The search engine optimization field is always developing dynamically. Each year, along with new technologies evolving, SEO specialists invent new ways of enhancing website search visibility, driving visitor traffic, and promoting user activity. In addition, marketing becomes ever more digitalized, so ignoring the digital marketing trends of 2023 will be too costly for any business. So, it is very much recommended to follow the latest news in SEO development, check for upcoming search optimization trends predicted by professionals, and try to stay in line with the future of SEO.
In this article, we provide an overview of SEO market forecast trends for the year 2023 so that you could prepare and adjust your website search optimization strategy accordingly.
Table of Contents
Video Content
In 2023, the development direction toward closer integration between Google and various video content platforms will continue. The top popular ones remain YouTube and TikTok, of course, as people adore short reels and fun engaging content but traditional ones like Vimeo will also be topical.
Google displays well video content in search results, and it continues to belong to SEO Google trends of the year. One can observe that some search queries will display video content first, which gives SEO specialists a hint of what type of content to prepare for certain keywords and search intents. An important argument supporting the importance of video content embedding to the website for search engine optimization purposes is the fact that, in July 2022, Google announced a new block in Google Search Console called Video index report. The report displays the count of videos identified by Google, how many of them were indexed successfully, and provides a classification of issues preventing videos from being indexed. It also allows inspecting a particular video webpage.
When integrating with YouTube, TikTok, Panopto, Brightcove, Vimeo, IBM Watson Media, Kaltura, Yuja, Qumu, and others, mind the most popular categories of content demanded by today’s users, namely:
the latest music videos of pop stars as well as the best movie trailers;
product comparison and product review videos, especially for top-demanded product categories;
latest resonating news, scandal interviews;
explainer and tutorial Video content for top-rated products, services, and technologies;
vlogs (travel, cooking, fitness, fun, science, etc.) and educational webinars with high visitor and/or engagement rates;
viral user videos, e.g. amateur Wednesday’s dance recreation.
SERP SEO
As Google continues updating its functionality, managing the search engine results page, SERP, becomes more important than ever before. The current trend from 2022 into 2023 is displaying the most attractive and well-structured data deserving a click.
Today, it is not enough to get your webpage into the top-ranked ones by the chosen keywords corresponding to the search intent. It is also important to make the user click on it. If your snippet does not look attractive enough, it will not be preferred by a user and your competitors will take over your clicks. This is why structured content is a must-have according to SEO trends for 2023.
Carousels, questions-and-answers blocks (F.A.Q. and People Also Ask), visuals and videos, ratings, and prices - these are your options requiring SEO specialists’ attention. The full list of available elements to display in search results by Google is provided here.
One of the most advantageous and free options in Google search results display to remember is the feature of the online shop products carousel. The search engine implements indexation and organizes and updates product information from numerous e-com shops regularly. Many retailers can participate in this display for free if they are eligible by product type. All in all, this improved online shopping experience is created for the end user who benefits from an aggregated view within the category of interest. At the same time, each SEO specialist might use this for their own purposes. Google Blog provides an extensive explanation of how popular products might be displayed and one may argue which parameters to add to each product setup to allow filtering them smoothly and usefully.
Sometimes, Google SERP applies the Passage Indexing feature, which may be considered a way to structure the displayed content, too. We remind you that Passage Indexing refers to a featured top-ranking of a passage from a webpage text which is not particularly high-ranked. Google prioritizes displaying such passages as an excerpt from a page if they fit the search query the most and if the algorithm believes the paragraph contains exactly the information a visitor wants.
In addition, the keywords used in the text will be highlighted bold and the readability and click-attractivity of the text will be increased automatically. We highly recommend considering passage optimization for some queries if you believe they can match some of the popular keyword search intents.
As to other types of structured content displayed in SERP, we have already written recently about how to use Google snippets more effectively and especially how to increase snippet CTR. Whenever trying to benefit from the structured content display in search results, mind the efficiency of content preparation to compete over clicks with your direct competitors for each search phrase.
AI-Generated Content and Visuals
You will hardly find people who did not play with Lensa these days, having generated social media avatars for themselves in almost any archetype during the corresponding flash mob wave. AI (both Artificial and Augmented Intelligence) is confidently getting more and more attention across different industries and areas of activity.
Throughout 2023, there will be ever more AI-assisted content and visuals generation on the Internet, and this will affect the latest trends in SEO. Using Artificial Intelligence is quick and efficient. It allows for saving time and resources, scaling up, and dynamically responding to all market changes. AI is like a personal assistant that is never tired or unavailable. It is easily tunable and self-learning continuously.
The below picture demonstrates the variety of AI-assisted online services available in different areas so far. In addition, there will be ever more new services that will assess the quality of text and visual content generated automatically and whether it can be used for your SEO optimization or not.
Overall, whether you will be using images created with the assistance of AI or ones borrowed from photo stocks and made by designers specifically, it is important that you continue optimizing them with titles, captions, and alt text all including keywords, proper file sizes as well as sitemap inclusion. In addition, creating backlinks to images within a webpage and social media promotion.
We also remind you of our previous article discussing how you can apply artificial intelligence in SEO and save your resources.
Cross-Platform / Marketplace Optimization
Cross-platform optimization is another current SEO trend that remains topical in 2023. Marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, AliExpress, Target, eBid, Rakuten, and others remain huge market players attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors and monopolizing product search queries in Google and Bing. Their positions in top rankings will remain strong, so their product sales strategy and corresponding SEO optimization cannot help impact your brand and your sales.
