SEO is one of the top digital marketing activities that brings the highest return on investment (ROI). If you still don’t know what SEO is and how this technique will benefit your business, check out our article “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. With each passing year, SEO becomes even more relevant for businesses. Search engines have been updating their systems to become better and smarter every year. So we as marketers need to be able to keep up with updates and trends. Here are some of the top 5 SEO trends and tools you should be aware of to improve your rankings in the coming year: Table of Contents: Focus on the page experience. Content will still reign supreme next year. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be a key tool for topic and keyword research. Need to start optimizing for voice search Local SEO must become a priority. 1. Focus on the page experience The quality of a web page has always been crucial for authority and ranking on Google. The search engine prioritizes the quality of the user experience and recent updates reveal this. This year, Google announced that page experience indicators will become another crucial factor for ranking on search pages. Page experience search indicators included from Core Web Vitals (loading, interactivity and visual stability) along with other algorithm updates. Use tools like: Google’s Lighthouse , Core Web Vitals, PageSpeed Insights and others to look at where your webpage needs improvement. 2. Content will still reign supreme next year. If there’s one thing 2020 has taught us, it’s that there’s still a lot to learn. Content will never be one-dimensional, especially now during a global pandemic, so much must be reinvented, reapplied and relearned. According to Google Search Trends , 2020 was the year of online and drive-thru concerts, social and racial causes, diversity in the film industry, Asian and Middle Eastern food. In 2021, most countries started their vaccination plan, but doubts about the Digital Certificate and social contact were still visible. The use of social networks accelerated and there was a development of e-commerce , especially in the creation of marketplaces on the most used social networks, such as Instagram or Facebook for companies. Content has gradually become more personal, more empathetic and serve up an experience for the recipient . For this reason, videos, podcasts and co-watching have seen increasing success in 2022 and are expected to set the trend for the future. The relevance that certain content brings to the reader is now prioritized by Google, which is focused on showing results that satisfy the real needs of users. In this sense, the Google Helpful Content Update is one of the updates that will be part of the 2023 SEO strategies. 3. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be a key tool for topic and keyword research. The use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in digital marketing activities is not new, however it is important to observe its evolution and the emergence of new AI solutions for the industry. Artificial intelligence has gradually improved the quality of topic and keyword research, saving marketers time by taking on time-consuming tasks such as grammar checking and readability, testing content performance, improving work quality, and much more . more. Popular tools that use AI include: BrightEdge : Shows real-time keyword searches, recommendations, and rankings. Wordlift : is an SEO tool that assists marketers in organizing content, analyzing text, internal links, customizing vocabulary suitable for their audience, suggesting images, recommending articles and much more. MarketMuse : Helps marketers strategize and optimize content. This tool uses advanced topic modeling to improve content creation and natural language generation to create the first draft of an article. Kafkai : is a tool that writes content. This is a solution that will save marketers time when writing content, allowing them to focus more on editing. Google MUM or Multitask Unified Model: is an artificial intelligence algorithm from Google that will allow you to raise the levels of search performance, as it allows you to respond to complex requests from users and provide comprehensive and reasoned answers in more than 75 languages. 4. You need to start optimizing for voice search Given the experience of living through a global pandemic, what types of behavior will change? Numerous hands -free solutions have been developed to keep pace with changing behavior. Google shared that 27% of the global online population uses voice search. In the USA, a Gartner study showed that 39% of the population use virtual assistants on their phones, however, 15% of brands have optimized their mobile applications (App) with voice search. In its 2020 study , Perficient found that 55% of respondents included voice search in their top three ways of asking questions on their smartphones. By 2022, ClearBridge Mobile has estimated that voice purchases will reach $40 billion. While voice search isn’t growing as quickly as many people thought, the global pandemic has changed our ways forever. The expectation is that in the coming years these numbers will continue to increase. The need to optimize voice searches is increasingly urgent, which will require marketers to study new ways to achieve it. For example, since voice searches tend to be longer than written searches, you’ll need to: use longer keywords; capture nuances of natural language ; improve the quality of content production. Additionally, in 2019, 40% of Google responses to mobile searches were featured snippets. Therefore, you will also have to add schema mark-up code to your website to improve voice search results. 5. Local SEO must become a priority. While 72% of local Google searches resulted in a visit to a store, around 56% of local businesses do not have a Google My Business profile. Bing business listings showed even more shocking numbers, with 82% of local businesses having no business profile. Having a company profile on platforms such as Google and Bing will improve your position in the results page ranking (SERP). Google, for example, is improving its platform for zero-click searches by making the most relevant information available on the SERP. For context, when a user does a search and the information relevant to them is displayed on the SERP, if they end their search there it’s called a zero-click search. Therefore, not having a company profile or having an outdated profile will put you at a disadvantage. This year, Google My Business has made several updates streamlining many processes. From new health and safety attributes, setting more hours, service attributes like video calling and delivery attributes and so on. In this way, updating your Google My Business has become much easier. In addition to a complete and up-to-date Google My Business profile, you should also keep in mind that local searches are affected by other indicators , such as the use of local keywords, through the company’s complete data (address, phone number, category and attributes), photos, positive comments, responses to comments and the most used keywords. The effort that an SME has to spend to keep up to date and implement adequate SEO strategies is often too high. SEO depends on time and constant learning, as this alone will guarantee that efforts will turn into results. Our priority at Link37 is to always be up to date and implement the best strategies to give our customers online visibility.
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