What Your 2023 SEO Strategy Must Include

Competition is fierce for those coveted top spots on Google with all of your competitors going after the same keywords. Those who are ranking highly want to maintain their positions, while up-and-coming companies are hoping to implement just the right strategy to knock you off the throne. In this game, you either win or you lose and tomorrow is always a fresh slate.

Because the SEO landscape is always changing, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve. This way, you can have a clear understanding of what needs to be done to maintain your ranking or adjust course if your rankings drop. In this article, we’ll go over some statistics about SEO that are key for you to know as well as take a look at some upcoming trends in the field.

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UX (User Experience) is Still Critical

With the vast number of companies available online, you must make sure your website offers an optimal user experience. This means quick page loading times, easy navigation and design, and highly relevant content. Always keep your target customer in mind when coding and designing your website. And remember mobile-first indexing is still the law of the land, so don’t think because it’s no longer a hot topic, it isn’t crucial to your SEO and web design tactics.

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Content Has Yet to be Dethroned

(See how we avoided the cliche of “content is King” … oh but it is, lol) With the rollout of BERT, search engines can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and user intent to deliver results. This means that your content needs to be more relevant and clear than ever before. Make sure you have proper keywords to target and make sure the content on that page is clear and highly informative if you want to be competitive on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

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Gain an Awesome Featured Snippet

Because featured snippets are located at the top of organic listings, they have the potential to generate a large number of clicks. Consequently, getting your content featured has become the holy grail of positions in the SERPs. Optimizing content for featured snippets could be an article in and of itself because they can play such a crucial role in your 2023 SEO strategy. Featured snippets provide you with a chance to showcase your brand name to customers before they even have an opportunity to see your competitors’ names.

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Don’t Under Estimate the Power of Video

You’ve probably heard by now that YouTube is the second most powerful search engine after Google. You can optimize your YouTube Videos nearly the same as you do for traditional SEO. The biggest difference is how people search on YouTube versus traditional search engines and targeting keywords on YouTube with the consumer’s intent in mind, will become critical to your strategy.

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Don’t Skip an SSL Certificate

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a secure link between a web server and browser. In other words, it protects both your website from attacks and visitors to your site from anyone trying to collect their personal information. We’re nearly 8 years into Google’s algorithm prioritizing websites with SSL’s so if you don’t have one yet, now is the time.

As for how it looks on the SERPs, your website needs an SSL certificate to be displayed as secure by Google and its browser, Chrome. Secure websites have HTTPS in their URL, while non-secure sites only have HTTP. In case you’re wondering, HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Security.

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Optimizing Your SEO for Voice Search

The way we use the internet is rapidly changing due to voice search technology, and SEO strategists must take advantage of this new trend by identifying emerging trends in voice search statistics. Google first introduced voice recognition software back in 2011, but at that time, few people used it because the speech recognition accuracy wasn’t very good. However, that’s changed now and voice search is one of the most important aspects of search marketing. 40% of the United States Population is reported to use voice search features, so it’s no longer an option to leave these out of your marketing planning.

If you want to optimize for voice search, target keywords that are in question form. These will be more long-tail and specific than other types of keywords. For example: “What Orthodontists offices are near me?” Another tip is to think of questions a customer might have about your business type and create blog posts answering these queries. Getting featured on the “People Also Ask” block in the results pages will also be a traffic game-changer.

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Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Devices

With more and more people relying on their phones to search the web, along with mobile-first indexing, there’s no choice but to prioritize optimizing for your mobile site. You can check how mobile-friendly your site is by googling “Google Mobile-Friendly Tool” and putting in your URL.

If you want your website to look great and function properly on mobile devices, it needs to be responsive. That means the coding automatically adjusts based on what kind of device is being used to view the site. Caching, compressing images, and using a content delivery network (CDN) can help you speed up your webpage loading times. Another option is to use Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) method to create mobile-friendly versions of your web pages.

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Google Business Profile and Local SEO

Focusing on ranking highly for relevant keywords near you has always been important and will continue to be so in 2023. This is especially critical if your business relies heavily on servicing customers from a specific location. One of the first things to check for is structured data and that it’s been properly implemented throughout the website. There are two things you can do to bring more local foot traffic through your door: keep an updated Google Business Profile (previously Google My Business) listing and use locality-specific keywords throughout your website content.

Seasoned SEO’s know that leveraging your GBP is a critical way to get eyes on your Google Maps listing and feet in the door. So for brands seeking local exposure, ensuring that your GBP is fully optimized and adding regular relevant posts can make or break your local SEO success.

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Artificial Intelligence & SEO

Over the years, Google’s algorithm has become more sophisticated due to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI. A great example of this is their BERT algorithm update. If you’re not familiar with computer science terminology, the acronym BERT stands for a series of words that would probably make your head hurt if you tried to understand them. Basically, what this means is that Google can now understand language better than humans can. This update, along with earlier ones such as RankBrain, helps explain why old-school techniques like keyword stuffing no longer work and will actually lower your search ranking if you try them.

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E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)

If your business provides advice or sells products that could affect a person’s well-being in any way, SEO E-E-A-T is important. Google differentiates between goods and information that are YMYL, or “your money or your life.”

Showcasing content created by an expert in their domain establishes your credential as an expert, too. In some cases, this can also be done with people who have first-hand knowledge of the subject matter. You become a thought leader in your industry when you make your website a reliable source of information for many people. If you want to be seen as more trustworthy and authoritative by Google, get other experts in your field to recommend or link to your website. Also, make sure that it’s clear who creates your website’s content, and include plenty of contact information so that people can reach out to you easily.

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10 Must-Know SEO Statistics

1. Since the majority of searches occur on Google, it’s no surprise that most online marketers focus their efforts on ranking highly on this search engine. In fact, about 75 percent of all desktop searches and 96 percent of mobile searches take place on Google. By comparison, Bing – the second most popular search engine – only accounts for 10 percent of all searches.
2. The large majority of users disregard sponsored search results, so if you’re soley relying on pay-per-click ad campaigns to grow your business, that’s not the ideal long term strategy. This statistic demonstrates how crucial it is to center your online outreach efforts around SEO for long-term gain.
3. Almost all online experiences (approximately 93 percent) begin with a search. So, if you were doubtful about how important it is to rank highly among searches… that should no longer be the case!
4. Did you know that Google adjusts its search algorithm approximately 500 to 600 times in one year? Although the majority of these are tiny updates, they have the potential to gradually change your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, if you want to maintain a good position on SERPs, it’s going to take some effort and time.
5. For anyone wishing to be successful, optimizing their website and SEO efforts for mobile devices has been non-negotiable for some time now. As of 2018, 52.2% of worldwide traffic came from mobile phones.
6. Google’s ranking algorithm determining website rankings looks at over 200 different factors. If you’re only optimizing your website for a handful of those factors, you could be getting much better results.
7. The Power of Video- In 2017, Forbes reported that video content is 1,200 percent more likely to be shared than text and links combined. Today, this number is most likely even higher.
8. PPC advertising cannot serve as a replacement for SEO because approximately 70-80% of users disregard sponsored search results. Cost is another issue to consider; on average, businesses spend $1.60 on Adwords for every $3.00 in revenue, according to PowerTraffic agency..
9. The Increasing Power of YouTube and Video Content – According to YouTube, the number of businesses advertising on their platform has more than doubled since 2016. Once seen as simply a site for cute cat videos, YouTube has been the second-largest search engine on the planet for some time now.
10. More than half of all clicks go to the top three results on search engine pages. This demonstrates how crucial excellent SEO is for your website; if you’re not in one of those spots, you’re missing out on a lot of potential business.