Heading into 2023, there’s a lot of uncertainty looming in regards to the economic situation. Are we heading into a recession? If the answer is in the affirmative, should companies look to reduce their ad spend

One thing is certain, paid advertising is not performing as well as they used to. For the same marketing budget, companies are facing a diminishing return on investment (ROI). If you’re looking for profitability, simply focusing on paid advertising is not going to cut it. 

This article is written to give tips on how to get ahead in 2023 through marketing. It specifically focuses on growing your brand’s organic traffic. 

Let’s deep dive into what you should be preparing to do. 

Create content for humans, not algorithms 

Previously, content creators have been writing with an algorithm-centric mindset. They have been targeting primary, secondary and long-tail keywords in the hopes of ranking higher on search engines. 

But here’s the latest news: 

Keywords are no longer an essential part of SEO. Pages can rank without the keyword being mentioned more than once in the article. 

Instead, the new way is to focus on search intent and relevance. The question is: 

How do you come up with content ideas according to the search intent?

  • Focus on the niche that represents your company the most. 
  • Make a list of content ideas in that niche. 
  • Once you’ve exhausted the ideas, take advantage of Google Discover to come up with content ideas. 
  • Write engaging, punchy content that is relevant to what people are asking. 

Remember writing click bait headlines will not work in 2023. Click bait headlines keep you out of showing on Google discover.  

If you also want paid advertisements on websites, use a strategy termed contextual targeting to come up with relevant ad content according to the theme of the page. As a result, the impressions are relevant and there’s a chance of a higher conversion.   

What type of content should you focus on in 2023?

The attention span of people is decreasing, so focusing only on long-form content is not the best strategy. Long-form content helps when users want to deep-dive into a certain topic or when there’s a need to give a step-by-step guide. 

To keep the content engaging, consider adding videos and media to the articles. 

Short-form videos have become common in 2022 and their popularity will continue in the upcoming year. Content that is to the point tends to be effective, especially in B2B and B2C marketing. People want their queries answered in a short amount of time and short-form content effectively serves this purpose.    

Re-audit your website  

It’s not like you stop caring about algorithms completely. You do need to take them into consideration, especially when it comes to optimizing your website.

Before diving into creating new growth policies, work on fixing the existing issues on the website first. 

If you have a search console API, pull all your website’s data. Do a complete SEO gap analysis. 

Recrawl your website. Eliminate all internal 301 and 302 redirects. Fix all the website errors until you get a solid clean crawl. 

All of this website maintenance lies under the domain of technical SEO. Skale offers technical SEO auditing and on-going consultancy to help you optimize your conversion rate. Seeking their assistance means they manage all aspects of improving your website’s traffic and organic rankings. 

Part of website auditing also includes deep-diving into the following areas: 

Dead URLs

What are dead URLs? 

Dead URLs are the ones with zero clicks or low impressions. Create a list of all your dead URLs.

Once you identify dead URLs, get rid of the internal links that point to those URLs. Instead of deleting them altogether, link them to the next page that’s most relevant. 

Cannibalisation 

If multiple pages on the website talk about the same topic, then it gets confusing for search engines. To make it clear which page is the most relevant: 

  • Carry out a cannibalisation audit: This way you’ll be able to identify all the pages that have similar content and can be consolidated. 
  • Carry out a content audit: Create a list of pages that are similar in nature. Merge pages if there’s a possibility for aligned query sharing. Identify the pages that lost search queries. 

Content Strategy

Create a new content strategy after carrying out a cannibalisation and content audit. Here, make use of tools such as SEMRush or AHREFS. Using their position explorer feature, look to see the position shift of particular pages in SERPs. 

If ranking of certain pages is reduced, revamp the content. Create a mix of both short form and long form content. 

Use Surfer SEO to check the content score. Aim for a score of 75+ as it indicates content is relevant and of high quality. 

Review search appearance data

By reviewing search appearance data in the search console, look for lost clicks. For instance, make up for missed opportunities by adding videos into pages and FAQ snippets. Use Also Asked to find the queries people are searching for. 

After you incorporate these questions into your pages, tag them with SCHEMA. This way you can improve the way search engines read your content. 

After creating articles, remember to tag them with available SCHEMA. After creating a new page or post, get the URL indexed through the search console. The aim is for pages to start ranking as soon as possible.

Remember:

  • Your index should be streamlined to have only crawlable URLs that are of value. 
  • Control the website parameters via robots.txt. 
  • Review auxiliary URLs that can be blocked in robots.txt. 

Run a click gap analysis

Analyze the click rate of pages. Do an analysis of the last 3 months to rule out the effect of seasonality. 

The focus should be on pages that are recording a lower number of clicks as compared to the previous quarter.

Sort results according to the number of impressions and segregate the results in a Google Sheet. Segment the pages that are losing clicks into “large”, “fair” and “small”. This can be done by easily highlighting the click-through rate (CTR). 

The best way to sort out high impression pages is to use this formula: Pages that have at least 0.5% of the total impression share of the domain are high impression pages.  

After determining the number of pages using this proportionality, filter all pages that have high impressions. 

The pages that have 2000 or more impressions are the opportunity pages. By focusing on opportunity pages, improve the overall performance of your website. 

Review your internal linking strategy

By mastering internal linking, you can improve your search rankings significantly. The best way of creating an internal linking strategy is to pick 10-20 of your biggest underperforming pages and add more links to the pages where there is topical relevance. 

After adding more links, evaluate their performance. If the traffic increases significantly, continue with this strategy. 

By doing an analysis regularly, gain unique insights. The insights will give you new ideas and point of views on how to frame your content and linking strategy. 

Final verdict: where should your focus be in 2023?

Your focus in 2023 should be on content marketing, especially if you don’t have a massive advertising budget. 

Remember that content marketing doesn’t mean generic SEO content –  writing that doesn’t provide any insightful or valuable information. 

While creating content, imagine you’re writing for experts who are aware of the ins and outs of the industry. 

When done right, content marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. It’s more about thought leadership that differentiates you from the competition and helps you become memorable. 

The market is saturated. It is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to create a strong brand positioning. So, what’s the solution? Share your personal experiences of situations that worked in your favor; some key insights that are valuable to the audience. People should learn something from you. This is the best way consumers will remember your brand’s point of view.

If you follow this strategy, people will be sharing your content organically. This way, you unlock new distribution channels that allow you to generate a significant amount of traffic from communities and social media. This traffic can be used to make sales. 

Does all of this seem overwhelming? If you answered in the affirmative, you might be better off seeking assistance from a marketing agency that has been in the industry for a long time. Let them take the reins of your brand marketing and you can focus on selling the right product and building exceptional customer service. 

Author Bio:
Osama Zahid is a technology content strategist who is passionate about content marketing and all things SEO. He has helped various companies rank their content on the first page of search engines. In his free time, Osama loves to play football and travel.

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