It’s that time of year again. It’s hard to believe there are only two months left in 2023. That means it’s time to take stock of what happened in the world of SEO this year, and make some predictions about what 2024 will bring to the world of SEO.
Table of Contents
- Content Continues to Reign Supreme
- Google’s EAT Standards Become EEAT Standards
- What Are Your Goals?
- Automation in SEO
- The Biggest Disruption to SEO in the Next Few Years Will Be…
- The Biggest Shifts in the SEO Industry in 2023
- How to Weather the Storm
Content Continues to Reign Supreme
When asked about where they were focusing most of their resources, the vast majority of SEO pros said they are currently focusing most of their time and energy on their content marketing strategy.
I know that, being a content marketing strategist, I’m biased, but I still have to say that I could not agree more with this assessment.
Yes, there are technical things you can (and should) do to improve your search rankings, but at the end of the day, Google still heavily relies on content to figure out what your site is all about, determine if you are a trustworthy authority in your field, and if the content is up to date.
That means your content needs to tell people (and Google) what you’re all about and position you as a thought leader in your industry, which you can only do if your content is up to date.
Google’s EAT Standards Become EEAT Standards
Speaking of Google and what it uses to determine where to place you in search rankings, one of the major updates to Google’s algorithm this year was to add an E to its EAT standards.
The original EAT acronym stands for Expertise, Trustworthiness, and Authority. Basically, Google want’s to make sure you know what you’re talking about, you can be trusted to provide helpful, accurate information, and you are an authority on the subject.
The new E stands for Experience. As in, “How much experience do you have in this field?”
It’s a common interview question, so it makes sense that Google would try to determine how much experience content creators have in an industry before pointing people their way. There’s a big difference between a fresh-faced college graduate and someone who has been in this industry for decades.
How does Google determine experience? Using much of the same content it uses to determine your expertise: your bio and your thought pieces. Your bio should give an indication of when you started your career, and your thought pieces should include your personal experiences with certain aspects of your industry, not just a summary of what you heard elsewhere.
Personally, this is something I’ve been working on in my own content marketing strategy over the past year, even before Google expanded their EAT standards. That’s because it’s one of the best ways to position yourself as an authority in your industry.
Summing up what other people have to say can make you a resource for other people to find those experts, but eventually they’re going to figure out they can’t get anything from you that they can’t also get from those experts, which will ultimately cause you to lose your audience.
By talking about what you think of recent developments in your industry and why you think that way (i.e., what experience has led you to think that way), you provide your audience with something they can only get from you.
What Are Your Goals?
I always start out by asking my clients what their goals are for their content. That information helps me figure out the best call to action to use in the content I’m creating for them, but it’s also important to keep in mind that SEO is about more than just driving traffic. At the end of the day, it needs to help the business meet its objectives, and the most experienced SEO professionals surveyed said that is exactly what they were focusing on: meeting specific business goals and improving the quality of their audience.
I found that last one to be really interesting because audience size tends to get the most attention among people who are new to the SEO game.
But people who have been doing this for a while know that quality is much more important than quantity, and I could not agree more. The higher quality your leads, the easier it will be to engage and convert them. That, in turn, will help you achieve your business goals
Automation in SEO
When it comes to implementing artificial intelligence into their work, SEO strategists said they were most looking forward to making the most of generative AI, content generation, and content audits.
While I’m hesitant to use AI to create content, I can see people finding value in using it to speed up the process. Personally, I’m a fast writer, so I don’t get much benefit from generative AI. If you have a harder time putting words on the page (or the screen, as the case may be), I can see how AI could help you get something on the page that you could then massage and turn into something worthwhile.
Personally, that massaging and editing took so long I could have done it from scratch in less time, but like I said, I write faster than most.
I also like using AI to give me some ideas to help me get over writer’s block. When my mind is coming up blank, it can help to have something on the screen to act as a starting point, and I have definitely used AI for that purpose.
I’m not sure I trust AI for content audits. I know AI has come a long way, and I know Google’s algorithm largely depends on AI “reading” our website content to determine its quality and relevance, but AI still has its limitations, and sometimes Google gets it wrong.
As with anything involving AI, I would definitely make sure there are humans overseeing the process. I’m just not sure how you can manage that thoroughly without having the humans just duplicate the work of the software.
That said, content audits are extremely time intensive, especially if you have a lot of content on your site, so if there were a way to do that quickly and effectively, I would definitely be interested to learn more about that.
The Biggest Disruption to SEO Performance in the Next Few Years Will Be…
Of course generative AI tops the list, especially since more and more people are using it as a search engine, rather than a chatbot.
That said, generative AI still needs human-created content to feed it so it knows what to say when it’s asked about things like the state of SEO in 2023. That means Open AI should have a motive to point people towards our content, but we’ll see if that actually happens.
Then there’s Google’s new(ish) EEAT standards, and improved automation capabilities, which should allow us to do our jobs more efficiently.
The Biggest Shifts in the SEO Industry in 2023?
Again, it’s not hard to guess that ChatGPT tops the list here, shortly followed by Google updates.
In addition to Google’s EEAT standards, some of the other updates that topped the list including Google phasing out third-party cookies and its zero-click search results.
The lack of Google’s third-party cookies gives us less information to work with when learning about visitors to our website, but we can still track their engagement on our website and learn a lot about them that way, so I would focus on capturing those leads whenever possible.
Google’s zero-click results are also not super new, but they only work for searches in which the user is trying to find a short, simple answer. If they want to dive deeper into a subject (for example, the state of SEO in 2023) they’re going to have to click through to get the full story.
I don’t think there’s any way we can (or should) try to get around Google’s zero-click pages, but as always, I encourage people to create content that covers everything there is to cover on a topic because that’s the best way to position yourself as the authority on the topic.
How to Weather the Storm
While it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on new technology and emerging trends in any industry, especially one as ever changing as SEO, the best advice I can give for weathering these storms is to keep an eye on the basics of SEO strategy: create high-quality content that’s easy to read and answers your target audience’s questions, use relevant keywords, and make sure your site is optimized for Google to easily scan and index it.
When it comes to content as part of your SEO strategy, not only is content getting more ubiquitous, but Google’s standards for quality content are getting higher. At the same time, it’s getting harder to control what content appears in the SERPs.
All this means it’s also getting harder to acquire organic traffic, especially as Google is focusing more of its efforts on zero-click searches.
Overall, SEO professionals seem confident that search engines will continue to reward content that provides value to its users, and I agree.
As an SEO strategist who started from the content side, I can’t say I’m surprised by the importance of content in SEO. It’s also why I work so hard to make sure all the content I write for my clients is designed to make Google (and their target audience) happy.
If you want to talk about how I can do that for your brand, let’s chat.
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