Keeping up with SEO trends remains a priority for marketers due to constant search engine updates and changes to Google’s algorithms. Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to attracting consumers to your website.

 While the fundamentals of SEO remain the same, algorithm updates and search trends evolve, and you need to stay on top of the latest trends to ensure your content strategies are effective.  Relying on the same SEO practices over and over can even negatively impact page rankings.

Many strategies must be updated or more effective in the current SEO landscape. Therefore, it is imperative to continually adapt your SEO strategies to the latest trends to strengthen your presence in relevant search results.

Yet staying on top of the latest SEO strategies is a never-ending task for marketers.

 To help you stay on top of the latest SEO developments, we’ll discuss the top 15 SEO trends to pay attention to in 2023 to improve your website’s ranking in the SERPs.

Top 15 SEO Trends for Ranking High in Google SERPs in 2023

 Here’s a look at the SEO trends that will have the most impact in 2023.

 1. User Intent

 Search query intent and user behavior are still Google’s top priority. Creating your content, whether a video, an article or any other web content, should plan around the keywords and user intent behind the search to bring a holistic approach to your content strategy.

 Users visit Google or other search engines to find answers to their questions or learn about a topic in general. Google strives to identify the right intent behind a user’s search, which is constantly changing.

Companies that understand what users are searching for and provide content that answers their questions also benefit, as do users. Google’s latest helpful content update, announced in August 2022, is crucial to ensure that only valid, quality content ends up in Google’s top positions.

Google can now flag a website as useless if many articles are deemed less trustworthy. The valuable content update may also affect websites that use artificial intelligence to generate content automatically.

 Google recommends that websites use real people to write content for real users. Brands must cater to the audience’s needs rather than forcing users to register on their site, showing pop-ups, or redirecting them to registration forms to promote their brand, products, and services.

 People also ask

 A recent study of 2.5 million search queries found that Google’s “People Also Ask” feature now appears in about 48.6 percent of searches. With its prime location at the top of the SERP and often above the top, everyone will want their content to rank in this coveted SERP feature.

 To achieve this, you need to answer common questions in your content. Using a keyword research tool or checking the SERPs is a good practice for identifying long-tail question keywords for your audience.

 Then, include the questions in your h2 or h3 headers or add an FAQ section and provide complete answers,

 Keyword Clustering

 Keyword research is the foundation of SEO, but as Google’s natural language processing (NLP) technology has become more sophisticated, effective keyword targeting has become more granular and complex.

 Gone are the days of optimizing content for a single keyword. Google abandoned exact match keyword optimization years ago. Today, because Google has gained a great understanding of the searcher’s intent, it does not use the actual string of words typed into the search box.

 Old-school content creation methods that focus on a single keyword string need to be revised. Instead, Google looks at the context of the query and analyzes the potential search intent to provide results.

 Keyword clustering is a more advanced strategy for improving your keyword rankings. It involves identifying multiple keywords with similar search intent and creating web pages targeting them.

 Keyword clustering is a more effective way to increase the number of keywords your web pages’ rank for and make your website an authority in critical areas. Although it takes longer, the results can mean that Google displays the same web page for hundreds more keywords.

 2. Core Web Vitals Optimization

 Page experience, now quantifiable by Core Web Vitals, has become a determining factor for page rankings on Google as of May 2021. Core Web Vitals is a set of three key page experience metrics that provide Google with data about the user experience offered by different pages on the web.

 The three Core Web Vital factors are:

 – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): the time it takes to load the most important content on the page.

 – First Input Delay (FID): the time it takes for your site to respond to the first user interaction with the page.

 – Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): the number of unexpected layout changes during the life of the page.

 Improving Core Web Vitals signals across your pages will have a tangible impact on the performance of your web pages for users and your search engine rankings. But Google clarified in a later announcement in December 2021, via a Core Web Vitals FAQ, that the impact would come only to mobile search results.

Google’s free Search Console and Page Speed Insights tools will be vital in identifying areas for improvement on your web pages. 

 The “Experience” feature of your Google Search Console account will allow you to see which pages do and do not meet Core Web Vitals standards and list the issues affecting your pages.

 PageSpeed Insights reports, which are in addition to Core Web Vitals data, can give you insight into how your web pages perform for users.

 In addition, Google confirmed that websites enabling AMP might not have to worry about Core Web Vitals compliance, as AMP pages generally meet this requirement.  So, if you’ve enabled AMP, you’ve saved the time and money needed to optimize the site for Web Vitals.

