23 SEO Trends in 2023

Marketing has always had trends, and ensuring you know what will help you tackle your brand’s 2023 strategy is important, even in SEO. Here we discuss our top 23 SEO trends for business owners and digital marketing professionals to know in 2023.

(E)EAT

With Google adding an extra E for Experience to their EAT algorithm, there could now be more emphasis on who your content creators are and their experience and knowledge of your content topic. This is more relevant to health and financial sites, but it’s good practice to make sure industry experts are involved when creating blog content, and even better if you’re using author profiles on your site to attribute content to the experts.

Endless Scrolling

While getting to the top positions is still important, Google has started to try out endless scrolling on mobile and desktop. This means we could see less importance on achieving those page one rankings as users will be able to scroll until they find the content they want.

Helpful Content

Google released their Helpful Content Update back in August 2022 with the aim of serving useful content that leaves visitors feeling satisfied. Although there isn’t a metric we can rely on for this, we can infer that this means content written by humans and created for humans, not AI-generated or written just to appear in search engines.

Product/Service Page Content

As the above, Google looking to serve more useful content in search results applies to your product and service pages too. Since these tend to contain smaller amounts of information, think about what else you could offer and what would make these pages more helpful to users. That could include FAQs or product reviews etc.

Less Crawl Frequency

Many businesses are looking at sustainable options, and Google is no exception. One thing we might see this year is a decrease in web page crawling to help them meet their goals. What this means for SEO is that it might take longer for Google to crawl existing pages after making changes, highlighting the importance of having new pages fully optimised from the start.

Competitor Analysis

Checking up on the competition has always been useful in SEO, but now we have other areas to look. With updates around helpful content and experienced writers, looking at what the thought leaders in your industry are doing is a great way to approach your 2023 content strategy.

This might also mean expanding your keyword research to go beyond search volumes and looking at what types of content appear, who the industry experts are and what subtopics and questions they’re covering.

AI Content

This might be in contrast with helpful content, but AI tools are becoming more popular with marketing professionals. We don’t recommend using AI to create all your content, but they can be useful for creating drafts or suggesting a heading structure to help your content writers.

SERP Features

We’ve always loved structured data, and we’re likely to see even more of this in 2023. It’s a good idea to think about structure when creating content by ensuring your FAQs are displayed with clear questions and answers marked up with schema, and that important points can be easily read and extracted for those featured snippets.

SEO Copywriting

Traditionally, it was all about primary and secondary keywords but now we need to focus on context. For example, if you’re writing about bar design trends, you might also mention drink trends and other semantically related topics. Using other related terms as part of your SEO copywriting helps search engines to understand the context of words and topics. You can also do this with your internal linking, since Google will start to understand the words you use around your anchor text.

Video Content

Have you noticed more video results appearing in your searches? While we think it’s a myth that sticking a video on your page will improve SEO results, there’s no denying the demand for this type of content. No matter how optimised your text-based blog is, you’ll struggle to compete if the search intent is for video.

Page Experience

Talking about load speeds has become something of a trend itself, so it’s important to note that this is just one ranking factor, and fast loading isn’t going to make much difference if you’re not covering the basics. However, making sure your site loads fast and offers a good experience for users is going to help you stay ahead of the competition.

Local SEO

We’re seeing a lot more location-based search results, which will help local businesses, but only if you know how to utilise local SEO. A polished Google My Business profile for every physical location will help with location-specific content and accurate NAP (name, address, phone number) info used across your website, social media and directories or other online mentions.

Updating Old Content

Have you thought about what happens when content is no longer relevant? Chances are, it’s going to drop in visibility as soon as your competitor publishes an updated version. That’s bad for SEO because now you have content that nobody is reading, taking up space on your website.

Whenever information changes or gets updated, or even when you publish something new related to the previous topic, it’s a good idea to update your content and your internal links. Maybe we’ll update this blog next year with 24 trends for 2024!

Trending Topics

Now, this doesn’t mean start doing TikTok dances or jumping into every trending conversation on Twitter, but it’s time to get out of the keyword research tools and look at customer behaviour. SEMrush is great, but it’s not going to tell you what questions your customers have right now or what’s going on in your niche.

Another of our favourite tricks for this is to use Google Search Console to see what terms people are actively using to find your site. If these terms aren’t yet used on your page, implementing them into your copy is a good way to increase visibility.

Brand SEO

It might sound odd, but good SEO strategies aren’t just about your website anymore. People like to see consistency across all platforms, which means keeping your branding and company information up to date across social media, Google My Business and directory listings to help build another level of trust.

Complex Queries

The Google Multitask Unified Model (MUM) is a powerful AI for language understanding. It’s possible that this tool will eventually be able to understand specific high information queries and extract the relevant data from multiple sources (text, image, video etc.) to answer the question.

This shows SEO the need to cover a topic thoroughly and answer multiple questions. The aim is to have everything accessible on one page so users don’t have to go back to the search results to get what they need.

XML Sitemaps

We know it’s not the most exciting discussion point but optimising your sitemap is still important, particularly if we see less crawl frequency, as having a cluttered sitemap means search engines might need help finding and indexing your key pages. This means ensuring low-value pages on your site are set to noindex where relevant.

Image SEO

No, we’re not going to talk about alt text, but basic image SEO, such as compressing and optimising images for load speed, still applies. Image search isn’t widely popular for service-led and niche industry businesses but, if you do have a visual product, having the best images out there is going to help you beat the search competition.

Digital Marketing Trends

Speaking of images and video, keeping up with what’s going on with wider digital marketing trends is something else to think about in terms of what content types your audience is interested in. For example, there’s no ignoring the growth of short-form video content, but it’s not right for every industry.

Keep an eye on what the thought leaders in your industry are doing and what types of content they’re publishing to stay ahead with this one.

Google Search Console

Formally Google Webmaster Tools, this tool is nothing new but its use for SEO could grow in 2023. We’re saying goodbye to Universal Analytics this year to welcome GA4, which can provide great reporting tools if used correctly. But for monitoring your SEO efforts, get out of GA and into Search Console.

Getting the Basics Right

Creative PR campaigns are great for building links and improving your online visibility, but they don’t replace the fundamentals of SEO. Getting your keyword targeting right alongside basic technical and on-page SEO is still essential, and that’s unlikely to change.

User Behaviour

This year, it’s less about tracking your keyword positions and more about user behaviour. This doesn’t mean that keywords don’t matter, just that observing what users actually do on your site and ensuring you’re giving them what they want is going to be a big aspect of SEO success.

Other Sites as Search Engines

We don’t mean the likes of search engines like Bing and Yahoo, the way people use the internet has changed over the last few years, which means we may see even more change in 2023. Instead of tapping out a Google search, we might see more people turning to content-based social media like TikTok and Pinterest to find what they’re looking for.