Every year the SEO industry goes through a rollercoaster ride, and 2022 was no exception. As 2022 is over, and we have already welcomed 2023, it is time to find out the most significant predictions and trends of the new year.
Since Google is one of the prominent search engines that continues to have a significant share of the market, the SEO strategy that marketers need to adapt is constantly changing. So if you’re willing to find great results from your effort, there is a need for you to stay updated about the latest happenings.
The trends you found were working a few years back are no longer a good choice. One of the most notable examples is voice search. As algorithms are constantly changing every day and are getting smarter, voice search has become a new trend that marketers must pay attention to.
While some of the trends that I have listed were working in 2022 and still remain working this year. Being an SEO expert, you must stay aware of all the predictions made by top marketers and trends. As the competition is very high, in order to set standards, it is crucial for you to understand The trends.
Therefore, let us check out some of the biggest SEO trends that will be making a mark in 2023.
Table of Contents
Top SEO Trends and Predictions
Content update
It does not require any introduction that content updating is one of the most crucial aspects of any website. There are several reasons for it. The very first and foremost reason is relevant, and fresh content improves user experience, which is again one of the most critical factors and goals of search engines like Google.
So, when you start updating your website with fresh content, it provides information to the search engine that your website is updated and accurate. Therefore, it helps to improve ranking on SERP.
If you check some of the most popular blogs, you will find that they keep updating blogs constantly with new and relevant information. Some of the biggest blogging sites continued to edit the content after the major announcement of the Google algorithm Update was made by Google.
Regardless of what your content is about, if you take and update it with relevant details, it will have better performance. It can bring tons of new traffic to your website. However, it is just the beginning.
It can be estimated that in the next couple of years, there will be other websites coming up with better content, better data, insight and information that will attract Google’s attention.
So, if you want to stay on top, it is better to create evergreen content. Enrich with values and new details so that it becomes nearly impossible to push down on the ranking. Because Google will eventually pay attention to quality over junk materials.
The dilemma with AI Content
As Google has already mentioned about AI written content and human written content, the dilemma still prevails whether AI contents are a good choice. This is going to be a dynamic and thrilling journey, but it will take a few more years before they provide substantial information.
It can also be estimated that there will be many more amazing advancements in AI content generators in the coming year. There are a few reasons why it is believed that this is going to give a tough time to Google’s algorithm.
The first thing is: We have checked how Google continuously makes efforts to identify AI-generated content. It has already updated several helpful content updates in the year 2022, which clearly mention the type of content search engines are looking forward to.
The impact of the updated changes was felt by websites that were mostly producing AI-generated content. The reality is the Google algorithm still needs to have the perfect or robust mechanism that can classify or identify AI content. However, keep in mind that AI-generated content is not content spinning, as Google can effectively understand content spinning.
The second thing is: Even when Google algorithm gets the ability to find AI-generated content, there are questions about how they can evaluate reliability and quality. No wonder AI algorithms will be able to provide informative and well-written content, but they will lack human perspective and expertise.
In technical terms, Google is using an AI tool that will be able to identify content correctly, which provides better ideas.
Fewer Organic CTR
After the new SERP features provided by the search engine giant, marketers have seen significantly less CTR. As the search engine is focusing on providing direct answers to queries, there has been less growth in organic CTR.
As Google is paying more value to instant answers, users are able to get the information that they require without making much navigation from the search result. Moreover, as Google has constantly been striving to keep users within the ecosystem, it provides users more control to get relevant information.
Apart from this, when users start spending more time on Google, it will be able to leverage their attention and redirect them to using services like shopping, YouTube, maps, and others.
For example, let’s take a search query based on a product with high buying intent. “buy MacBook pro.”
You can start by searching this term on Google, and you will immediately find out the top few results provided to you on the top row by the search engine. Followed by it, you can find the official website of Apple. Below that, you can find a Google map of where you can buy a MacBook.
