As a business owner, you understand how vital it is to maintain an effective online presence. One of the most effective methods to do this is by using the process of search engine optimization (SEO), which involves improving your website’s performance to appear well on search results and to draw more organic visitors.
In the current digital age, SEO is more important than ever. With most customers using search engines to locate items and services, a prominent position on search results webpages can have a big impact on the success of your business.
There are several SEO trends of 2023 that businesses should be aware of.
This article will discuss the importance of consolidating and updating your site’s content, cleaning and optimizing content to improve SEO, building up pages with thin content, more quality links, cleverer methods to advertise your web-based content and your core web vitals. By understanding and implementing these strategies, you will increase the visibility of your website and attract more qualified visitors.
Core Web Vitals
Before following the rest of these SEO trends, take a look at your website.
Google wants to provide its users with the best possible online experience. If your site is slow or outdated, visitors will leave. As people leave your site, your bounce rate could begin to rise.
A high bounce rate will cause your search engine rankings to drop. Consumers might struggle to find your website during a search. Instead, they’ll find your competitors at the top of a search engine results page (SERP).
In order to determine if you’re offering a positive user experience, Google created its Core Web Vitals. The Core Web Vitals are a series of user-centric ranking factors. You can update your site following the Core Web Vitals to ensure a positive user experience.
For example, you can:
- Set fixed dimensions on images
- Limit embedded content and iframes
- Preload custom web fonts
- Use a content delivery service
- Minify CSS and Javascript codes
- Optimise images
- Find better hosting
- Use page caching
- Eliminate unnecessary third-party scripts
- Delete unwanted codes
- Enable browser caching
As you update your website, make sure it’s fast, secure, and mobile-friendly.
Google uses mobile-first indexing to determine search engine optimisation rankings. If your website isn’t mobile-optimised, your ranking will drop.
Improving the user experience on your site can boost your click-through rate and dwell times. As these metrics rise, your rankings could, too. Then, you’ll reach more people online through organic SEO.
Schema Implementation
Schema is a type of microdata that helps search engines understand the content of a webpage and provide additional context in search results. By implementing schema on your website, you can help search engines understand the meaning and context of your content, which can improve its visibility and relevance in search results.
Schema implementation is expected to be a trend for 2023 for several reasons:
- As search engines become more sophisticated, they are able to understand and interpret more complex forms of microdata, such as schema. This means that the use of schema can help your website’s content stand out in search results and provide additional context to users.
- With the increasing use of voice assistants and other types of artificial intelligence, schema can help to provide more context and meaning to your content, making it easier for these technologies to understand and interpret your website’s content.
- By implementing schema, you can also take advantage of enhanced search results features (such as rich snippets or knowledge panels) that can help your website’s content stand out in search results and attract more clicks.
Here are some tips for improving your website’s schema implementation:
- Identify the types of content on your website that would benefit from schema implementation. This might include product pages, event pages, recipe pages, or articles.
- Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to create and test your schema markup. This tool allows you to highlight the relevant content on your webpage and apply the appropriate schema markup.
- Use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to test your schema markup and ensure that it is valid and correct.
- Use descriptive, keyword-rich schema property values to provide additional context to search engines. For example, if you are marking up a recipe page, you might use the “name” property to specify the recipe’s title, and the “author” property to specify the recipe’s creator.
- Use schema types and properties that are relevant to your content and supported by Google. You can find a list of supported schema types and properties in Google’s Structured Data documentation.
EEAT
EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Consumers want to find brands they can trust. If they can trust your experience and expertise, they might decide to shop from your business.
You can demonstrate EAT within your content by:
- Developing your personal brand
- Generating high-quality backlinks
- Telling your brand story
- Adding author names and bios to your posts
- Updating your content to show you have first hand experience in the subject matter
Consider partnering with credible influencers in your niche industry as well. You can leverage their existing credibility to generate brand trust.
Otherwise, try sharing your content on other trusted platforms.
Use your content to demonstrate your experience and expertise. Consumers will have an easier time trusting you as a go-to resource. You could even become a thought leader within your industry.
Consolidation and updating of website content
One of the most crucial actions you can take to boost the SEO of your website is to review and regularly modify your website’s content. This will ensure that your website remains relevant, accurate and beneficial to the people who visit it, improving the experience for users and boosting the chance of your website getting a high ranking within search engine results.
