THE BEST SEO TRENDS FOR 2023 AND PERHAPS BEYOND! (MAY 2023)

SEO IS A STAIRCASE AND NOT JUST A SINGLE STEP.

SEO when done ‘proper’ is not a once off task, it’s perpetual, strategic and to a certain extent malleable. My methods are unique and do not only rely on theory and common practices, instead I look at each search phrase with my mind’s eye, and I can see it having its very own battle on the World Wide Web. I then arm it and champion it to its victory! Here are the principle SEO flags for 2023:

• Reverse engineering the 1st page of Google. Every single search phrase will show a unique search result. Change one letter and you will get a new result. You have to research who is on that page and why! Then you have a ‘base line’ to improve upon. This is the number one mistake Clients and their SEO developers make, they skip this step entirely, and from that point onwards results are slower and more costly.

• Once you have a base line its time to do better than your competitor. An imperative area of focus is improving your ‘authority’ for both your website and all its pages. This process requires another article, but you can Google it and learn a little more for yourself in the meantime. One little nugget I will offer today is to review Google suggestions in actual Google search and use them if applicable to your website. Improving authority makes a colossal difference!

• Assessing competitors on Google requires some tricks of the trade, and you can help the process with 3rd party tools like: https://ahrefs.com which has packages from 99 USD or https://surferseo.com which offers a free trial and many wonderful tools. Tools like these should not make you lazy, they should excite you because they offer a real time peek under the covers of your competitors operations.

• Long tail search phrases and voice search phrases are a must. The simplest way to explain what these are would be text that sounds like a natural question or a natural answer to a question when being read out in a conversational manner. Inject these into descriptions, titles and general content.

• Another thing I insist on is a dedicated page per search phrase. This can be time consuming but improves your chances of competing tenfold. Exact key phrases must feature in page Title, Description, Page File name, Folder Name, H1 and H2 tags, and of course in Meta with some variations.

• Ensure images and videos on the webpage are titled appropriately and are relevant to the page. Google can ‘watch’ a video and ‘see’ what is displayed in a picture. Do not add irrelevant stuff.

• Plagiarism. If your text is not unique, you are shooting yourself in the head and might as well give up.

• Check your word count and search phrase density. Having more relevant and topical information does absolute wonders! Create a ‘topical map’ before you start building pages and then work on adding interlinks between pages with similar relevance.

• Frequency. If your competitor updates their website more often then they will do better than you. You must ensure you match their update frequency or better it.

• Broken links, bad code and dirty web folders are not acceptable. Make sure your site index and robot files are in tip top condition.

• From time to time, check that your domain, server and website is not blacklisted with web authorities.

• Links still matter a lot, but the page they ‘come’ from must be relevant.

• Reviews from rating sites like Google Review, Facebook Reviews and in South Africa the site Hellopeter add credibility to website and its position on search results.

• A spanner in the works. I cannot confirm this, but it is my belief that page viewing time is not as important as it once used to be. In short, don’t panic if people do not stay on your page for an extended period of time, and ensure that your web page is designed to serve up the information or answer to the question the user had or needed in double time, instead of a protracted essay.

• A red flag. AI content is a ‘thing’ now and appears to actually generate content that Google likes. With that said I do believe this is a trend, and Google is not yet able to work out if an AI Robot wrote something or a human did. I do hope that ‘people’ generated content will have a greater ‘authority’ once Google works out who wrote what, but this could go either way.

I have lots more insight and nuggets to share, but the above should keep you busy for months. If you would like an SEO expert to help your business, please reach out to me!

The End.