From an experienced marketer’s perspective, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics are practically unrecognizable from what they were when the concept first emerged in 1997.
There have been extensive changes made to the Google search algorithms over the last decade alone that have forced marketing teams to completely revamp websites and marketing strategies around new goals and targets. These algorithm updates can be so disruptive that 58% of marketing experts surveyed in a recent UpCity study reported their business was negatively impacted by a past update.
Turning the corner from the challenges of the post-COVID economy in 2022, marketing experts find that 2023 is already rife with challenges relative to anticipated Google algorithm updates and other SEO trends we are watching emerge in real time. In this article, we gathered quotes from the UpCity experts community in order to better explore the trends that are emerging in 2023.
Which SEO strategies will be more important in 2023?
Across the digital marketing community, experts have already started to lean into the strategies that helped them successfully navigate the last two years of the pandemic intact. The range of SEO strategies gaining traction and expected to become invaluable in 2023 are intertwined and largely a response to shifting consumer behaviors in the wake of the pandemic.
Technical SEO should set the tone for the user experience
If we learned anything about the post-pandemic consumer, it’s that they expect authentic, high quality experiences with the brands they are most engaged with.
Before seeding your site with content, however, experts are advising business owners and marketers to focus on SEO best practices when building, updating, and maintaining websites, and to use automation tools to audit sites in order to find opportunities to improve Google and other search engines’ ability to quickly crawl and index the site, and to ensure fast load times and easy-to-navigate site structures.
Use a mix of technical and on-page SEO to leverage search intent and deliver zero click search results
Search engine algorithms are reaching the point that they are able to discern a user’s search intent much more effectively than in the past. Paired with an effective keyword strategy, brands in 2023 will find success if they match their SEO efforts to the evolving ways in which Google and other search engines are serving up results.
A recent addition to Google’s SERP structure are zero click search results. The user performs a search and if it’s a query for information, the SERP can deliver the answer to that query at the top of the page in full, which doesn’t require the user to then follow a link back to your website.
Optimizing your website to deliver zero-click search results requires your team to optimize meta tags and schema markup strategies to ensure the search engines can find the data you’re trying to highlight for that topic.
Content marketing
With consumer online content consumption approaching an average of 500 minutes per day in 2023, search behavior and online activity has shifted dramatically towards content consumption and a focus on brand trust and credibility. This consumer behavior shift has placed content marketing at the center of many small business’ marketing strategies.
Evolving formats dominated by video content
The growing demand for content across multiple industries means brands will diversify their content channels through the use of different formats, such as visual infographics, educational content, testimonials and influencer marketing.
Video is anticipated to dominate the marketing landscape, with experts anticipating online video to account for 82.5% of all web traffic. Additional data reveals that this trend has been building since 2016, with a 25% increase in the number of firms that use video for marketing due to the extremely favorable ROI the medium delivers.
AI and machine learning tools have forced Google’s hand in recent updates
The evolving demand for marketing content across industries has businesses increasing their reliance on automation tools, and those tools are becoming amazingly complex and capable of handling a diverse array of time-consuming and labor intensive tasks.
While automation tools have alleviated the workload for small marketing teams, they’ve also introduced complications that have placed the output from these tools directly in the spotlight of search engines and technology companies.
Particularly, content marketing has become a complicated landscape over the last few months because artificial intelligence (AI) tools driven by machine learning have emerged onto the scene for art, video, and written content especially.
With popular machine learning engines going viral for their creative artistic output and ability to splice together cohesive visual and video narratives, content marketing tools are especially becoming the focus, as their capabilities have the potential to greatly disrupt content and SEO on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the algorithms were shifted in 2012 to prevent black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing and misleading backlink tactics.
How ChatGPT is disrupting SEO
One of the best examples is the OpenAI project, ChatGPT, which has dominated the content marketing discourse across multiple industries since it was released to the public.
ChatGPT is a language model trained on a diverse dataset of publicly available text, sourced from the internet, books, articles, and other sources considered to be neither private nor proprietary. It’s capable of rapidly generating large amounts of content that approximates natural language, and many marketing professionals are both leary of and intrigued by what the tool can achieve if properly leveraged.
Google’s response to AI content? EAT is now EEAT
The term EAT (which stands for expertise, authority, and trust) is built into Google’s search engine algorithms to determine the quality of your website and how much weight your brand carries in search engine results pages (SERPs) relative to your competition.
