The wonderful world of search engine optimisation (SEO) moves pretty quickly. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it! And with a new year on the horizon, there’s certainly no time quite like the present to do a little SEO strategy review and see what potential changes you could ring in 2023.
Part of your review should definitely include a peek at what’s expected to be big trends for search in the future, helping you to keep on top of the competition and achieve those page one results you’ve long been coveting.
To help you get started, here are some of the top trends that we here at Manchester SEO agency Ad Rank One expect to be big news over the coming 12 months. Which of these piques your curiosity?
Visual Content
We’ve blogged before about the importance of image SEO and what this will mean for businesses in the future, so we’re putting pictures and videos right at the top of our predicted SEO trends for 2023.
It’s highly likely that visual content will have a big impact on rankings over the coming months thanks to surging interest in social media channels like TikTok and Instagram Reels, as well as the rise of short-form video content… so make sure your site is set up to take this into account and you should be sitting pretty next year.
AI For SEO
While we would never advocate using artificial intelligence (AI) to produce the actual written content for a site, you can certainly use this kind of technology to your advantage and this is something we expect businesses to start investigating more thoroughly in 2023.
In fact, some of our clients have already started experimenting with AI and have seen some interesting results, so if you’d like to find out more about how you could leverage this tech to further your business aims, give us a quick call and we can guide you through it.
At a quick glance, you can use AI to help you find the right topics to cover on your site and keep an eye on what’s trending in your industry, as well as helping you refresh your content as needed and keep up to date with all the latest changes in algorithms so you can reduce the risk of a rankings drop.
The long and short of it is that data-driven, organically optimised and automated sites will come out on top, so keep a close eye on what’s happening with AI and SEO over the next 12 months.
Topic Clusters
One SEO strategy that has gained serious traction in 2022 is the topic cluster model, where pillar pages are created that serve as a hub for all the content relating to a particular topic.
Various content pages are then created that are related to the topic in question, linking back to the pillar page, which tells search engines that this pillar is an authority on the subject, which can have a positive impact on rankings. This is something we expect to see a lot more of in 2023.
Adopting this strategy can help make your site architecture and structure cleaner and more organised, which will also help your rankings since it’ll help improve the overall user experience… which search engines are a big fan of!
Marketing In The metaverse
There’s been a lot of metaverse buzz this year and you can bet that it’s only going to get louder as time goes on. From an SEO and marketing perspective, the rise of the virtual universe will mean trying to find out how best to go about being found there.
Currently, this will likely involve using related words and phrases in brand names, products and content so you can be found by the right target market in search and on social platforms.
Or you could see how you may be able to use augmented and virtual reality technology to create 3D experiences of your business to give your local SEO a boost. It’s all about experimenting at the moment, since the metaverse is still very much in its infancy, so you could have a lot of fun trying different tactics and seeing what sort of response you get.
Helpful Content
Earlier this month (December), Google rolled out another helpful content update to make improvements on its original system that was introduced back in August… so it’s relatively safe to assume that this will be of increasing interest to search spiders in the near future.
Helpful content is all about rewarding websites that put people at the heart of their operations, instead of those that are obviously ticking boxes in a bid to target search engines.
The user experience is absolutely key and helpful content will tie in with this, with sites being indexed preferentially if they bring something unique and valuable to the table, rather than what can generally just be found from any online source.
Want to find out any more about these trends or discuss anything else related to SEO? Get in touch with the Ad Rank One team today to see how we can help.