2023’s Top SEO Opportunities

When it comes to SEO, the only constant changes. It’s no surprise that it’s difficult to stay firm on its ever-changing terrain when the rules and trends alter, if not at the speed of sound, then far faster than you have time to embrace them. Tactics that were formerly effective may become not just outmoded, but also harmful in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile, certain emerging trends may put you too far behind to catch up if you don’t anticipate them or ignore them for whatever reason.

Last year, we addressed the SEO trends for 2017: saying goodbye to keyword density, taking bold strides into the age of semantic search, and making the web safer and more mobile-friendly. Let’s catch up with the shifts in older patterns this year, and discover some new opportunities along the road.

1. Link-building Is Very Much Alive (But Challenging)

There will always be SEOs who believe link-building is dead, and SEOs who feverishly devise new ways to obtain links, turning ‘building’ into ‘earning.’ You’d better be on the second team because there’s a never-ending stream of studies and surveys confirming backlinks to invariably stay one of the major ranking variables, as well as revealing the direct association of site ranks with their backlink profiles.

Stick a fork in it, Google isn’t going to relax its stance on unnatural backlink profiles and deceptive link-building practices. While low-quality and spammy links are more likely to be ignored and devalued by Google, there is still a danger of receiving a manual penalty if you use unethical methods.

The Opportunity

Make regular backlink profile cleansing a part of your routine to be on the safe side with Penguin (which has been real-time since 2016). ‘Could it get much more boring?’ you may ask, but that’s not much of a hardship, and it’s a terrific opportunity to be one step ahead by not being one step behind (as those who don’t bother).

According to a recent link-building poll done by SEO Power Suite, most SEOs are still battling with a lack of opportunities, ideas, or expertise, but there are some old and new approaches worth attempting, with a focus on common sense. The following is some advice for 2018.

• Rather than wasting time on grey-hat and spamming approaches,
• Increasing the number of links in your profile at a natural rate,
• Creating useful and foundational information that is worth linking to,
• Instead of trying to collect as many links as your hands can hold, focus on building relationships within your niche.
• Returning to genuine paid means, but in a reasonable manner.

2. All-things-Mobile

Mobile search has grown increasingly important in lives, and Google is well-known for its desire to be responsive to its consumers’ requirements. The so-called Mobilegeddon (increasing the usage of mobile-friendliness as a ranking indicator) was followed by the statement that Google is trying mobile-first indexing by the end of 2016. While 2017 was a year full of debate and Google delay notices, 2018 appears to be the year when it will finally take effect, and rankings will be determined based on the mobile version of a site.

Load time is still the most important aspect influencing user experience, and it has at least some impact on a page’s performance in the SERPs, as well as subsequent interactions and conversions. To avoid a massive shift away from mobile surfing and toward applications, Google has introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which can load 4x faster than ordinary pages and improve user experience with subtle hints (like displaying ads in a mobile-friendly way). According to case studies, AMP deployment enhances user-behavior factors like CTR and bounce rates. So, while AMP is not currently a ranking criterion, it very well may become one in the future.

The Opportunity

Google often warns users not to panic about mobile-first indexing. However, if your site isn’t entirely responsive, and core content and markup differ between mobile and desktop, it’s necessary to make some changes to ensure your mobile pages aren’t awkward, blank, or less informative than desktop ones.

If you haven’t thought about using AMP yet, now is a fantastic moment to do so. According to Google, over 900,000 domains have already implemented the AMP framework, however, this represents a very small percentage of the internet’s 1.2 billion websites. So that’s one more benefit you can obtain with little risk, whilst your competitors may regret missing out on it in a year’s time.

3. Voice Search Is On The Rise

The number of voice recognition-based products continues to rise; we have Siri and Cortana to tell us where to go for the finest pizza near me and to tell us a joke, and Google Home and Amazon Echo to allow us to shop nearly hands-free.

The accuracy of speech recognition is also improving – Microsoft revealed a 5.1 percent word error rate, while Apple SVP Phil Schiller joked in an interview with John Gruber that he’s no longer afraid to say ‘Hey Siri’ on stage.

We are seeing an increase in the number of voice searches as it becomes more convenient and less annoying. According to a recent Higher Visibility poll, more than 70% of respondents use voice search at least once each month, with nearly half using it weekly or daily. According to Google, speech presently accounts for 20% of mobile queries, while ComScore expects that it will account for 50% of all searches by 2020.

The Opportunity

Unlike text-based queries, voice search questions are typically longer and more detailed in intent, and searchers expect clear immediate answers. There are numerous modifications you can make to your content to adapt to the transition and improve it for voice search:

• Long-tail keywords should be used to handle more specific searches.
• Answer the What, Where, When, and How inquiries using more natural language and a conversational tone.
• Create a FAQ page, phrasing the queries in the way that real would, and provide extensive, straightforward answers.
• The four most prevalent voice search intents are ‘I want to know,’ ‘to go,’ ‘to do,’ and ‘to buy.’ Recognize (study) your users’ demands and provide solutions.
• Take careful care of your local SEO, as the majority of voice searches have a local intent.