Largely determined by the content on the page, EAT is especially important for businesses considered to provide information that could impact a reader’s finances, health and well-being, or safety. These brand’s websites, also referred to as “Your money or your life” (YMYL) sites, rely on your brand’s ability to establish your expertise and authority, which over time allows the business to build their trustworthiness with readers.
What’s concerning to marketing experts and to Google is that the machine learning tools of AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT have been trained well enough to mimic the types of content that instill that trust. In order to prevent a flood of artificially generated content that will skew search results and heavily impact YMYL content with potentially false, misleading, or unvetted advice, Google announced in December of 2022 that its search algorithm will now take into account the experience of the content’s creator and how that comes through in the content.
Focusing on human experience and quality over quantity
In adding this additional “E” to the equation, Google has tempered some of fervor around these automation tools. It is now crucial, regardless if an agency decides to leverage AI-powered content generators or continue to solely rely on expert writers, for marketing agencies to involve subject matter experts in the process.
Those experts should be involved in vetting information, fact checking, and creating content that reflects sufficient experience in the topic to, in turn, convey sufficient levels of expertise for Google’s new requirements.
What tactics are the experts prioritizing in 2023?
In gathering insight from the UpCity community of experts for this discussion, we found that AI-powered content generation tools are a serious concern for many. What we found most interesting, though, is that many experts are advising others to be extremely cautious not to exclude the human element from the automation equation, but to instead continue to lean into well-written high quality content created by experts. Oversight of how the tools are used and the content they create seemed to be the primary focus.
“Creating relevant high quality content will be even more important as the market is cluttered with lots of average content. Also, AI tools like ChatGPT will create lots of content so we need better content than what AI will generate easily.” —Josiah Bussing, CEO, Mountaintop Web Design
“Focus on relevance! The more relevant a page’s content is to search queries, the better it will rank, all other things being equal. The same goes for backlinks. The strongest ones will be from highly relevant websites. Backlinks from irrelevant sites or pages are just not going to cut it. Differentiating your content from the rest with unique data, insights, and information, using semantically related keywords/entities, and discovering and employing useful applications of AI to assist with SEO tasks and content creation will all be more important strategies in 2023.” —Jason O’Connor, SEO Manager, OpenMoves
“All of the ‘best’ strategies currently in use, such as content marketing and backlink strategies, will still play a role, but the frequency and the ways in which they are being used will have to be adjusted. We can expect more frequent and more radical Google updates in the coming year, which is why flexibility and implementing a holistic approach in SEO will be required. In other words, relying on a single SEO strategy or just a few will not be enough. Since organic CTR will continue to go down due to an increase in non-clickable results in the SERPs, tactics related to CTR optimization will become invaluable in 2023.” —Tomo Rakocevic, SEO Lead, Scopic
“Content relevancy, not just more content, will be the biggest task companies need to tackle this year. Quality content that helps the visitors is going to move the needle the most this year.” —Kevin Heimlich, CEO, The Ad Firm
Which SEO strategies will be less important in 2023?
Search engine optimization strategies are an intertwined bundle of approaches across multiple departments, so when we talk about the trends above that will take hold and become more important, there will necessarily be related tactics that we anticipate to see much less of in the coming year.
Deprecating Third-Party Cookies
To say that Google shook things up in 2022 is an understatement. In addition to the late-year shift to EEAT for page authority ranking, Google announced in July of 2022 that they plan to fully discontinue the use of third-party advertising-focused tracking cookies in Chrome by the end of 2024.
Originally announced to have been required by the end of 2023, this means that brands have time over the next year to restructure SEO in other ways around maximizing their SERP results.
Time to stop keyword stuffing and creating single keyword landing pages, and instead focus on long-tail keywords
In the past, the algorithm was such that it was necessary to create identical landing pages for each of the targeted keywords in your campaign. This can be a time-consuming and expensive approach to SEO, and it’s one that marketing experts can officially abandon. As with content, “quality over quantity” should be your approach to keywords in 2023.
Additionally, we’ve seen a growing reliance on voice search, as 50% of users in a recent UpCity survey say that they are using it, so business owners should be aligning with this shift and tailoring their SEO around long-tail keywords and conversational search strategies to be best positioned to take advantage of this consumer behavior in the coming year.
No more creating content for the sake of having content
In the past, the Google algorithms would reward and boost active pages, so companies would be constantly releasing updates and content, and that content would often be short and repetitive.
As we move into 2023 and that is no longer the case, it’s crucial that your content marketing strategy remain focused and intentional, but that content should be written in such a way that it will receive natural, organic traffic through search engines, and that is focused on educating or informing readers. If it doesn’t have relevance to your brand’s services or products, it’s not likely to support your SEO strategy.
