Welcome to the 2020s, where your content is the most prominent feature of marketing your business online. When you optimize your digital content with good SEO practices, you’re not just optimizing for search engines—you’re optimizing for people. You want to make sure your content is as relevant as possible for what people are searching for so that when they click on your page, they get exactly what they need from it. More and more businesses are turning to digital content as a way to attract new customers and keep existing ones. But there are many different ways to approach this process, so it’s important to know what you’re getting into. The trends are constantly changing so let’s get into some of the details and predictions for SEO in 2023.
Creating a better user experience
User experience (UX) will become more important than ever before. In fact, UX is likely to overtake some technical optimization features as the most significant ranking factor in the next few years. That’s because users can easily tell when a website has been designed poorly—and they’ll leave if they don’t like what they see. If your website isn’t easy for users to navigate, then you’re probably going to lose important ranking metrics.
Optimize voice search
Optimizing for voice search will also become increasingly important as time goes on. Voice search has been around for a while now, but it’s only recently become popular enough that people actually use it on a regular basis—and with that popularity comes increased pressure from Google. Marketers want their content found through voice search to be optimized (VSO). After all, many users now navigate the web using Alexa, Google’s Assistant or Siri.
Focusing on local searches
Ever since the pandemic hit the world, there has been a massive increase in the number of local and “near me” web search queries. This is because people were more interested in ordering things for home delivery, no matter what the business was specializing in. Not only that, people wanted to find out when and where businesses were still open due to local working hour restrictions. This trend is going to continue in 2023 as well, since Google has placed an emphasis on ranking via Google Business profile and local SEO. A good part of improving your local SEO revolves around implementing effective location specific keywords. This makes it essential to check local rankings for your business in order to achieve full success with you SEO strategy.
Taking a mobile-first approach
The term “mobile first” refers to the practice of building a website from the ground up with mobile devices in mind, before adding desktop functionality. This approach has become increasingly popular among web developers who have noticed that people are using their phones more and more often, instead of PCs. Why should you care about mobile first? If you’re not designing your site for mobile devices, you’re missing out on a huge part of your audience—and those who do visit will likely be disappointed by the experience. Moreover, it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore the fact that Google has made it clear that they want to rank sites that are optimized for mobile devices over those that aren’t. So, if you want to get ahead in search rankings, you need to make sure your site works well on a variety of different screen sizes!
Monitor your analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for SEO. It allows you to track the performance of your website, and it can help you identify areas where you could improve your SEO strategy. Google Analytics is free, and it’s available in both desktop and mobile versions. The Audience section gives you an overview of how many people visit your site, where they come from, what pages they’re viewing and how long they spend on those pages. This can give you valuable information about your audience’s demographics and how they interact with content on your site. The Audience section also lets you see which keywords people search for to find your site, which helps provide insight into what keywords might be worth targeting in future marketing campaigns. In the Acquisition section, Google Analytics tracks how visitors found your site—whether it was through social media links or search engines such as Google or Bing—and whether those visitors converted into leads (i.e., signed up for an email list).
As we’ve seen, the SEO market is constantly changing. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a novice, you need to keep up with these trends in order to stay on top of your game. To do that, focus on: improving UX, optimizing voice search, focusing on local SEO, mobile users and analytics.
