SEO & SEM

The Most Important SEO Trends for 2023

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By Laia Cardona, on 25 January 2023

If we talk about digital marketing trends, we have to talk about SEO. Being at the top of the page when users search for information related to your brand is essential, but the keys to achieve this evolve year after year.

In 2023, we are facing a more complex landscape than ever in the world of SEO: voice, image and video searches, complex queries, artificial intelligence, new channels and platforms on which to rank… there’s a lot happening. To help you set priorities and plan an effective SEO strategy, let's look at the top SEO trends for 2023.

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The Most Important SEO Trends for 2023


1) Online Shopping

2020 marked the definitive boom of online shopping, and the habits of many consumers changed forever. That's why Google is focusing on improving online shopping experiences.

For online SEO, the main new feature is Shopping Graph, a functionality that allows sellers to get more visibility for their products and shoppers to more easily find the products they are looking for.

Shopping Graph uses an artificial intelligence-based model that takes into account factors such as price, website, reviews, videos or inventory data to show the most relevant products in real time. In addition, it allows you to search for products directly from images.

To take full advantage of this SEO trend, we recommend including relevant keywords in your product listings and image alt text. This will make it easier for Google to correctly rank and display your products.


The Most Important SEO Trends for 2023

Google Shopping Graph.

2) Conversational Queries

Another focus for Google is to understand the complexities of natural language to deliver more efficient results. All of this allows for improved responses to voice searches, which are another big SEO trend for 2023.

Voice search focuses on natural language processing (NLP) to understand how users search for content using voice. To optimize your page for NLP and voice searches, keep these recommendations in mind:

  • Optimize for phrases, not keywords. For example, instead of "best running shoes", the voice search would be something like "What are the best running shoes".
  • Create short answers to users' most frequent questions. Try to answer the question in the first few sentences and go into detail later.
  • Keep in mind regional differences, e.g., Coca-Cola may be called "pop" in the Midwest and West United States, and "soda" in the East Coast, California, and Florida.

3) Clip Markup and Seek Markup to Improve Video Positioning

Did you know that more than half of consumers use videos in their purchasing decisions? And moreover, users spend 88% more time on pages that contain videos. It's clear that video marketing is still trending in 2023, so we need to integrate it into our SEO strategy.

Google has launched two SEO features for video that you can't miss:

  • Clip markup: this technique allows you to highlight the key points of your video so that users can go directly to them. For example, if you have a video that contains a series of tips, you can mark the beginning of each tip.
  • Seek markup: This feature tells Google how your URL structure works, so Google can show key moments in your video and link to specific points. Unlike clip markup, with seek markup you do not choose the key moments, they are selected automatically.

To take advantage of the full potential of clip markup and seek markup to rank your videos, use detailed, keyword-rich markers. For example, if you have a video about caring for plants, don't mark the key points as "Tip 1" and "Tip 2", but "How much to water your houseplants" and "How to tell if your plant is getting enough light".


The Most Important SEO Trends for 2023

4) Increased Traffic Through Image Searches

SEO in 2023 is no longer limited to text, but must encompass all aspects of your marketing. Thinking about your images in terms of SEO can help you get a new source of quality traffic.

The basic tricks to optimize the SEO of your images are quite simple: use quality images (but make sure theie file sizes are not too heavy), try to make your images as relevant as possible, use descriptive file names and always include an alternative text.

5) Queries Based on Complex Questions

To solve complex tasks, users perform an average of eight Google searches. For example, if someone is planning a trip, they may search for "cheap flights to Tenerife", "best hotels in Tenerife beaches", "tips to visit Teide", etc.

To simplify this process, Google has implemented Multitask Unified Model (MUM), an AI functionality that helps users find the information they are looking for with fewer steps.

For content creators, this means we need to focus on answering audience questions in one place. Your content should be as comprehensive as possible, so that users can find all the information they need with the minimum number of searches.


The Most Important SEO Trends for 2023

6) Focus on Core Web Vitals

For Google, page speed is more important than ever as an SEO factor. That's why they have launched the Core Web Vitals, a series of metrics that measure the loading speed of your page from the user's point of view.

To optimize these metrics, we recommend using Google PageSpeed Insights. Here you can see the most important Core Web Vitals and get ideas to improve the performance of your website.