What SEO strategies are experts being cautious around in 2023?
Our expert community was more cautious in weighing in on which strategies they think will not be as effective in 2023. While they largely agreed that it was necessary to take a more diverse approach to SEO, they also felt that authentic content marketing would be the core strategy to drive traffic and success.
“Content creation is going to be interesting with the ability to generate content with AI. I believe more companies will jump on the bandwagon and utilize AI in their branding, marketing, and content creation.” —Arif Gangji, Managing Partner, Neon Rain
“Companies have started to rely on AI for many efforts and SEO is no different. But while many companies have been looking to AI, not all companies will use this technology. SEO made with AI tends to be less unique and less personable. During a time when brands need to be authentic to stand out, I think we will still see a lot of companies still using real people to write and create content for SEO on their sites. Not all brands are ready to fully commit to machines making their content.” —Robin Dimond, CEO and Founder, Fifth & Cor
“It’s no secret that search engine optimization strategies are changing. Automated link building is on its way out and content-focused techniques have become more important than ever. Focusing specifically on well planned phrases has proved to be incredibly effective when optimizing web pages for SEO, making them both user friendly and Google friendly! The importance of developing a solid content strategy will only increase so now’s the time to get ahead of trends before they take off.” —Ernie Crews, Founder, CloudEden
What is your top SEO prediction for 2023?
Search engine optimization tactics are driven by online consumer behaviors and Google’s algorithmic response to those behaviors, as the search engine-focused technology company strives to provide online searchers with the most relevant data paired with a high quality user experience.
Google’s efforts to appease online users more often than not can turn the marketing industry on its head as digital marketing experts and business owners attempt to keep up with the ever-evolving changes in SEO. We have the benefit of having learned a significant amount about consumer behaviors in the new economy since 2020, and businesses are already poised to take advantage of some of the same tactics that helped them survive the types of economic uncertainties we anticipate in the coming months.
When asking our community to weigh in on what they think will happen with SEO in the coming year, many were understandably focused on the discourse around Google’s evolution of EEAT in response to ChatGPT, but they also weighed in on a number of other strategies such as link building, the balance between SEO and paid search, big data analytics, and keyword optimization.
“With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, Google will aggressively combat mass-generated AI content. They’ve already started this by announcing EEAT. This means that having content pieces written by experts or hiring experts to review and edit content will be a very important and successful SEO strategy in 2023. Another important strategy will be building authoritative and contextual backlinks to again show Google and other crawlers that content on your website is trustworthy and useful.” —Tyler Thompson, Co-Founder, Bend Marketing
“In 2022, we saw many marketing budgets squeezed due to the tough economic climate. This will likely continue into 2023, resulting in marketers investing more in organic search marketing because of its ability to deliver targeted customers to their websites long after the initial investment.” —Paul Bies, Partner, Mystique Brand Communications Inc.
“We anticipate we will see several shifts in 2023 in line with how Google algorithms are shifting to match consumer behaviors. We expect to see an uptick in the importance of visual search. With it becoming difficult to keep up with the other forms of SEO, more companies are apt to prioritize technical SEO. Big data will become increasingly important, and during difficult economic times, SEO tactics will likely become more prominently used as companies look for ways to cut costs and increase efficiency in their marketing efforts.” —Devvkanth Musunuru, Marketing Data Analyst, New Path Digital
“Ranking highly in search engine results for the products and services a company offers should be considered a mission-critical business priority for any company looking to grow in 2023. To outperform competitors for search engine results, marketers need to be prepared to invest capital, time and effort to see significant results. The SEO strategy will require discipline in focusing on the keywords that generate results and double down on those keywords with a content process optimization approach.” —Dan Mahoney, Chief Marketing Officer, Communications Strategy Group (CSG)
Take A Diverse Approach To Your SEO In 2023
Trends will come and go in marketing, especially when it comes to search engine optimization tactics that are driven heavily by updates to the Google algorithm and consumer search behaviors. Marketing experts and business owners across the board find SEO to be a challenging undertaking, so your team isn’t alone if they feel like they could use some backup in crafting and executing your SEO marketing initiatives in 2023.
If your team needs guidance or more expertise in any of the topics we’ve explored in this discussion, refer to our list of the top SEO companies. Check out our other SEO resources as well to ensure your brand’s strategies are aligned with the trends that will generate success for businesses like your own in 2023.