 However, Google warns web admins against using heavy images and other external elements in AMP, which could affect the Web Vitals score.

Note that Core Web Vitals will not constitute a primary signal for page ranking in the SERPs.  Google says it will continue to rank web pages with high-quality content and links, even if it does not meet Web Vitals standards.

 3. Consider MUM to improve your rankings

  Google used advanced artificial intelligence to improve the quality of search results with the introduction of RankBrain, then later with BERT in 2019, and now the search engine giant is making yet another era by introducing Multitask United Model or MUM. 

 MUM or Multitask Unified Model is the new way Google processes users’ search queries to provide them with the most relevant and comprehensive information possible. With the MUM update, Google is better able than ever to understand the context of users’ searches,

Thus, it is no longer possible to trick the search engine by stuffing keywords or using other tricks that used to work. MUM will combine different aspects of the search query and try to understand the user’s feelings, context, entities, and, most importantly, intent to provide answers that are close to what the user expected.

There are no more language or format barriers for Google. It now considers all available content on the topic, including podcasts, videos, images, Etc. and refines its search results based on the richness of the content provided and its deep understanding of what the user is looking for.

 According to Prabhakar Raghavan’s announcement at Google I/O 2021, its new natural language processing model MUM is 1,000 times more potent than BERT. She can multitask, allowing it to analyze videos, images, and text in 75 languages to give users the answers to complex search queries. [4]

 While high-quality content is always the way to go and the only way to ensure your pages get these rankings, you need to put in extra effort to understand user intent.

 4. E-A-T

 Google has repeatedly emphasized that quality content is critical to ranking success.  When trying to improve the quality of your content for SEO purposes, it is essential to refer to the E-A-T principle. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Google uses these factors to determine if a web page provides quality content.

 With its more innovative algorithm and knowledge graph, Google can tell if there is an actual entity behind the domain and determine each page. It is, therefore, increasingly more work to prove to Google that your pages deserve the top spots.

 You must keep the concept of EAT in mind when developing your content by filling it with all the criteria of the EAT principle. To ensure you are creating quality content and sending strong E-A-T signals to the search engine:

 – Show that you are relevant to your audience and the content your target audience enjoys.

 – Be sure to back up your claims with statistics and facts, and link to reliable, quality sources.

 – Invest in building a brand, so your site becomes the preferred destination in a given niche.

 5. Long-Form Content

Google is concerned with ranking quality content.  While content length is not a ranking factor, there is a strong correlation between longer content and higher rankings. Indeed, longer content is more likely to display the E-A-T signals that Google associates with quality, such as in-depth content, original research and analysis, and quality authorship and use of experts.

 To ensure that you captivate and engage the readers who visit your website, you need to adopt a long and relevant content strategy on your website. Your content should follow E-A-T guidelines and be 3,000 to 3,500 words long. Longer content of 3,000 words or more has been shown to generate more traffic and shares than shorter content.

  Creating quality long-form content can significantly improve your search engine rankings. As Google improves its NLP algorithms, it will increasingly be able to recognize quality.  So take the time to provide comprehensive information about the keywords you are targeting, and you will likely get better keyword rankings and higher average positions.

 For long-form content to be effective, it must be able to keep readers interested. To keep readers interested, make your content easy to navigate, especially on mobile devices, by breaking it up into multiple subsections using H2 and H3 subheadings.

 Large chunks of text can be considered intimidating by many readers, and they can overwhelm a small screen.  Also, be sure to have a table of contents at the top of the page or a teaser to consider the “user experience” aspect of long-form content,

 After all, users don’t link to wait, and you can’t force them to read the entire content. To further improve your SEO, make sure your content is easy to share by including obvious share links at the beginning and end of your content.

Passage Indexing

 Google is rolling out a new search ranking feature called Passages in 2021. The search engine will now use natural language processing when indexing web pages and attempt to understand each passage’s meaning.

 This feature allows Google to rank specific sections or a page passage semi-independently of the page itself. In other words, instead of ranking an entire page based on relevance, Google will now evaluate the relevance of specific page sections.

SO, a particular section or passage covered by your article can appear in search results for relevant queries, even if it is drowned in the vastness of the main topic.  Therefore, passage indexing is more of an internal ranking system and will significantly impact the results you see in the SERPs. 