Why is it important to keep website content accurate and relevant?
- Accurate content helps to establish your credibility and build trust with your audience. If users come across inaccurate or outdated information on your website, they may lose confidence in your business and look elsewhere for the information they need.
- Relevant content is more likely to attract and keep users on the site, improving your website’s bounce rate and increasing the chance of them completing a desired action (such as purchasing or filling out an application).
- Up-to-date content can also improve your site’s position on search engine results. Google, along with other major search engines, prefers websites with fresh, top-quality information and could penalize websites with poor-quality or outdated information.
Google Helpful Content Updates: Google has been adding more and more helpful content updates to reduce the ranking of websites with thin, irrelevant and AI generated content. Keeping a website up-to-date helps keep your website accurate and relevant while future proofing your website. This is a critical SEO trend for 2023.
Tips for revising and updating the content of websites:
- Use analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) to track the performance of your website’s pages and identify which pages may need to be updated.
- Check for broken links and fix them. Broken links can cause users frustration and adversely affect your site’s rank in search results.
- Check your site’s information to ensure it is current and accurate. If you notice any information that is no longer relevant or accurate, consider making changes or removing it.
- Try regularly adding new content to your website to ensure it is always fresh and up-to-date. This could be blog posts, videos, articles, and other forms of media.
- Make sure to optimize your newly updated content to be SEO-friendly. This could include adding pertinent keywords, formatting your text to make it easier to read, and adding external and internal hyperlinks.
Cleaning up and re-optimizing content for SEO
Alongside regular updates to your website’s content, it’s crucial to eliminate any low-quality or obsolete content that could affect search engine optimization efforts. This could include duplicate content, weak content, or even content irrelevant to the people who visit your site.
Benefits of removing low-quality or outdated content:
- Removing low-quality or outdated content can improve the overall quality of your website and make it more attractive to search engines.
- It can also enhance the user experience by reducing the unimportant or confusing data users need to sort through.
- If you remove low-quality or thin content, you can create space for more detailed and relevant content that will draw and keep viewers.
Strategies for optimizing content
- Incorporating relevant keywords into your website can increase search engine rankings and increase its appeal to potential customers.
- How you format your text to make it easier for readers (such as using bullet points, headings or short paragraphs) will also help readers understand and scan your text.
- Adding internal and external links to your content can improve its credibility and provide additional value to users. Internal links can help users navigate your website and discover more of your content, while external links can provide additional information and resources on a particular topic.
- Consider using multimedia (such as videos, images or infographics) to enhance your content and visual appeal.
- Review and regularly update your content to ensure it is accurate and current. This includes reviewing broken links and adding details or insight as needed.
Building up pages with thin content
If you have pages on your website with thin or low-quality content, it’s important to take steps to improve them. Not only can thin content negatively impact the user experience, but it can also hurt your website’s SEO. Google and other search engines favour websites with high-quality, informative content and may penalize websites with thin or low-quality pages.
Importance of having high-quality, informative content on all pages:
- Quality, well-written content will likely entice and keep visitors on your site. This will improve your website’s bounce rate and boost the probability of users making a decision (such as purchasing or filling out the form).
- It could also help establish your credibility and increase trust with your customers. If your visitors come across sloppy or poor-quality information on your site, it could cause them to lose confidence in your company and go elsewhere to get the required information.
- High-quality content on every page of your site can boost your site’s position in the results of searches.
Ideas to add more content to thin pages:
- Consider adding additional text to thin pages to provide more details and benefits to your users. It could include information about your services or products, industry information, and some tips and suggestions for your business.
- Use multimedia (such as videos, images or infographics) to enhance your content and make it visually attractive.
- Consider including testimonials or customer reviews on your web pages. They can increase your credibility and help build confidence with potential customers.
- Consider adding external and internal links to your website to provide more information and resources to users.
- Make sure to optimize your content to be SEO-friendly. This may include including pertinent keywords, formatting the text to ensure readability, and including external and internal hyperlinks.
Focus on Good Page Structure and Taxonomy
SEO taxonomy refers to the practice of organizing and categorizing website content in a way that is optimized for search engines. This can involve grouping related content together, using clear and descriptive headings and subheadings, and proper formatting and structure to make it easier for search engines to understand and index the content.