As you can already find that most of the screen is taken by the features of Google, which makes it impossible for other websites. Apart from Apple getting a good CTR, it can be estimated that top-ranking pages on the SERP will get 43% clicks followed by 37 and 29%.
However, according to the new page dynamics, the click-through rate of the organic pages can become lesser than what is estimated here. The reason is that most traditional pages appear down on the ranking.
Even in a study made by Sparktro Rand Fiskin, it has been witnessed that 64.82% of searches that happened on the search engines did not end up clicking. It can be estimated that in these 3 years, the efforts of Google have increased to keep users in its ecosystem.
Links remain essential in 2023
We all are aware of how Google constantly talks about getting penalized when using unethical ways of building backlinks. Well, the truth is Google has constantly been looking forward to finding better links and building practices like guest posting, link exchange, and blogger outreach. The strategies primarily consist of sharing quality content on other relevant and high-quality websites.
Well, there are definitely some loopholes by which websites mostly incentivize the entire process. Since it is done in a very discreet way, it becomes almost untraceable for the search engine. Well, the SpamBrian algorithm of Google, which got added in 2018 in the core algorithm update, has now become even more efficient.
But we still know that there is huge potential in making link-building strategies like influencer outreach, manual blogger outreach, and genuine guest posts. Some of the biggest SEO agencies have started choosing brand mentions as it is one of the significant ranking factors.
Coming to manual blogger and guest posts, both offer value to users without any money exchange but remain one of the best link-building strategies.
Google might reduce indexing and crawling frequency
By now, we are sure that Google is definitely cutting immensely on the frequency at which it is used to index or crawl websites. In fact, when looking at the crawling status of different websites, it has been witnessed that Google has reduced the crawling rate since the year 2021. This is the primary reason why IndexNow was among the most prominent SEO trends in 2022.
However, Google still needs to adopt this protocol that other search engines already have. This feature will inform search engines regarding content changes. It will further report that a change might have happened on a page so that Google or the search engine can easily crawl and add them to their index. It saves time and resources for the search engine as otherwise they require crawling the overall website to identify and find new content.
As mentioned by John Mueller a few times back, Google might be adopting similar protocols, but it has still not materialized. So the question remains why does the search engine reduce the crawling frequency?
Both the crawling and indexing processes are majorly used by search engines for adding web pages and discovering new information to their database. Crawling generally involves the use of spiders or bots for scanning websites from one page to another. Indexing, on the other hand, consists of organizing and storing information that search engines find while crawling.
The impact of both can be said to be significantly less as it involves the use of digital technology and computer servers. However, it still contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and other problems that come from nonrenewable energy sources. We all know how bitcoin mining resulted in climate damage. As Google is committed to the carbon neutral policy, they are making an effort to reduce carbon footprints by 2030.
No denying that there is a huge reason for the reduction, but over time this search engine will definitely try to find a proper solution and not compromise on indexing and crawling.
EAT
We are all aware that the term EAT is a major factor among marketers. Since 2018, it has been getting a lot of importance in the Google quality writer guidelines. This means that a website needs to follow the three most important factors, which are expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. However, Google has now added another E with the existing ones, which stands for experience.
All of these four factors will help Google to understand how honest, accurate, reliable, and safe the content is when it is about ranking it on the search results. If you have a website in a specific niche offering products or services, the suggestions or content can affect financial stability, health and safety. So your website needs to have a higher weightage on EEAT.
For the websites that are categorized under the YMYL category, Google will consider all of these factors as highly dependable ones. Apart from this, these factors are considered extremely valuable for product reviews, websites, and online stores. The search engine will pay attention to a secure payment system and customer service if you have an online store.
When it comes to product review websites, Google will find out if you are offering in-depth and honest reviews after using the products to help readers to decide further. Google has already talked about the type of content in the helpful content updates made in 2022 so that it becomes easier for websites to create quality and useful content.