 It is more or less confirmed that web pages with highly structured and relevant content that tries to answer the pressing questions of the target users will benefit from the pass indexing ranking algorithm.  Passage indexing will significantly influence search results for long-tail and question-based queries.

 A specific question requires a “needle in a haystack” approach to find the correct answer. That is what Google is trying to achieve with pass-by indexing.

 With passage indexing, Google tries to find context and relevance in the different passages of a page to present users with the best answers. According to Google, the benefits of passage indexing will be felt by sites that contain valuable content.

 The structure of your content will become as important as its quality to give Google an idea of the depth of your content and its ability to meet users’ search intent.  It is essential to divide the content into several sections so that each section addresses a subtopic using headings.

 If you write short content, the chances of covering smaller subtopics and passages are less, and the benefit of per-passage indexing may be less noticeable.

6. Video in Search Results

  Today, videos show up in Google’s search results, come into SEO and dominate all other forms of content consumption, thanks to an exemplary implementation of structured data. Optimized video content should therefore be an integral part of your SEO strategy. One way to do this is to ensure your video channel description is optimized by including a user-friendly overview of its content and appropriate keywords.

  Google has launched two new structured data – Seek Markup and Clip Markup – to help video content appear in search results with critical moments.

 Seek Video Markup

  Seek Video Markup is an automated way to tell Google how a URL structure works so that Google can automatically display the key moments identified for your video using the following properties in your VideoObject.

 Clip video markup

 For Clip tagging to work, you must manually tell Google the timestamp and label to display the key moments.  Currently, the Key Moments feature is available for videos uploaded to YouTube.

 7. Image Optimization

 Visual search is also part of the SEO trends, as people love visual content and providing information. As a digital marketer looking to improve search visibility, it’s important to include original images that correlate with your topic and keyword so that Google Discover always has it in the search listing.

  It would help if you gave users and crawlers proper tagging and signals, such as file names, proper labeling for high-quality images, and alt tags, to help them rank photos in search.

 Google Lens then learns more about areas, people, products, Etc.

 Google Discover also leverages images.

 A case study recently released by Google showed that sites using the max-image-preview meta tag could see a 79% increase in click-through rate and an increase in total clicks of up to 333%.

 8. Content Diversification

 Content diversification provides the opportunity to create quality content assets in different formats. Content diversification is the foundation of omnichannel marketing, which has multiple benefits, including creating quality content in different formats, more marketing channels, cross-device compatibility, a smoother shopping experience, Etc.

 Today’s consumers are everywhere, all at once, on social media pages like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, as well as on Snapchat or TikTok, and searching for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems on Google.

 So it’s more important than ever to take a consistent, streamlined omnichannel marketing approach to your digital marketing campaigns.

 9. Local Optimization

 As search results become more localized, local businesses will get more attention from Google.  Google My Business wants to highlight results that will benefit users.

  To target a local audience, you must include the city, state, or country name so that Google can rank your site higher. For sites that don’t just target a country, it will be increasingly necessary to create locally focused content.

 10. Mobile Usability and Voice Search

 The user experience on mobile devices should be the focus of every SEO expert. Since Google rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2019, optimizing your content for mobile devices is more critical than ever. 

 As a result, Google mainly uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking. It is estimated that nearly 75% of internet users will access the internet solely via mobile devices by 2025.

  The more Internet use occurs from mobile devices, the more you’ll need to ensure your content is optimized for those users. Thanks to Google, it’s easy to check your mobile site’s effectiveness with its free mobile-friendly test.

 You can also use Google’s Mobile Usability Report to see if there are any issues with your mobile site and what you can do to fix them. Using these tools can be crucial in helping you find and fix your website’s mobile usability issues that could negatively impact your SEO.

 In addition, Google has already made it known that page speed is a factor considered for the ranking.  In other words, improving page speed contributes to the overall experience of your website visitors and your ability to secure the coveted page 1 spot in the SERPs.

 Voice search

  There’s no denying that voice search has become a part of our daily lives.   More and more people regularly ask a mobile device or smart speaker questions.  It makes sense that Google prefers mobile-friendly sites with fast speeds. There are significantly more searches on mobile (64%) than on desktop (35%).

  Since mobile device users often use voice search to find answers while on the go, it’s safe to assume that voice search is becoming popular, and these two trends are very much related. Another SEO strategy is to rework your content to include common questions users may ask.  Consider identifying long-tail question keywords and include them in your h2 or h3 headers.

