It’s not technical.
But holy shit, people really, really WANT it to be so.
Particularly SEO experts.
Imagine if someone knocked on your door and said, “Hey, doctors are obsolete today. You can treat yourself at home with this cool scanner thing that will rearrange all your particles and it’ll fix that meniscus tear in your bad knee.”
Sounds cool for us, but equally not cool for doctors.
SEO in 2023 is the same.
Let me defend this position by taking a brief step back in time.
It’s 2011 and Google only knows what a page is about based on what you tell it in your SEO metadata.
It’s not really smart enough to figure out things like: content quality, topic clusters, satisfaction of search intent, etc.
There’s no nuance yet; just mechanical signals. Signals like:
- H1-H6 header tags.
- Broad keyword usage/density.
- Exact match keyword usage in URLs.
- Image optimization.
- Exact match keywords in title tags.
Guess what? Google doesn’t need (or want) you to bludgeon it over the head with these things anymore!
Oh and also, that checklist above looks a lot like…well, a checklist, right? And, a checklist that any person with Yoast or Moz could REASONABLY figure out without an SEO expert, right?
The truth is that technical SEO in 2023 is like having tires on your car: if they go flat, it will slow down your car. But upgrading them really won’t make you go any faster.
And since so few of these signals are relevant anymore, it’s often better for people to have not known them in the first place so that they don’t over-optimize, or waste time on the wrong things.
Think of 2011 as a sledgehammer, and 2023 as a surgeon’s knife.
SEO has become less complex by becoming more complex
Huh?
Google has become so sophisticated that it understands (by using math) how well (or poorly!) any given piece of content satisfies the reason someone searches a specific keyword.
The metrics they use to figure this out are super complex. But the concept is not.
The concept is: Understanding humans and what they actually want when they search something.
Whoa, dude…profound.
But seriously…what that means is that content writers (good ones) who understand basic math and psychology are going to be the “SEO experts” of 2023. And, the less they get hung up on the technical stuff, the better.
So if technical SEO is the rubber tires on the road, then writing content that satisfies searcher intent is the engine and the fuel.
Here’s how it’s going to work in 2023
For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to break down the 5% of SEO that will generate 95% of results.
Hint: none of it is technical.
Don’t believe me? I did this re-optimization with 30 minutes of work and nearly zero technical know-how. We went from position 5 to 1 overnight.
There are 3 main factors that are constantly being evaluated, which, based on how you do perform, will result in your keyword being pushed up and down. They are:
- Expected click-through rate: Based on your ranking position and your peers, Google expects you to be within a certain CTR range. Anything above or below that will likely result in a change of position, up or down.
- Dwell time: The length of time people spend on your piece of content before they go back to search results (Your goal is for that to never happen).
- Pogo-sticking: If someone clicks on your content, then goes back to search results and clicks on other pieces of content to weave together an answer, that’s bad for you.
And there are six things that can dramatically impact these three factors. They are:
- Topic coverage: Use MarketMuse or Clearscope to write content that is more “complete” than anything on the web. Imagine creating the Wikipedia page for every topic you write. See how to do it here. Impacts: Dwell time and lack of pogo-sticking.
- Engaging title: Your title tag should be an awesome 65 characters of marketing content. Look at the top 5 search results to see which titles people are clicking the most often See how to do it here. Impacts: Expected click-through rate
- Page speed: If your page loads too slowly, people will leave, period. Impacts: Dwell time and pogo-sticking.
- Media usage: Look at the top 5 results. Do they have video, graphics, charts, GIFs? Impacts: Dwell time and pogo-sticking.
- UX: If your UX is terrible, people are going to leave and find your competitors, period. Dhbooes your page look as good as your competitors’? Are your conversion forms clean and effective? Is the content nicely organized? Impacts: Dwell time and pogo-sticking.
- Intent understanding: Does the content and conversion actions match the intent of the search (informational, commercial, navigational)? If not, they will leave. Impacts: Expected click-through rate, dwell time and pogo-sticking.
The biggest tip of 2023 is simple… without using tools, look at the top 5 search results for any given keyword. They are the mathematical result of how well they satisfied everything above.
Most of SEO in 2023 is a combination of using your eyeballs, and a little hard work.