Instead of competing with the mentioned giants, focus on optimizing product listings on e-commerce marketplaces and benefiting from what they have already done so far. Marketplace Optimization (MPO) techniques and principles might include but are not limited to optimizing product titles, descriptions, and genuine visuals. As well as FAQs, getting detailed reviews and a high product satisfaction rate, creating tags, and optimizing search categories and keywords. Pay attention to sales parameters such as gross sales, return rate, defect rate, late shipment rate, etc.
Experts believe that reaching consistency across marketplace listings is another important factor to mind.
Content Created for People and by People
Despite the popularity of AI automation reached by today, website content is consumed by humans. So, the texts should be well-structured, interesting, engaging, and interactive. The ultimate goal is to create something that will motivate users to stay on the webpage and interact more. The human factor cannot be canceled. Our customers are real people who want to be informed, assisted, entertained, served, educated, and pleased. AI is a tool to help nowadays but it cannot fully replace human input here.
We have already written before about Google E-A-T guidelines and how they might help you create more valuable and optimized content visible to visitors. Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are the keys here, which allow users to benefit from coming to a webpage. In August 2022, however, Google announced an important update to its definition of helpful content as well as declared its E-A-T guidelines turning it into E-E-A-T. The extra E in the abbreviation stands for Experience. For SEO specialists, it means that articles about products, services, or places are recommended to get updated with information about their actual use or consumption, and actual visit, and should communicate what a person experienced. Thus, adding eye-witnessed and proof visuals, quotes and user feedback, and more can be a way to make a webpage rank better.
So, in 2023, all content writers and SEO specialists are advised to mind E-A-T SEO, continue working on expertise in their texts, and improve their value to the end user.
Conversation and Voice Search
We talk about voice search as one of the top SEO trends every year. In one of the previous articles, we already discussed the importance of voice search in general and provided some hints for optimization. This is a continuously emerging trend, indeed, and we cannot skip it for 2023 either.
First of all, online search trends demonstrate the increasing demand for voice search, especially locally. Users get accustomed to this type of search comfort, the trend grows as people watch others doing that, and the audience is expanding. The COVID-19 epidemic also contributed here as touchless usage is safer.
Secondly, the industry giants continue investing in voice search support technologies. Thus, Google has recently announced the Speakable data markup, which is a significant argument about Google Assistant’s popularity growth. The speakable structured data is used by the assistant to respond to most frequent user queries on smart speaker devices and is potentially scalable for more languages than just U.S. English of its first release. To remind you, here are other markup types that exist explained in detail.
Thirdly, conversation search goes further and turns voice search into context-based voice search. In a conversation with its smart device, a user can provide extra search parameters requested, which can then be used for extended long-tail queries by the assistant. Moreover, an extensive dialog between the user and the system allows for rechecking user intent and categorizing it correctly, which ultimately improves the search results and brings higher user satisfaction. Correspondingly, it’s a wide area of potential optimization for SEO specialists including both generating new optimized webpages and updating existing web content. Even Google’s featured snippets can be considered a sort of conversation search technology, as for basic search queries Google usually offers a bold-highlighted definition, the “People Also Ask” section, and a FAQ snippet whenever applicable. Using these opportunities might help a website to increase its CTR.
Conversational search is the area where SEO specialists should mind increased usage of chatbots - new conversational channels for interacting with users. Chatbots are all based on structured data input/output and may, on one hand, be an extra source of traffic generation, and, on the other hand, an interactive search engine optimization assistant for an SEO specialist. For example, the SEO automation WordLift Chatbot can help you enrich your webpage text vocabulary, add tags and internal links, enhance the navigation and add schema markup.
Here is also where AI comes into place, which we have discussed earlier, as conversational AI enables smarter self-learning solutions for high-quality machine conversations with users.
Monitoring Updates
However precisely we are trying to predict and report on the most important SEO trends to follow, the task of any SEO specialist remains the same - to follow every search engine update and to understand its impact. Being always ready to track all Google updates, continuously monitor the situation via indexation and visitor activity reports, and quickly solve indexation issues arising because of Google’s regular innovations - this is what SEO specialist work is about.
In 2021-22, Google released many product updates and requirements for content quality and usability. So, one might expect an increased number of indexation and crawling issues in 2023 related to improved quality control mechanisms implemented by the giant, experts warn. The forecasts are that some of the reasons for the issues will not be easy to spot quickly.
The same principle belongs to following technological updates, e.g. in the world of smart devices. Both smartphones and tablets are dynamically developing, and mobile adaptability of user interface design and user experience as well as mobile-specific SEO optimization remain regular routines to do along with main website search optimization in focus.
Conclusion
In this article, we have discussed SEO forecasting and top SEO trends of 2023, which might have inspired you to make your SEO work routine more diverse. Trying new things and following new trends in SEO may be not only interesting and create learning opportunities but also beneficial in terms of traffic generation and professional growth as an SEO specialist.
Of course, in each of these directions, the ultimate focus remains the same as SEO's main goal is to please the end user and makes one’s online search as comfortable, efficient, and fast as it is only possible.
As to the SEO specialists themselves and how the mentioned trends might affect your daily job - early adopters of technologies and approaches usually enjoy the multiplier effect of associated efficiency and output. We wish you appreciate your learning process and your efforts bring unexpectedly remarkable results making your websites boost in visibility for the search queries that correspond to user search intent the most.