 Mobile users rarely have time to scroll through pages; with voice search, only one result is read to the user. Therefore, optimizing featured snippets is paramount to your online visibility – you’re either there or not.

 In addition, Google introduced in 2021 the operation of LaMDA, the acronym for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications,” which is a language model for dialogue applications and sets new benchmarks for natural AI conversations. Google has focused on training this language model to produce sensitive and specific responses rather than more generic ones.

 LaMDA can make conversations natural by fetching information from Google’s Knowledge Graph and can be trained to read words, understand the relationship between words in a sentence and predict the next term.

11. Enriched Results and Featured Snippets

 Google’s search results and SERP features are becoming increasingly affluent and interactive. With its prime location at the top of the SERP and often above the first position, everyone will want their content to rank in this coveted SERP feature.

  You’ll need to work on implementing structured data and other ways to trigger featured snippets and ensure rich snippets. Knowledge graphs, extended “people ask too” responses, and visible results have become prominent.

  It’s not an easy task, but armed with the correct information and tools, you can discover which snippets still need to be taken by your rivals and implement the accurate structured data to take control of the SERPs.

Read More: 10 Featured Snippets Optimization Tips to Rank in Position Zero

 How to implement structured data?

 Many tools, plugins, and solutions allow any website owner to implement structured markup without any technical knowledge required.

 – Structure your content with H2-H3 subheadings that answer the query questions that trigger featured snippets.

 – Provide quick, concise answers to common questions in your content under each subheading for Google to grab and highlight.

 -Use a keyword research tool to identify long-tail question keywords among your audience.

 – Provide complete answers, by including questions in your H2, H3 and H4 sections, or by adding an FAQ section.

 Schema markup:

 Schema markup is a microdata vocabulary that helps Google better understand and extract content from your pages, allowing them to display as rich snippets, which are more engaging and clickable for users.

  Rich snippets allow Google’s crawlers to show users the exact content they are looking for, resulting in a better user experience.

 12. User Experience

 A key driver of search marketing is to focus on giving your site visitors the best possible impression when they are on your page. Remember that Google tracks and considers the time spent on a website when it is linked to a search.

  A website with tons of errors, dated aesthetics, and a terrible navigation structure is a site that users will likely click on as soon as they arrive. A website where people don’t stay to get the answers they need is probably irrelevant to Google.  In other words, people who click on the site immediately because of poor usability affect your chances of ranking high in Google SERPs.

 To fix this problem, start by browsing and using your website as a user would, and don’t worry about changing it to something annoying or generally unpleasant if you find and replace it with what might entice them to act on your site even faster.

 13. Automating SEO Practices

 They are automating SEO practices, whether technical audits, competitor analysis, or search intent analysis, is increasingly common. Intelligent technical audit automation uses machine learning to segment technical issues by content type.

 It is more critical to implement real-time SEO validation and alerting systems to prevent issues from generating or monitoring them in real-time to get notified as soon as they occur to avoid prevalent SEO disaster scenarios.

 14. Refresh Existing Content

  All website owners should review and evaluate their content to make room for additional details, longer text, or more targeted keywords. The ultimate result is the ability to rank higher and outperform the competition for organic traffic in the coming year.

 15. Tedious Regular SEO

 Although Google updates its algorithm and search engine technology improves, the fundamentals of SEO have always remained the same.

 To continue to be successful with SEO, remember the basics that still apply:

 – On-page SEO: Make sure your meta titles, meta descriptions, header tags, images, and body text are optimized so that Google can better understand the content on your pages.

Read More: On-Page SEO:10 Essential Factors for Ranking on the First Page

 – Backlinks: Focus on getting high-quality backlinks from other sites through content marketing, guest blogging.

Read More: 12 Best Ways to Get Backlinks

 Conclusion

Keeping up with the ever-changing Google algorithm and search landscape is the job of every SEO professional. Quality content responsive to user intent, which is engaging, informational, and offers value to your audience, will always be the easiest and most popular way to get more organic traffic, rank higher in the SERPs, and expand your audience.

 Google can recognize quality content and user experience signals on web pages.  While backlinks and domain authority will still be essential to rank well in the SERPs, younger websites will have a better chance of ranking if they offer users a high-quality, high-performance web experience.

  As search moves towards contextual relevance, a better understanding of human language and intent and expanding to other content formats will impact your website’s ranking in the SERPs. Remember to audit your site regularly to make sure it’s performing at its best at all times.