4. Progressive Web Apps Are Gaining Popularity

Progressive Web Apps is another Google endeavor aimed at improving and speeding up the mobile web. The essence of PWAs is the combination of all the finest features of mobile web and native apps while leaving the shortcomings behind. It’s faster, x times lighter than an app, and adjusts its performance to the device’s and connection’s capabilities, making the experience seamless.

While launching such an app may greatly reduce business expenses and maintenance, PWAs also have a fantastic impact on engagement and conversion rates. With app-like functionalities (push notifications, offline accessibility, payment app integration, and the ability to download the app to the home screen) and being super fast in the meantime, PWAs are also showing amazing re-engagement stats – in cases where users abandon heavy native apps, such an alternative is more likely to win them back.

The Opportunity

The number of shops, publishers, and other well-known businesses that use PWAs is expanding, and the majority of them report several benefits. If you’re not sure if it’s the best answer for your company, consider a hybrid of a native app for loyal customers and a PWA for engaging with new or lost customers.

It encourages website owners to adopt, like with every Google project, by providing simple instructions on how to get started. PWAs are absolutely worth considering because they have the potential to become a new standard for the mobile web. As an added plus, earlier adoption would mean less competition.

5. Structured Data Deserves More Attention

In the age of the meaningful web,’ most SEOs think that Structured Data Markup is underappreciated, despite the fact that it’s a wonderful approach to make your site crawler-friendly and assist to understand your content (concepts and logical relationships between them).

Google has also launched a slew of new ways to present data in the SERPs in recent years, including displaying an immediately relevant answer, adding context, valuable subtleties, and a visual layer to the search results. All of these characteristics are dependent on data that is organized in a clear and logical manner.

Structured Data is becoming increasingly important as the structure of SERPs evolves and the emphasis shifts to user experience, thus there is virtually no excuse not to use it.

The Opportunity

Because new search experiences, such as Google’s SERP Features, are built on structured data, appropriate markup may help you rank ‘zero,’ and get promoted above the dull horizontal listings, to earn greater visibility, trust, and traffic.

To get the most out of it, research the various schemas at Schema.org and construct a map: list all of your site’s pages and evaluate all of the relevant schemas for each. A beginner’s guide will assist you in correctly creating, implementing, and testing Structured Data Markup.

Operating hours, contact information, and ratings can all have a big impact on your success with local and voice searches, so make sure to include them and keep them up to current.

6. Crawl Budget Can Be Spent Wiser

Crawl Budget was a concept buried in secrecy for quite some time until Google threw some light on the subject in early 2016. While SEO is largely concerned with user experience, crawl budget optimization is mostly concerned with making your site appealing to bots. This still has a lot of overlap with SEO, because you’re naturally concerned about getting all of the important pages crawled, indexed, and updated on time. Keeping your website ‘healthy’ on the inside and not wasting any of the crawl budgets are your best bets for getting Google to crawl your site more regularly. What is good for crawlability is also good for searchability.

The Opportunity

Because the aspects that contribute to your crawl budget (as well as those that make your site unappealing to Google) are now very evident, there’s no excuse to put its optimization on the back burner. Aside from creating credible links to your site (which is still the primary ‘popularity’ signal for Google), there are numerous completely fixable issues that bots may encounter, leaving out a large portion of your pages:

• Ensure that vital pages are crawlable by spiders, while those you don’t want to appear in SERPs (duplicates, dynamic pages, etc.) are banned with your robots.txt or.htaccess file.
• Make sure there are no superfluous redirect chains, as spiders may abandon the site before reaching the final target page.
• Remove any broken links to avoid wasting money on 4xx pages.
• If you’ve added dynamic parameters to your URLs that don’t impact the content of the sites, send a list to Google Search Console to avoid repetition and budget waste.
• Don’t squander the spiders’ time! Optimize the heavy and slow pages for maximum benefit.
• Maintain the order of your sitemap. An up-to-date, garbage-free sitemap is a terrific way to understand your site’s structure and locate fresh content more quickly.
• Try not to bury any important or often updated sites more than three clicks away from the homepage. In general, a clean and transparent site structure is advantageous for both indexing and user experience.

7. New Approach To Good Old Content

Content is here to stay – that is a reality that does not need to be proven. Google, on the other hand, is continually changing and learning to be better at understanding search intent, and now relies on topical relevancy, context, and other criteria to produce the results that a user expects. Content optimization today extends far beyond keywords and necessitates a far more complicated technique. Quality will also continue to trump quantity – most SEOs think that writing short pieces of content frequently is currently less efficient than building thorough ‘long reads and keeping them up to date.

The Opportunity

Instead of creating thin pages, each optimized for a super-specific query, you might want to reassess your keyword research strategy and stop focusing on a few phrases. Instead, detect and analyze the user’s goal behind each query you target, arrange them logically, and develop content that fully satisfies the intent.

Keywords are still important, but instead of packing them, try employing them naturally and complementing them with topically relevant content. Unique, helpful material customized to your audience’s requirements will never go out of style, but it can also never be faked.

Conclusion

The future is almost here, and the distinction between optimizing for and optimizing for real users is becoming increasingly blurred. When you can’t easily mislead Google and have to fight for the attention of a picky audience, new trends, initiatives, and standards-to-be (that flatter both sides) are well worth considering, or at the very least be aware of.