Each year brings new opportunities to make digital marketing work for you. It’s natural that the methods you use to interact with your customers with alter organically over time. As we learn more about how users find what they are looking for, major search engines develop new strategies for meeting this demand. Once these new strategies are implemented, it becomes necessary for you to reassess your search engine optimization methods so you can stay relevant in the online marketplace. Accomplishing this takes more than a bit of knowledge and effort, so let’s see what the oncoming trends are for 2023.
Content Creation/Quality
It’s not just about what you sell, it’s about what you provide to your customer base that keeps them on your website longer, improving your search engine rankings. With context becoming a definitive foundation of SEO strategies, having a writer on staff that can provide quality content to your online presence will be a necessity. This is about more than just utilizing keywords and phrases. You need to have content that is made for people, by people. Which is to say; helpful, informative, and relevant to the topic content that is written by an actual person. This can be accomplished with blogs, video content, or research that backs your business. Quality matters more than quantity, so be sure to research topics thoroughly and create reliable content for a wider audience engagement.
Core Web Vitals
How customers experience a website is essential to their interaction with your business. In 2021, Google implemented the Page Experience Algorithm, which focused on the three core web vitals of user experiences: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint, measures the loading performance that the user interacts with first by marking the point at which the site’s main content has finished loading. For a more positive user experience, this should take no more than 2.5 seconds. This user-centric method takes considerable effort to achieve, so utilizing precautions by reducing plug-ins, minimizing code, and using libraries sparingly or not at all can help your overall LCP grade.
FID, or First Input Delay, measures the load responsiveness of a user interacting with your page. It marks the amount of time between when a customer first clicks, taps, or otherwise attempts to interact with your website to the point at which the browser begins processing that interaction in response. The ideal time between click to reaction should be less than 100 milliseconds for a usable page. This comes down to good coding and a quality server that is up to the task.
CLS, or a Cumulative Layout Shift, measures the visual stability of a website to the user. Have you ever visited a website and started to click on a button only to have the page content suddenly shift due to a block loading, forcing you to click on the wrong thing? This clunky, annoying aspect of the website experience happens when content loads at different speeds, altering what the customer looks at. Incorrect dimensions for images, ads, and embeds are a few of the most common causes of a poor CLS score. You can use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), to help mitigate this.
Web Accessibility
We tend to think of the internet as being fairly user-friendly, right? It’s easy enough to see things that way until you realize that your website has unintentional roadblocks to potential users. Web accessibility has become an important tool in SEO by increasing the potential user base that can visit and successfully interact with your business. Everything on your site from the format, structure, navigation, content, and visuals needs to be functional for everyone in order to enhance their individual experience. The guidelines for an ADA-compliant website are extensive, which means working with a professional who has experience in web accessibility is a priority.
Responsive Content
Responsive content adapts itself to the size of the window or screen it is being viewed on while remaining user-friendly. The most typical example is viewing a website on a computer screen vs. a cellphone. The layout changes from a three-column format to a single-column format and any unnecessary images are hidden so as not to interrupt the important content on a smaller screen. You can utilize simple layouts for a more mobile-friendly design overall, which results in a stronger SEO ranking that benefits your business.
Optimizing Page Titles
When your website turns up on a search page, you are competing with hundreds of your peers for the user’s attention. A smart, relevant page title can be the difference between a click or a scroll for your business. Your page title, or title tag, is what will show up in the browser tag and SERP along with the meta description for your content. It tells your readers what this page is about from the start and improves your overall SEO. In recent years, Google has made a move to rewrite page title tags which have had an unpleasant result on the Clickthrough-rate (CTR) performance. Taking initiative and optimizing the page title yourself, reduces the chances that Google will decide to do this for you.