The Most Important SEO Trends for 2023

7) Being in Position 1 Is No Longer the Most Important Thing in SEO

The Google results page has become increasingly complex. Now we can find local search results, ready-to-buy products, videos, featured snippets, rich data and much more. Therefore, being in first position is no longer the most important thing to get clicks.

Therefore, in 2023, we should focus on a different metric that is more related to real results: the CTR or click-through rate of our page in search results.

To optimize your CTR, follow these tips:

  • Experiment with different titles and meta descriptions for your page and compare the results with each other.
  • Complement your SEO strategy with SEM to gain access to more placements within search results.
  • Use rich data to make your results more space-consuming and attractive.
  • Create different types of content, including images and videos.


8) Passage Indexing

Although position 1 may not be as important as it once was, there is one position you should still strive to get: the featured snippet or position zero, which shows a snippet of the page and appears above the rest of the organic results.

The mechanism by which a decision is made to display a fragment of a page as a featured snippet is called "passage indexing" or "passage ranking". Factors it takes into account include:

  • The relevance of the snippet to answer a user query.
  • The length of the snippet.
  • The

    tags.

  • The use of images.
  • Structured data.

9) Google News and Google Discover as New Traffic Sources

Google Discover is a Google feed designed to deliver relevant videos and articles to mobile users. Although it is a relatively new service, it has become popular very quickly and already reaches 800 million users. It is therefore a very important factor to consider for increasing web traffic.


The Most Important SEO Trends for 2023


Although we don't know the details of the Google Discover algorithm, we do know that it is based on the quality of the content and its relevance to a particular user. To optimize your posts for Google Discover, we recommend using high quality images that are 1200px wide, including more long tail and semantic keywords and, above all, focusing on understanding your buyer persona and creating content that is useful and relevant to them.

10) Google EAT Sets the New Rules for SEO

Google employs more than 10,000 page quality evaluators worldwide. Their job is to conduct searches and evaluate the quality of the pages that appear in the top results. To do this, the evaluators use a set of guidelines that have been made public, centered around the acronym "EAT", which stands for:

  • Experience: The content has been created by an expert in the field, with a high level of knowledge or skills in a particular field.
  • Authority: Tthe more authority a website has around a topic, the better its content will be positioned on that topic. Authority is measured by factors such as incoming links to a website, years of activity, or belonging to an official organization.
  • Trustworthiness: This factor evaluates the legitimacy, transparency and accuracy of a site and its contents. It takes into account the sources of information used to elaborate the contents, website contact information, or that it indicates who the authors are, among others.

11) Focusing on Search Intent is the Way to Get Leads and Sales

Google's algorithms have become increasingly sophisticated in interpreting search queries. Now, related keywords, search intent, and semantics play a very important role in the results displayed.

This means we have to let go of the old ways of SEO, focused on creating a list of specific keywords and including them in our text as much as possible. Instead of starting with a list of keywords, we recommend you to start by creating the buyer persona you want to reach with your content and think about what are the needs that lead them to make a search. Write answers to their questions and use semantically related phrases and keywords.

12) SEO on Amazon

66% of buyers start searching for new products on Amazon, so it has become an essential platform for brands that sell their products online.

Unlike Google, SEO on Amazon focuses almost exclusively on purchase intent, leaving aside informational queries. To optimize your products to rank in Amazon's listings, keep these recommendations in mind:

  • Optimize your content with high-quality product images and copy.
  • Optimize your product listing keywords by including all relevant search terms.
  • Manage user reviews of your products and resolve any issues that may arise.
  • Complement your SEO with PPC campaigns on Amazon to get faster results.


13) Local SEO and Google's Business Profile

Local search is still a top SEO trend in 2023, especially if your company offers services to local customers.

To improve your ranking among Google's local search results, here are two key tips:

  • Create and update your Google My Business profile. This free Google tool allows you to create a listing for your business that displays on Google Maps, making it easy for customers to find you.
  • Use keywords specific to your location, that is, include the name of cities, areas, and neighborhoods to the general keywords you are using.

The Most Important SEO Trends for 2023

14) Artificial Intelligence and SEO

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in search. Google's latest algorithms, such as BERT and Rankbrain, rely on this technology to deliver more relevant results.

For marketers, AI is a very powerful ally to optimize your SEO. There are already tools on the market that allow you to optimize keyword research or content creation with AI, and we will see many more in the future.

In any case, search is now more intelligent than ever, and that means we have to focus on delivering quality content and understanding what our target's needs really are.

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Laia Cardona