and watch a video for up to 2.7 minutes.

Youtube has come a long way from becoming a platform for watching videos. It’s now an effective platform for marketing. YouTube hosts a lot of thriving communities, and there are flexible methods for product placement. Influential YouTube vloggers post blogs that gain a lot of traffic and profit over time. These YouTube channels appear in Google search results. Some videos even land in featured snippets.

Why is YouTube effective for marketing? YouTube is one of the largest search engines on the web. Widen your brand reach to almost 2.68 billion active users monthly on the platform. The booming influence of video platforms, particularly TikTok, means more users watch videos.

Expect a rise in Video Marketing over the next few years. Video editing software like Apple Final Cut aids aspiring video producers. Transcribing software such as Descript helps with video transcriptions. Lastly, beginners in YouTube can maximise the YouTube Studio to explore everything about video creation.

How to Implement this Trend?

Apply some strategies below to optimise videos for SEO.

  • Add a CTA – What is your goal for the video? Always add a CTA to your video. Some examples are putting a sign-up link, entering an email, or linking to another web page.
  • Provide transcripts for the video – Transcripts give Google more content to index, making more of your content part of Google’s index. Moreover, these transcripts add more accessibility for viewers who want to keep up with the video content.
  • Optimise the web page that contains the video – Sometimes, we produce the best videos, but they are nowhere in the results. Double-check the web page it is in. Optimise the web page by checking for relevant links, keywords, and mobile-friendliness.

10. Core Web Vitals Has Higher Weighting as a Ranking Factor

What makes a website healthy? Google has launched a unified set of guidelines to do the following: standardise metrics for healthy websites and maintain good user experience. Google’s Core Web Vitals are three measurable signals for website performance. These are:

  1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – loading time of content on a web page
  2. First Input Delay (FID) – responsiveness of the web page from the first time the user interacts
  3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – stability of website visuals

Good Core Web Vitals affect user experience immensely. Google rolled out these ranking factors to support mobile-first indexing. When users visit a website, specifically on mobile devices, Google wants reliable websites where users will stay. The move towards more mobile-centric websites means that Core Web Vitals measure website performance on mobile.

As more people use phones for searching, Core Web Vitals will be more crucial for businesses. If a website wants to rank high in the SERPs, it needs to be fast, interactive, and stable.

How to Implement this Trend?

How can you use the Core Web Vitals to improve SEO? Refer to some tips below.

  • Keep your website up to date with any changes – Google promises to update the Core Web Vitals guidelines annually. Any change can hugely affect your website. Look out for specific announcements. Then, make necessary changes to your site to follow new guidelines.
  • Reassess your hosting options – If your site is slow according to Core Web Vitals, it’s time to look for alternatives. Consider a dedicated hosting solution if shared hosting is making your site slow.
  • Download the Chrome Extension – Core Web Vitals has a Google Chrome Extension. Keep your website constantly in check, so your website is always performing best. Google prioritising Core Web Vitals alongside mobile-first indexing means it wants to rank only the most optimised websites for mobile users.

11. Long-Form Content Is An Advantage

We’ve all heard of “Content is King!” and SEO professionals agree in unison for a good reason. Content is the reason users stay on the website. You want to keep posting high-resolution, beautiful images. It’s necessary to invest in high-quality video snippets for your product. Lastly, long-form content continues to dominate SEO!

Long-form content isn’t just for your random musing. After all, nobody wants to read long blogs and text paragraphs. So why is it advantageous? Long-form content can take in more keywords. You want to rank for as many relevant keywords as your user might be searching.

How long is long-form content? There is no specific answer to that. However, a 2020 study stated that the average first-page result in Google has 1447 words.

How to Implement this Trend?

Start making long-form content. Here are some tips for implementing this trend.

  • Get good at writing – The tricky part is finding someone who can write well! The rule is always to write valuable information. Moreover, relay this information in a simple way users can digest and understand them,
  • Search for keywords and relevant keywords – Always perform keyword research before you write about your topic. Long-form content is advantageous, but only if it caters to the user search it is intended for.
  • Structure your content well – Always diversify your content structure. Nobody likes to read paragraph after paragraph. A simple break in the text, such as images or videos, help keep content more friendly to users. Adding polls, tallies, or any gimmick also helps keep your content more engaging rather than boring.

12. Google’s new edition for E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust)

Users only get valuable results. How does Google decide about this? Through E-A-T. Google rates websites and website creators according to Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Recently, they added another E for Experience. Google now rates websites according to E-E-A-T.

Google has human-quality raters for evaluating websites with E-E-A-T. Then, Google incorporates the results and ratings into the algorithms. The feedback from raters becomes data points in the algorithm. These, then, affect the search results.

Google wants to provide users with high-quality content that are:

  • Coming from content creators that have relevant experience about what they’re talking about (Expert)
  • Being referenced by other authoritative results in the domain and bringing more traffic from other readers (Authoritative)
  • Secure, safe, and authentic (Trustworthy)

The only way to rank high in search engines is if your content provides value to users. It does not matter if it’s coming from a voice search or a typewritten search. E-A-T becomes a framework for ranking sites and improving SEO. Google wants users to consume content that is not harmful!

How to Implement this Trend?

You may want to take E-E-A-T seriously if you are a content creator. Here are some tips to be level with Google’s E-A-T Search Quality Guidelines:

  • Publish only high-quality content – Good things take time. If you plan to publish a long blog or a video snippet, plan. One way to ensure you are putting out high-quality content is by doing all the necessary keyword research, competitive analysis, and preparation. Publish content that is beneficial and relevant to your readers.
  • Be transparent about your business – State on your website what your business is about and add other necessary information. What does this mean? Maximise your homepage. Take the time to write the About Us page. Add Location Pages if you are operating in other locations. Present necessary White Papers about your business.
  • Do NOT plagiarise content – Google does not penalise for duplicate content. But you will be competing with other pages with the exact same content. Presenting something a reader might have read beforehand is not a way to build credibility. Create your blogs and content. It doesn’t matter if you want to start slow. Put out content that you want readers to benefit from genuinely.

Why Follow These Trends

These trends will keep changing over the years. They will keep changing with more advances in SEO technology, software innovations, and user behaviour. For 2023, the list presents what’s currently rising in SEO.

Survive and rank higher than the competition. Do the small changes to your website. Take these trends to pattern your changes in the website. Build your credibility as a website that offers users only valuable, optimised, and engaging content.

 

Kevin is the CEO, Founder of Aemorph. A seasoned entrepreneur and digital marketing expert. Kevin started in digital marketing, specializing in Search Engine Optimisation since 2010, and is helping Finance, Insurance, E-commerce, Medical, B2B, and SaaS companies. Kevin is also a certified adult educator in Singapore, delivering high-quality, relevant, and easy-to-implement training to ensure learners can get immediate results and build upon their knowledge. He’s currently building Mint Superteams with a mission to train 1 million people and place them into companies.

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