Kickstart your 2023 SEO strategy

Did you know 53% of all web traffic comes from organic search accounts? This makes building and optimising the perfect search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy an essential task. But how do you manage to get ahead and beat the competition? What is your 2023 SEO strategy?

2023 will see some major changes that you can’t afford to miss. Below, we provide our 2023 SEO strategy to help and discuss the tools you need to execute it perfectly.

Planning Your 2023 SEO Strategy

SEO is changing and to stay ahead of the curve, you need to be abreast of the major changes. The most important of these are listed below.

Embrace AI

AI can currently handle several tasks, all of which will impact your SEO directly or indirectly. Firstly, chatbots can deal with customer queries and personalise website content. The impact of this is that customers stay on the site longer and have a better experience, decreasing your bounce rate.

One of the biggest leaps forward, though still in its testing period, is the recent arrival of Chat GPT. A tool that optimises language models for dialogue, it can be used to build blog content in an instant. All it needs is tweaking with good SEO practice, and AI will have made you a passable passage of text.

However, that does not mean that AI is a magic key to SEO success. Speakers at the latest 2023 AdWorld Conference highlighted that Google will continue to penalise junk content. Not content that incorporates automation, but content that solely relies on fast AI prompts for predictable content. This will work to restrict any content that has been heavily automated during its creative process.

Of course, this brings up an interesting conflict of interest. As AI improves, it may be harder for Google’s algorithms to catch it, which in turn uses automation itself. This means 2023 is a year when you really need to keep abreast of any changes.

Optimising for Voice

Content remains one of the best ways to attract people to your website. Yet the way people search for it is changing. This involves using voice search available on mobile devices and smart assistants.

The easiest way to do this is to target keywords that form questions in your SEO campaigns. In some industries, where people need a lot of assistance and advice, this will be easier to do. They can also work efficiently when combined with a sound knowledge of local SEO practices.

The Rise of TikTok

Social media is often overlooked as a method of off-page SEO. Yet not only does it provide backlinks, but it also sends traffic to your site. Both of these will improve your ability to rank.

With upheavals in Twitter and users beginning to use Facebook less, TikTok has emerged as a force to be reckoned with. It is now the world’s main method of sharing pictures and video content. While it has a younger demographic, more older people are using it while its original base begins to age.

Social media marketing is a big task. But by creating content, using the right hashtags, and having quality video, you can build something lasting that will positively impact all aspects of your business.

Our Favourite SEO Tools in 2023

All SEO campaigns should start with a sound knowledge of the tools of the trade. Like a builder wouldn’t go to work without a shovel and spade, no marketer should venture online without keyword research tools.

Google provides many of these for free, but you can often find that paid models are easier to use and offer more features. The most popular SEO tools of 2023 are below.

SemRush

SemRush has been one of the top SEO strategy tools for some time now. This is due to its accessibility for a range of practitioners, from small business owners to professional digital marketing experts. With a flexible price plan, you never seem to be paying for things you don’t need.

On the surface, it is a tool for keyword research. Yet it packs in so many more features that will help your website rank. These include campaign management tools, competitor analysis, and tracking of a website’s position on Google’s ranks. As an agency partner, we’re offering our free SEMRush audit tool for all users, so you can test your website today.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a lesser-known SEO tool, with its unique selling point being focused on the theory that you should keep an eye on the competition. It will find your competitors and then check their keywords and campaigns along with their organic search results.

While it is a little more tricky to use effectively, it is cheaper than others in its field. Once you have the data, you can use it to target areas they may have missed, or check out which ones are less profitable for them to save your time and marketing budget.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is one of the fastest SEO audit tools on the market. It will quickly crawl websites of any size, and then give a comprehensive list of common SEO issues impacting it. These may include broken links, redirects, duplicate content, and myriad other problems.

From here, you can begin to sort out anything that may be losing you valuable traffic and watch it improve step by step. It does have a free trial which is exceptional, though, for long-term plans, you should go for the paid options.

BuzzSumo

If your campaign is focused on increasing your social media presence for SEO purposes, then you can’t go far wrong with BuzzSumo. Focusing on social media, its main purpose is to dig out trends and issues people are talking about online. Even if you are not on social media, it can be a great way to get ideas for relevant content to build brand awareness.

Its main features include a great backlink monitoring service that operates in real-time. It also has a robust content research tool that will help push your content strategy far beyond anything your competitors could imagine.

Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is an automated tool that can be used for improving webpages. It does this by performing an audit of the page and presenting results on accessibility, its speed, and how optimised it is for SEO. Best of all, it is open-source and free to use.

This can help you perform a quick audit of the website and identify what needs changing. As it is updated by Google, it is safe to assume it responds to the latest changes in policy and SEO practice way before its competitors can.

Getting Help With SEO

This list is not extensive, and if you are planning to spend the year focusing on a specific aspect of your 2023 SEO strategy, you may find ones more suited. Yet if you concentrate on these areas and use the tools provided, you can’t go far wrong. With time and patience, organic traffic will soon flow to your site. Our team is more than happy to have a free 30-minute consultation where we will give you actionable takeaways, and show you how our SEO services will impact your website.

All the tools above are best utilised when operated by professional, trained marketers. If you want to get the best from your budget so you can concentrate on running a business, we can help.