2023 SEO Predictions

What I think will happen next year

It’s hard to believe it, but 2022 is already almost over.

I remember the days when “2022” sounded futuristic. Now it’s about to be just another part of the past just like all the other years preceding it.

The earth is never going to stop making that big-ass loop around the sun. As it does, times change and so does SEO. The only thing you can do is look forward and keep on keeping on.

In today’s article I’m going to over some of my predictions for what I think the SEO landscape will look like in the next 12 months. Obviously I don’t have a crystal ball and can’t actually predict anything, but there are a few things that I think will happen based on recent trends.

What I think will happen in SEO in 2023

Google will go to war with AI content

In the past couple months there’s been a huge surge in site owners coming up with the “brilliant” idea of letting GPT3 write all of their content for them.

This is likely because AI writing technology recently went mainstream with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention then you know that this is nothing new. GPT3 has been around since 2020 and I’ve been writing about it ever since I started this Substack.

Site owners have been trying to game the system by copy/pasting AI-generated content for a while now with disastrous results.

Here’s the lifecycle of AI spam sites so far:

1. Huge surge in rankings and traffic due to topical authority from quickly covering so many topically-relevant keywords

2. Instantly lose it all when the site gets hit with a penalty from Google

Since there’s a new surge in sites spamming the index with AI content, Google is likely going to have to be more aggressive.

I predict that there will be an official “AI update” that will start nuking these sites faster so that they can’t even get off the ground to begin with.

With that said, AI writing tools aren’t COMPLETELY useless. There is a way to use them to help generate long-form content quicker. I’m going to release a guide for paid subscribers in the near future that will show you the method.

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Adding text-to-speech to your content is a great way to make your website stand out from the competition.

Murf.AI has over 120 realistic human voices that you can use to create audio versions of your posts. It also has a tool that adds voiceovers to your YouTube videos so you don’t ever have to voice-dox yourself.

Once you hear the voices you’ll wish you had added TTS to your site sooner.

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Algorithm updates will be more frequent

Once upon a time Google would release 2-3 updates per year and let us live in peace the rest of the time.

Those days are over.

At the time of writing Google is currently rolling out two consecutive updates (helpful content update and link spam update) on top of adding an extra E to the EAT score (Experience, making it EEAT).

This is despite the fact that Google previously claimed that they don’t like rolling out concurrent updates and also claiming that they don’t like rolling out updates close to holidays.

The “update every 1-2 months” trend that we saw in 2022 is likely going to continue into 2023 and become a permanent part of the SEO landscape going forward. That means that staying on top of things is more important than ever. You have to be able to quickly pivot and adapt if something that was working suddenly stops working.

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Links will become more important

Since the concept of topical authority is becoming standard knowledge in the SEO community, I think we’ll see a greater emphasis placed on links.

At the end of the day, off-page is the hardest part of SEO to game. You have 100% control over everything that happens on your site regarding on-page and technical SEO, but you can never force an external site to link to you.

If everyone is mass-posting topically relevant content on their sites, then links become the main differentiator.

Serious site owners will focus on building links in 2023 to set themselves apart from everyone else.

Google will be forced to defend their position as #1 search engine

In 2021, TikTok officially became the most popular site on the internet, a title that Google held for 15 years in a row.

You might be thinking, “so what, TikTok is a social media app. It doesn’t affect Google at all”.

But the problem is that Gen Z is starting to use TikTok as a search engine for things like reviews, travel advice, how-to guides, etc. This makes TikTok a threat to Google’s business model.

Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak

people are now searching on tiktok instead of google

As of right now Google is still way more popular than TikTok for search, but the trend is clearly going in one direction. As more younger people grow up viewing TikTok as the default search engine, it could start eating into Google’s market share.

Another major threat is the possibility that AI tools like ChatGPT will become free and more accurate.

If AI tools get to the point where anyone can type in a question and know for sure that they’re getting a 100% legit answer on any topic then that would obviously be a threat to Google.

As of right now the tech isn’t good enough (it gives lots of wrong information and is completely clueless about current events), but it’s only going to get better. It’s also not free, which is a major impediment to its widespread adoption.

In the past, the major potential threat was that Apple would decide to launch its own Google competitor and make it the default search engine on their devices.

But now the threat isn’t coming from new search engines but from new technologies that do the same thing in a different way.

It’s tempting to view it as a Sears vs. Amazon situation where one company is clinging to their old monopoly in the face of new technology, but I wouldn’t count Google out.

Google has tons of resources to create AIs to fight the AI and protect their business model. They also have some of the smartest people in the world working for them. I think they have a great chance of outcompeting the threats to their search dominance.

It’ll be interesting to see how Google evolves to fight these and other potential new competitors that may emerge out of nowhere.

Conclusion

SEO in 2023 is going to be a mix of the same-old same-old (creating content and building links) mixed in with complete chaos.

We’re likely going to see an AI arms race between Google and language models developed by companies like OpenAI. TikTok is going to continue capturing the souls and search queries of zoomers (unless it gets banned please God let it happen).

Nevertheless, creating an online business and driving traffic to it with SEO is still the best way for regular people to make it. Keep following the plan and don’t get distracted by nonsense and you’ll make it too.