Top Google SEO Trends to Rank Your Website in 2023

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a constantly changing and ever-evolving strategy.

In fact, many experts estimate that Google updates its search algorithm around 500-600 times a year—once or twice each day. While most of these changes don't majorly impact your website's SEO because of the smaller updates, some updates are much bigger and play a significant role in the SEO landscape.

Hence, knowing these updates and understanding what the search engine prefers to meet its user's needs is important to rank highly and stay ahead of the competition.

This is why many small and huge businesses invest in SEO agencies and branding agencies that help them stay aware and up-to-date with the latest Google core updates and algorithm changes.

So, as the year ends, if you're all set to prepare your website's SEO strategy for the new year—either in-house or partnering with a web design company—this article shares the top Google SEO 2023 trends you should know for high website ranking.

SEO certainly plays a huge role in positioning your brand, driving traffic, and boosting its authority and credibility.

If your website ranks for the search queries your target audience use—there's no stopping the growing business sales and revenue.

While you can rely on the top digital marketing agencies and creative agencies to keep a keen eye on the Google algorithm updates, these top Google SEO trends can help you make 2023 the most bright and most successful year for your business.

  1. User experience above everything

Knowing your target customers and users as much as possible is highly important when optimizing your website for SEO. It's about matching the user intent and offering the best user experience.

  • User intent refers to the searcher's goal for a particular query. So, you must structure your website well and post high-quality content, features, and elements that help users meet their needs and easily navigate your site.
  • User experience is the measure of how the user feels when they visit and navigate through your website. So, to deliver a quality user experience, it's important to ensure high page loading speed and code it to make it lightweight and intuitive for your users.

 

Brandon Hufford, the founder of Growing Sprints, recently shared the importance of understanding the user's search intent over relying just on traditional keyword research as one of the top SEO trends for 2023.

 

 

Thus, optimising your website with the user's intent and experience is the most relevant SEO trend you should take seriously.

  1. New local SEO strategies

If you own a local business selling local services, ranking your website highly for relevant keywords is still key to online success in 2023.

With digitization and growing mobile searches, consumer queries are mostly related to services and products nearby. Hence, to enhance your local search, it's important to maintain your business, update Google My Business Listing, and use geo-targeted keywords relevant to your locality.

Google My Business is a free tool Google offers that allows you to create your business's local listing, including a Google Maps listing—making it easier for customers to find your local business with ease.

Geo-targeted keywords include the name of your localities, cities, towns, and neighbourhoods—combined with the keywords you use for your business.

An example of a geo-targeted keyword is “Vegan cake shops in Brooklyn.”

These local SEO strategies will help your business stay above the competition.

  1. Voice search optimization

41% of adult consumers use voice search daily—likely to grow in 2023 and beyond. In addition, the use and prevalence of digital assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, are only increasing.

So, if you aren't optimising your website for voice search, you're missing out big time.

Consumers are free to ask casual and direct questions using these assistants on search engines—making it important to target relevant keywords in the form of questions.

You can optimise your content and answer customers' queries that mostly start with “what,” “how,” and “where” by targeting long-tail keywords in the form of questions.

An example would be, “How do I get Google My Business?”

You can create blog posts targeting these keywords and include an FAQs section to answer relevant questions that match the queries of your target customers.

  1. Visual search optimization

Visual search engines, like Google Images, allow customers to search for queries using visual elements like images instead of text.

Google Lens is a popular AI-driven visual search tool that promotes a better user experience. Moreover, eCommerce platforms like Amazon and Bing also introduced visual search engines to deliver a greater user experience.

Hence, visual search optimization (VSEO) is becoming highly important for businesses that focus on optimising images for visual channels and search engines. This optimization helps increase your site's image's ranking in visual search results—improving its relevance, visibility, and the ability to rank for a particular visual query.

  1. Mobile optimization

60% of online searches are done using mobile devices—making mobile optimization crucial for businesses going forward in 2023.

Thus, creating a responsive website compatible with devices like tablets and mobile phones is important to meet modern customer expectations. You can use Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to create mobile-friendly versions of your site's web pages.

At the same time, you can also evaluate how mobile-friendly your website is by searching “Google Mobile-Friendly Tool” on the search engine and entering your site's URL in the prompted search bar.

Pro tip: Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), compress images, and implement content caching to boost your website's page loading speed.

Featured snippets are short answers pulled from a website's content displayed on the search engine results page to answer the searcher's query.

It gives the most relevant information based on the user's search intent, and according to a study, featured snippets get about 35.1% of all search engine clicks as they have a major impact on your site's traffic.

Thus, make sure you post well-written blogs, use long-tail keywords, and write informative and authoritative content to increase its chances of ranking for featured snippets.

  1. SERP optimization

When users search for a query on the search engine, the relevant results are shown on the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

Brand SERP optimization refers to improving your brand's visibility, credibility, and click-through rate (CTR) and boosting organic traffic to your website. Hence, it's important to optimize your website's content in an organized, clear, and helpful way for Google to understand immediately.

There are several ways to optimize your website for SERP. Some of those ways include:

  • Creating clear content that answer's the searcher's query
  • Optimizing content per relevant keywords
  • Building quality backlinks
  • Submitting your sitemap to Google
  • Implementing structured data for Google to understand your content with ease
  • Using content optimization, tracking, and SEO tool like SEMrush to analyze your website performance and perform competitor analysis

These strategies will help you rank higher on the search engine and improve your site's visibility.

  1. Conversational marketing

71% of customers expect companies and businesses to communicate with them in real time, and nearly 46% of customers expect companies to respond faster than 4 hours.

This makes conversational marketing an important SEO strategy for today's age that allows businesses to interact with customers instantly and personally.

A few critical conversational marketing strategies include:

  • Chatbots
  • Customized emails
  • Individualized videos
  • Visual sales representatives

Chatbots are a popular conversational marketing platform that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to send automated real-time messages resembling human-like communication.

Chatbots are available 24/7, providing exceptional customer service by automating routine activities, responding to customers quickly, and fulfilling their expectations.

So, if you want to deliver a high customer experience for a good SEO score, implement conversational marketing channels on your website.

Conclusion

Google's algorithms are becoming increasingly sophisticated daily—making it imperative for businesses to implement SEO tactics that work and ensure high user experience while ranking websites higher on the results page.

So, ensure you stay on top of the newest SEO trends to drive organic traffic and build a successful online presence in 2023.