Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to evolve in a constant state of change and as a result, your business needs to adapt to the latest SEO trends. Search engine optimization remains a coveted source of traffic and a winning strategy in digital marketing plans. Search engines use over 200 signals in their search algorithms making the moving target that much harder to hit.
To help your business stay ahead of the curve, here’s a breakdown of the top SEO trends for 2023 that will equip you with a better understanding of the technology, best practices, and takeaways.
1. Artificial Intelligence Drives Google’s Search Engine Algorithm
Google’s search engine has deep learning incorporated into the algorithm to change and refine search rules and query responses as it goes. It uses a combination of AI systems to better understand language, search queries, and potentially relevant results. Specialized AI also helps identify images and product content to provide the best results for shopping and other visual-related searches.
An important takeaway is to focus on writing content for humans. As machine learning and AI-driven algorithms become more complex in understanding human language and search intent, we don’t want to optimize for the AI system, but rather the human audience you intend to reach.
2. New Technology is Driving Visual Search
This trend is gaining traction as technology improves and becomes more integrated with our daily search practices. Taking a picture of a product or object is a common method to search for more information about it.
By optimizing your website for visual search or non-text search, we begin to move beyond keywords and put an emphasis on high-quality images and videos. Publishing optimized video and visual content will be a successful component in your SEO strategy in 2023. Get started by optimizing your video channel description with a user-friendly overview of what your channel is about. Utilize keywords and hashtags in your video description to enhance your channels, showing purpose and intent of your content to the right audience.
3. Mobile-First Indexing Sets the Stage
Creating a mobile-friendly site is not only a standard in the industry, but a requirement in order to rank in the search engines. More than 60% of searches are conducted on mobile devices and for this reason, Google has increased the importance of this ranking factor with a “mobile-first” mindset. This switch will continue to rise as it is estimated that nearly 75% of internet users will access the internet solely via mobile devices by 2025.
SEO best practices for mobile-first indexing strongly recommend an optimized mobile version of your site as the majority of users access search with their mobile device and Google primarily indexes pages with a smartphone agent. Work with a professional web designer to verify your website is adaptable for all screen sizes and your mobile page load time scores well.
4. Featured Snippets Help You Appear In SERPs
Well-written and informative content published in the form of short answers to user-driven questions will appear at the top of search engine results pages. The idea behind this is to provide quick answers to user’s search queries.
One SEO method to get featured in snippets is to add schema markup to your website. The SEO results can be successful towards improving CTR (click-through rate) and organic search traffic. Adding schema markup code to your site will help search engines understand and index your content more accurately.
5. First-Party Data Is The Future
As third-party cookie support is phased out in the name of privacy, a key strategy for maximizing the most out of SEO is to construct your own targeted data hub. SEO in 2023 will be personalized and more focused on the user and audience you intend to reach. Utilizing first-party data to maximize your marketing efforts will provide better insight into how your customers connect with your brand. Start implementing a first-party data strategy for 2023 and let this approach drive all future marketing campaigns. While first-party data is a benefit to the user and their privacy, it ultimately will lead to better campaign results.
Wrapping Up
With an awareness towards building an SEO strategy with quality, helpful content, you can provide continued value for your customers while winning the SEO race. A strong SEO presence will pay dividends into the future. Staying on top of the trends in a mindful way will provide a positive ROI for both your business and your audience.
If staying up-to-date with the latest SEO trends is important to you, partner with us to take the next steps toward implementing a winning SEO strategy in 2023.
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