As we move into 2023, it’s important to keep your website stay up-to-date on the latest search trends in order to maintain healthy website traffic and improve search engine rankings. So, you’re probably wondering:
- How do I get more organic traffic?
- How do I get more high quality traffic?
- How do I improve my organic search presence and reach?
Take a look at some of the key trends for 2023 and our some useful tips on how to maintain healthy website traffic and keep the Google Algorithm Gods appeased.
Voice Search
The increasing importance of voice search, alongside the rise of smart speakers and virtual assistants, means more and more people are using voice search to find what they’re looking for online.
To optimise for voice search, it’s important to focus on long-tail keywords, questions and natural language phrases. Your website should be mobile friendly, quick to load and structured in a search engine friendly way. For example, FAQs are still a great way to provide users with a whole bunch of useful information in a simplified structure.
Voice Search Checklist
- Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. The majority of voice searches are performed on mobile devices.
- Include long-tail keywords in your content, as voice searches tend to be more conversational and use more natural language.
- Optimise your website’s metadata, such as page titles and meta descriptions, for voice search by including relevant keywords and phrases.
- Make sure your website has structured data, such as schema markup, to help search engines understand the content on your website.
- Consider using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to improve the way your website responds to voice queries. This can help your website understand the intent of the user’s query and provide more accurate and relevant results.
Local SEO
We’ve also been noticing the continuing importance of local SEO, with more and more people searching for local businesses online and choosing to seek out independent companies, over chains.
You should make sure that you’re listed in online directories, such as Google My Business, and that your website includes accurate and up-to-date information about your business, including your address, phone number, and hours of operation.
Local SEO Checklist
- Make sure your website includes accurate and consistent business information, such as your name, address, and phone number (NAP), on every page of your website.
- This information should also be included in the website’s metadata, such as page titles and meta descriptions.
- Create and verify a Google My Business (GMB) listing for your business, as this will help your website show up in Google’s local search results.
- Include location-specific keywords in your website’s content and metadata, such as the name of the city or neighbourhood where your business is located. You could also consider landing pages that focus on services in specific areas.
- Get listed in online directories and review sites that are relevant to your business, as these can also help improve your local search visibility.
- Encourage customers to leave reviews of your business on GMB and other relevant review sites, as positive reviews can also help improve your local search visibility.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO continues to play a key part in your search strategy, paying close attention to all the elements on site that ensure your site is technically sound and offers a great user experience. Ensuring you have a mobile optimised website, no broken links, accessible content and aesthetics, as well as ensuring your pages can be crawled and indexed.
Technical SEO Checklist
- Ensure for mobile devices. This includes having a responsive design, fast loading times, and a user-friendly interface.
- Core Web Vitals: Google has announced that it will be using Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal from May 2021. These metrics measure the loading speed, interactivity and visual stability of a page. It’s important to monitor and improve these metrics for your website.
- HTTPS and security: With the increasing concern for online security, it’s important to make sure that your website is using HTTPS and that it’s regularly updated to fix any security vulnerabilities or plugins.
- Structured data: Using structured data, such as schema markup, can help search engines understand the content on your website and provide more accurate and relevant results.
- Voice search: The number of voice searches is growing quickly, so it’s important to ensure that your website is optimised for voice search by including relevant keywords and phrases, making sure your website is mobile-friendly, and using natural language processing (NLP) techniques.
Backlinks
Over the past decade, link building has become significantly more focused on backlinks, their relevance and the value they add. Relevance is critical and takes us away from the SEO of old where any link would be built simply to boost that DA.
Backlinks Checklist
- Seek out journalists, editors and webmasters who run sites that are aligned with your product, service and site
- Speak with them preemptively to find out what they are happy to feature on their site and if you can feed into their content plan in exchange for a link
- Maintain relationships with site editors and focus on quality content and data that will genuinely help the reader and gives them a reason to click through to your site
Google Algorithm Update
Since the start of 2022, we have seen a significant shift in the way Google algorithms work. Google has been focusing more on the user experience and the quality of the content on a website, meaning that a priority for your website should be on creating high-quality content.
Content should be relevant, easy to read and useful to your target audience, this is where user or buyer personas can come in really helpful.
Google has also been focusing on the loading speed of websites alongside user navigation ease. This means your menus, CTA and internal linking system needs to be fool proof. That means, if possible, a maximum of two clicks for a user to get to each page.
Google also revised its 20-year-old Webmaster Guidelines, which are now referred to as Google Search Essentials and ‘E-A-T’ became E-E-A-T. The EEAT acronym now stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
We always recommend staying up-to-date on the latest Google algorithm updates, with constant updates to the algorithms to improve the search results and to provide users with the most relevant and useful information.