SEO taxonomy is considered a trend for 2023 because as search engines become more sophisticated, they can better understand and interpret the structure and organization of a website’s content. This means that how a website’s content is organized and categorized can significantly impact its ranking in search results.
By adopting best practices for SEO taxonomy, businesses can improve the visibility of their website’s content in search results and make it easier for users to find and navigate their website. This leads to more qualified traffic and a better user experience.
Here are some tips for building out a good SEO taxonomy:
- Start by understanding your audience and their needs. Identify the key topics and sub-topics that are relevant to your business and will be of interest to your audience.
- Group related content together and use clear, descriptive headings and subheadings to help search engines understand the structure and organization of your content.
- Use proper formatting and structure, such as using HTML tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3) to indicate headings and bullet points to break up long blocks of text.
- Use descriptive, keyword-rich URLs for your pages and use breadcrumb navigation to make it easier for users to understand the hierarchy of your content.
- Consider using a sitemap to help search engines discover and understand the structure and organization of your content.
- Regularly review and update your taxonomy to ensure that it remains accurate and relevant. This can include adding new pages, reorganizing content, and removing outdated or low-quality pages.
By following these tips, you can build out a good SEO taxonomy that will help improve the visibility and usability of your website’s content in search results.
High-quality links
Inbound links originating from high-quality websites can be a great advantage for your site’s SEO. These links serve as an affirmation of trust from other websites and they can improve the credibility and visibility of your website to search engines.
However, it’s crucial to concentrate on creating quality, natural links rather than using link spamming techniques. Google as well as other engines have become more advanced in identifying and penalizing websites using poor-quality or spammy hyperlinks to manipulate their rank on search engine results. In fact, Google has updated their “Link Spam” algorithm multiple times in 2022 and we expect them to do the same through 2023.
Here are some suggestions to create links that are natural and high-quality:
- Create useful, informative content that can be linked to and shared by other websites.
- Consider guest blogging or writing content for websites within your niche. This will help increase your knowledge and establish relationships with industry professionals.
- Contact other websites and request that they link to your site when you have relevant and useful content that is appealing to their target audience.
- Make sure the websites you place a link on has real traffic and is ranking for keywords within your niche.
- Join the online community and forum related to your business and offer valuable insights and advice to other users. This can increase your reputation and cause other users to link to your site.
- Make use of social media to advertise your content and to encourage people to share and share it.
By building natural, high-quality links on sites within your niche, you can help improve your website’s visibility and credibility in search engines and users’ eyes.
Promoting web-based content
When you’ve developed high-quality web content, The next step is to put it out in front of the most people you can. There are numerous ways to advertise your web content and increase its exposure on the internet. The most effective strategies are:
- Marketing via social media: Post your content via various social platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) to connect with a wider public. Tag your content with hashtags to allow users to find your content.
- Email marketing: If your company has a user email list, think about sending promotional emails or newsletters that feature the latest information.
- Guest blogging: Consider creating articles for other websites in your field. This will help develop your expertise, establish connections with other professionals in the industry and bring important inbound links to your site.
- Content Marketing: Make value-added and informative content (such as videos, infographics or ebooks) which can be shared and promoted on the internet.
Tips to effectively promote web content:
- Make sure you use eye-catching headlines and engaging descriptions to draw readers’ attention.
- Make your content more appealing for sharing on social media by using captivating pictures and appealing titles.
- To reach a larger public, you can run paid ads (such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads).
- Engage with people who comment or share your content. This will help build connections and encourage sharing.
- Examine the performance of your website using analytical instruments (such as Google Analytics) to identify the things that work and what don’t and adapt your approach accordingly.
If you promote your website content in a way that is effective, you can boost its visibility and bring more targeted traffic to your site.
Final Thoughts
To Conclude, there are a few important trends in SEO for 2023 that companies should be aware of. This includes consolidating and updating website content, cleaning and optimizing content for SEO and building websites with thin content, more quality links, and cleverer methods to market web-based content. By understanding and implementing these strategies, companies can increase their site’s visibility and bring more qualified traffic to their site.
We hope this article has provided valuable insights and tips for improving your website’s SEO. If you’re looking for additional help with your SEO efforts, consider reaching out to Snap SEO. Our team of experts can work with you to develop a customized SEO strategy that meets the needs of your business. Don’t wait; call us today and take the first step towards improving your website’s SEO and driving more traffic and revenue to your business.