Passage Indexing
You definitely have heard about the new announcement made by Google about passage indexing. So, if you were already regretting it, as you pay attention to creating long-form content that might fail, passage indexing might become the game changer.
As per Google, this search engine will start using the feature called natural language processing while indexing web pages and try to understand the meaning of every passage within that page. This also means that if they find any particular section inside the article which is relevant to a search query, they might show it on top of the search results.
Passage indexing is like an internal ranking system that will have a better impact on the results. It is confirmed that all the webpages that have been appropriately structured with content information will largely benefit from this new algorithm update.
Content structuring will remain important
The content structure is going to become an essential aspect of the webpage. Similar to the quality of your content, you now have to pay attention to structuring it properly. It is crucial that you divide content into multiple sections so that every area can be discussed as a subtopic.
This is one of the best ways to make Google understand your content and whether it will be able to satisfy the needs of users. Therefore, I would definitely recommend you to make proper use of heading tags and organize contents with different topics and sub-topics.
The passage indexing update is mostly essential for people who are predominantly into creating long-form content. As they require writing a lot of crucial topics under the sub-headings, when you make proper passages with proper headings, it has the chance of getting indexed. Even when your website might not get indexed on the first page, if your passage has the answer to the search query and the search engine finds it relevant, it might show up in the top few results which will increase the traffic.
Visual search is going to become more prominent
Depending on the generation, it is evident that users will mostly use Instagram for their search requirements. This can bypass Google as well. So there is a need for the search engine to stay updated on the changes. In order to keep up and constantly satiate the latest users, Google might need to pay attention to visual searches.
As younger generations find it very easy to connect to the visuals, it is time for the search engine to pay more attention to it. It provides them a better experience and so the search engine might be using more visuals in their search. So if you have a website and you’re thinking about what can be done, it is time to update your website or content.
You can pay attention to 3 major requirements, which are the following:
- Make sure to use as many images as possible in your content and adequately tag it.
- Start making more video content as the latest generation is more into audiovisuals and visuals.
- You must know that Google is not the only search engine existing on the web.
Most significant algorithm predictions and SEO trends 2023
As the market is constantly changing and so are the needs of users, there is a need for search engines to stay updated to provide a better experience to the users. As the generations are changing, so do their needs. This will continue to make constant changes in the Google search algorithm as well. As Google already made a range of algorithm updates in 2022, some of the most significant predictions and trends that we can analyze will be witnessed in 2023.
To stay on the top list, Google will constantly keep marketers on their toes. So SEO marketers or experts continuously have to pay attention to the trends in order to stay on top. Remember that every big trend that you see today might not work tomorrow. As the dynamics change, so does the algorithm. So in order to stay on top, you have to work smart.
Since it can be really hard for all newcomers to use the SEO trends, it is better that you hire an expert. They can be an excellent choice as they know appropriately and work according to the SEO predictions. If you are looking for one such expert who can overcome the challenges in SEO in 2023, you can choose Digital Habibi. As I have been in the market for more than seven years now, I have witnessed multiple SEO trends and their challenges. I understand how to precisely use them to retain the website’s ranking.
FAQs
Well, it is really hard to get a ranking on top when it is long-form content with more than 2000 words. However, with the latest update in SEO called passage indexing, Google will scrutinize every single passage to find out if any passage is relevant to their search query. In case your content has any of such, the selection will be directly shown on top of the result, which will again bring traffic to your website. However, this requires proper structuring of your website.
All of the SEO predictions and trends that I have mentioned in this list are the latest ones. However, these are only the predictions that we have compiled from the updates made by the search engine. If you want guaranteed information, you have to wait for Google to roll out another update.
In order to overcome the challenges in SEO, there is a need to understand the trends. You have to stay updated about the latest algorithm changes made by the search engine. It will further help you to work accordingly and get better results. As the competition is constantly getting complicated, one of the simplest ways to stay on top is by abiding by the guidelines of search engines.
