s Businesses have taken to digital marketing like fish to water, and that analogy is most suited because it’s impossible to sustain one otherwise. With 5.16 Billion people in total using the internet at the start of 2023, and more coming online each year, digital marketing has a lot to offer. 

All your business needs to get the best brand visibility and ROI from it is to create and implement a robust marketing strategy. Organic marketing in the form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) still reigns supreme for those gains, with an SEO marketing service provider delivering  the most benefits from the process. 

Your business can make good inroads in terms of market penetration and lead generation, not to mention conversion rates, by adapting to the changing SEO trends 2023 is said to bring. They can be found in detail below for your reference, so that you can make them a critical component of your company’s 2023 digital marketing strategy. 

The Top SEO Trends of 2023

The Hubspot State of Marketing Report of 2021 shows that 71% of marketers considered strategic keywords to be the number one strategy for SEO. While keywords are still an essential part of SEO, they have to be supplemented by many other things that Google now considers necessary for ranking by its search algorithm. 

• Adding Experience To The Mix

Google has a simple rule on which it ranks content, called the EAT rule. It stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Content that is high on these factors gets bumped up the rankings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). At the end of 2022 though, Google added another influential factor to this trio: Experience. The resulting new EEAT rule has changed the searching and ranking dynamic of the search engine. 

Now, Google checks to see if the content you’re publishing is written by a person that has experience in that domain. It does this by looking at the name of the author or the company that is publishing it and checking their professional information/industry of operation. So, content written by those with experience on the topic gets ranked higher than content by those from a niche that’s different to the content’s topic. This algorithm update has been added with the notion that it helps maintain the quality of content. Hence, your content creators being in the same field as the topics they are adding should be a priority. 

• Saying No To Automation-Generated Content

AI has made big strides in recent years, with it finding increasing use in content generation. ChatGPT is a prime example of this, being able to generate written content that closely resembles human writing.  But, the technology relies on basically copying content from the web or regenerating it, not producing anything original the way a person does. This is a blow to the authority of an article, which is why Google has sought to hammer down the prevalence of such AI-generated articles. 

Your content will get ranked down if it has been created by an AI. This is especially true if there is no mention of information that attributes the content to an author. So, to avoid this downranking, your content should have the following:

• Author Bios: Communicating to the reader the content creator’s credentials and experience.
• An Author Page: When an author writes multiple pages of content for a website and you need to credit them all. 
• Author’s Social Links: This helps Google recognize the authors and authenticate them via their social media accounts.

• More Pro-Audience and Less Pro-Traffic Content

Companies have realized the need for digital marketing and have undertaken steps to increase their blog portfolio. This is both a good and bad thing, with the latter outcome taking center stage due to the insistence on prioritizing traffic generation for the website. This increase may have signaled Google’s algorithm to consider the site’s content as being more authoritative and ranking it high, but not anymore. 

Google wants to arrest this trend of sites containing filler content for the sake of generating traffic as it doesn’t add value to the audience. Your blogs and web pages should only contain content that is relevant to the field you’re operating in. If you’re unsure of what would and wouldn’t work for your site, then you can use a keyword search tool that can provide you with relevant search terms for your domain. 

There may be some exceptions to this, like eCommerce businesses that sell products of different types. If you want to better educate your audience about those products, then you can use specialized SEO services for eCommerce stores to get your content ranked high. The experts there can provide their experience and expertise to better your chances with Google’s new ranking rules. 

• Higher CTRs With Endless Scrolling

Mobile phones are the world’s preferred way to connect to the internet and Google is well aware of this fact. Hence, it prioritizes content that is better tailored for mobile devices when crawling the web. Another feature that Google has added to its SERPs to facilitate better use of its search on mobile is endless scrolling. This gets rid of individual pages listing a certain number of search results each, instead making the results appear as an endless list that users can scroll down continuously. 

This change is similar to how websites have gone from having individual sections to being continuously scrollable with a single page. This change has affected the click-through rates, with many links that aren’t at the top of the list getting clicks too. A SEMRush study has shown that only 25.8% of search results have garnered no clicks. Hence, you can avoid practices like keyword stuffing just to get your content to rank high, and instead focus on adding value to the reader. 

• Product Page-Oriented SEO

This feature is a gift for eCommerce sellers. Google has sought to push up long form content via its search as those tend to be more authoritative usually. This adversely impacted eCommerce SEO as product page ranking took a hit without the long-form content being present on them. Your product pages needn’t suffer the same fate as you can add more important product-related content on them and Google’s search algorithm will pick it up. 

Helpful things like drop-down menus, customer reviews, FAQs, etc. can boost your ranking chances. Besides the usual set of information and product-based keywords, you should also consider adding content that answers your customer’s probable queries regarding product warranty, upgrades, shipping times and rates, etc. 

The more information the page contains that makes a purchase likely, the more likely that Google will rank the page higher. eCommerce SEO service providers can help you immensely here as they will know exactly what to do to get your product pages featured on search pages and the shopping section. 

• Closer Ties Between Search and AI

Google and other search engines have been working on adding more AI to their search processes to provide more accurate and relevant results, besides performing the background tasks like crawling. A recent example of this is the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) algorithm update.

BERT is special because it enables algorithms to pick up on the subtleties of the language used like context, emotions, etc. It gives Google the ability to look for content value through a more human-like conversational language approach. This is in line with its previous improvements like RankBrain. The more your content conforms to EEAT rules, the more favorable it appears to BERT. 

One way of ensuring this is to have links from authors with authority over the topic in the content piece. If not, you could have an expert write that content for you. Improving your site’s navigability to make it easier for users to find relevant content also helps with BERT compliance. Thus, transparency regarding who is behind the content will get your pages to rank high. 

• More Images and Fewer Crawls

Instagram, Google Lens, and other such applications have pushed search more towards images than plain text in recent years. And 2023 will emphasize this change in search trends even more. Google’s crawlers can better notice your site if it has relevant images accompanying the text, especially with the right alt text and schema markup. Adding image metadata like file name and source also helps. 

This focus on image search will be important because Google has decided to reduce its power consumption and carbon footprint. Reducing the number of crawls is how it is going about it. This change helps Google save on computing resources, thus saving power. It also means that your pages will get crawled less, meaning discovery takes a hit. 

Recrawls will be most affected though, so new changes to your website can take longer to get recognized. Therefore, you should optimize your site from the start. 

Conclusion

Search engines are technologies that are always changing, adding new features to better help users get the content they need. Google’s recent changes will make a big impact on how search fundamentally operates. Your business should get on that bandwagon from the get-go to stay ahead of the competition and gain brand visibility. Professional SEO marketing service providers can help with this task a great deal with their expertise and experience granting your content the authority it needs to rank high, besides performing the typical SEO functions. Your 2023 will look very different with these changes, pushing the boundaries of your operability further than ever before.