3 SEO Trends Marketers Should Look Out for in 2023
Learn from Marcus Tober, Semrush, three SEO trends marketers should look out for in the coming year.
We are slowly moving toward the end of 2022. Now, marketers should start focusing on the challenges search engine optimization (SEO) will present in the coming year. Here, Marcus Tober, SVP, Enterprise Solutions, Semrush, shares three SEO trends marketers should look for in the coming year.
Approaching the end of a year with two core updates and a handful of other algorithm adjustments from Google, marketers should now consider the challenges and opportunities SEO will present in 2023. What types of content should brands prioritize to ensure potential customers come across it early and often in their searches? How should Google’s moves inform online visibility strategy?
Marketers should take stock of three trends: fierce competition in transactional searches, Google’s prioritization of informational content, and the increasingly central role images play in the search-driven customer journey. Here’s what marketers need to know about all three trends and how they can turn each into an advantage.
Transactional Searches Get More Competitive
This past summer, Google continued running tests for Popular Products, a feature first introduced on mobile in 2020. Now a fixture of the desktop user experience as well, the integration is an organic promotional panel showcasing top-selling merchandise from sites and brands. It displays product photos and details in a way that lets users compare merchandise quickly without visiting any vendor sites.
The growing prevalence of Popular Products is most likely laying the groundwork for a world where users cannot only browse but also make purchases right on the SERP without having to navigate to any brand websites. Integrations with Google Pay will make this attractive to users seeking convenience. And Google will find ways to profit, whether it is by making Popular Products a paid spot or by taking a fee every time a shopper buys something through the direct Google interface. Over time, Popular Products will likely come to take up more space on the SERP, acting as a central feature of the user experience.
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What to know about Google’s Popular Products:
- The panel offers shoppers an easy way to browse multiple brands without visiting any vendor sites
- This feature is expected to take up increasingly more SERP real estate
- It represents an attempt from Google to own more end-to-end transactional traffic
Popular Products point to the efforts of Google to compete with Amazon as the go-to site for ecommerce. Pulling together schematic data from brand websites and curating the information into an easy-to-use one-stop shop is convenient for customers, but what does it mean for brands? How can brands prepare for a world where Google will own more and more transactional traffic?
Between Google’s push of sponsored ads and the quickly growing Popular Products panel, competition in organic transactional searches is steep. It will continue heightening, particularly as traffic on transactional searches is projected to decrease as Google aims to give users everything they need with just one search. Brands can adapt to fiercer competition for transactional searches by turning their attention to ranking high on informational searches.
Informational Resources Lend Brands an Edge
As Google looks to own more transactional traffic, brands can get their voice out with high-quality, top-of-funnel informational content. The distinction between these two categories is growing as Google aims to monetize as much of its transactional traffic as possible, leaving educational resources as a great way for brands to make headway.
For instance, if you are a company selling guitars, you are much more likely to get a rich, informative blog post on “how to choose your first guitar” or “learning to play the guitar” to rank high on the SERP than you would be to get a link to your product page to rank high. This is because the latter is competing with Google paid ads, Google Shopping, and now Popular Products as well. Users are more likely to find your site through a high-ranking link to a useful resource that can inform their shopping or research process.
The prioritization of helpful content is a long-standing practice for Google. It began evaluating sites’ E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) back in 2014 to connect its users with helpful and valuable content. In 2022, Google even released its first “helpful content update,” encouraging brands to focus on creating people-first web content that provides readers with a valuable experience. The update also introduced new methodologies for cracking down on content created with the express purpose of ranking high (which will also downgrade bare-bones content created by AI). Google is pushing content created by people for people.
Key takeaways for creating informational content:
- Google will reward brands for publishing high-quality resources that inform the customer journey.
- Brands stand to improve their online visibility the most by consistently sharing authoritative knowledge that answers a variety of customer questions.
- Google wants to connect its users with rich and nuanced explanations of products, services, and industries.
Google’s slow annexation of transactional traffic, combined with the search engine’s prioritization of content intended to help users, means that brands can achieve visibility by building out their web resources. Holistically owning the customer journey via content that earns visits directly to a branded site will be key to building direct relationships with shoppers and collecting first-party data as purchases increasingly play out in search results.
As Google encompasses more bottom-of-funnel activity, it is up to brands to cover the top-of-funnel customer experience. This will also help brands navigate recession fears. As shoppers engage in extensive research before making any big purchases, brands can serve them with highly detailed product-oriented content that speaks to their concerns. In fact, Semrush data shows that informational queries are on the rise, a trend likely to persist into the new year as people spend more carefully.
Images Take Center Stage
Along with increasing ownership of transactional traffic and the prioritization of brands’ informational content, Google is also making strides toward becoming a more visual platform. The meteoric rise of Pinterest during the pandemic demonstrates that users want visual content and foreshadows the shift toward images in online experiences. TikTok’s popularity points to the importance of visual content as well.
Google’s advancement of the Popular Products panel feeds into this trend, curating and featuring images on the SERP as a way to motivate users to make transactions. The real estate that images occupy on SERPs will continue to grow.
See More: 5 Best Practices To Elevate Your Product Content Across Search Engines
For brands, the call to publish high-quality, helpful content goes beyond written material and extends to images. Brands can get in on the image trend by featuring high-quality media on their sites, increasing the likelihood that Google will feature the graphics on the SERP and that users will be drawn to the brand site through those elements. Plus, with a brand site with a rich media environment of images, infographics, videos, and written content, brands are well-positioned to repurpose any of those elements individually and use them on platforms like Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, and others. This is because building a brand has to reach beyond Google.
How to get in on the image game:
- Include high-quality media on your site that Google can feature on its SERP
- Leverage image popularity in your quest to attract new customers
- Hoan the visual identity of your brand to stand out to customers and Google alike
Looking to the new year, Google will broaden the divide between transactional and informational content, leaving it up to brands to publish as much of the latter as possible. In-depth, authoritative resources and high-quality images will prove highly valuable as marketers seek to increase their visibility in search results and beyond.
What do you think are some of the SEO trends to watch out for in 2023? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Image Source: Shutterstock
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