Global growth is slowing in the face of inflation, rising interest rates, and the disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine. This has pushed many businesses to determine where they can reasonably cut costs in various areas without losing out on critical components of their plans.

When it comes to your marketing strategy, you need to identify what costs you can cut without losing out on components that are critical for business success — like search engine optimization (SEO). With the help of AI and other key trends and predictions for 2023, you can ensure you excel in your SEO game, despite these economic concerns.

In this article, we’ll discuss the top 9 enterprise SEO trends and 7 predictions for 2023. Armed with this information, you can up your SEO game and ensure you don’t lose out on this backbone of your marketing strategy.

How Is Enterprise SEO Changing?

Enterprise SEO is challenging and complex due to hundreds, if not thousands, of content pages. Enterprise SEO requires a larger budget, more resources, and a more rigorous intellectual and strategic approach than regular SEO. It also yields slower results and needs automation, audit, and website maintenance tools. This makes enterprise SEO costly to implement and maintain.

But in 2023, enterprise SEO is changing in the following 4 ways:

1. The Emergence of AI Tools 

Businesses are seeking ways to make their content marketing strategies more resource-efficient. AI tools can help to create and optimize helpful content. Enterprises will use and experiment with tools like ChatGPT to mitigate their workforce investments.

2. Deeper Analytics  

Enterprises are leveraging data to gain insights into user behaviors, monitor website maintenance, and track their return on investment (ROI). With these insights, enterprises can better target their audiences and ensure they’re getting a good ROI in areas of the marketing strategy they’re investing in. They can also make changes to their strategy where necessary. 

3. Changing Requirements for High-Ranking Content

Google is rolling out new updates faster than ever and transitioning away from more traditional ranking factors. This means enterprises will need to keep on top of the changes in order to ensure they continue to rank well and remain visible and credible to their target audience.  

4. Increased Focus on User Experience 

As mobile search, voice search, and video SEO advance, enterprises will need to provide the best user experience. Search engines like Google are prioritizing user experience as a ranking factor. This means enterprises will need to ensure their content is optimized for these new advances to provide a seamless experience across channels. 

Top 9 Enterprise SEO Trends for 2023

Amidst the economic worries of 2023, many new enterprise SEO trends are emerging in the market. Many of these trends can help you stay on top of your SEO game without heavily investing in extra resources and costs.

1. Artificial Intelligence for Search

Google wants to provide the most relevant and valuable answers to search queries, so it’s continually advancing its AI models. For example, the company introduced the MUM model in 2021, which uses AI to search and better understand user intent and content in different formats and languages. This represents a major opportunity for your enterprise SEO team to optimize your content for the MUM model. For this, you should focus on creating written, video, and image content.

2. Adoption of Automation and Generative AI in SEO

For repetitive SEO tasks, you can use AI for automation. You can also use AI to handle large amounts of data and ease things a little for your SEO specialists. While you can’t — and shouldn’t — use AI for the entire content creation process, you can use it to generate the first draft. 

Generative AI is a helpful tool for generating ideas and suggestions and creating outlines, headers, meta descriptions, and title intros. Now consider this: with all of the above tasks performed quickly and efficiently with generative AI like Outranking, your workload will be significantly reduced. You can better channel your writing skills and focus on more creative and strategic tasks.

Pro Tip

Fact checks and polish your AI-generated content to ensure it’s valuable, helpful, and unique. The video below is a valuable guide to help you learn about writing AI content for SEO.

5. Voice Search

With 50% of U.S. citizens and 27% of global users using voice search for search queries, we know the trend is the next big thing in the SEO world. AI voice assistant technologies like Alexa, Siri, and Amazon Echo are on the rise, and Google has also introduced its language model, LaMDA. LaMDA can understand voice queries and answer them accordingly.

The increase in voice search creates an opportunity for your enterprise. You can now make more conversational content, thereby optimizing it for voice search. This can give you a competitive edge in your SEO game and ensure your SEO strategy reaps even better results.

6. The Bing AI Chat Search and its Effect on Bing SEO

In February 2023, Microsoft announced it would integrate Bing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. If someone asks a complex query on Bing, the search engine redirects it to the interactive chatbot. Bing Chat then answers questions similarly to humans after researching the topic. After Bing Chat, Google introduced its own interactive chatbot, Google Bard. 

These interactive chatbots provide users with more personalized answers by extracting information from relevant sources. Moving forward, aim to make your content more personalized, and offer ideas relevant to the main topic. This will give your content a higher chance to appear on chatbots. The effect of chatbots on SEO is similar to that of featured snippets — the race isn’t about appearing higher on search engines. It’s about providing what others can’t.

7. SEO Integrations with Paid Search and Digital Marketing

With time, SEO is becoming the center of all digital campaigns, including email marketing, social media marketing, and video marketing. Integrating paid search with SEO provides many advantages, like increased traffic and reduced costs. 

SEO and paid search integration can also improve your SEO strategy by utilizing the insights acquired through pay-per-click (PPC). Integrating SEO and paid search teams can help your enterprise yield optimal results that can improve rankings and boost sales.

8. More Focus on Optimizing Existing Content

Google has rolled out 14 algorithm updates from the start of 2022. This means the most relevant, helpful, and unique content from January 2022 isn’t in the top results anymore. 

In 2023, with Google rolling out updates more than ever before, you’ll need to consistently and continuously focus on optimizing your existing content. This will help you provide the most valuable, helpful, relevant, and updated content so that it ranks high on Google.

9. Increasing Need for Organic Search Data for Business intelligence

Studies show over 75% of users search for a product before buying it. To get valuable market and business insights, you need organic search data. This will help you better understand consumer behavior and preferences.

In 2023, organic search data is essential for you to develop a successful consumer strategy that will help boost the sale of your product or service. This data can also help you produce content that resonates with your business goals and consumer patterns.

Top 7 SEO Predictions for 2023

With the top 9 trends for enterprise SEO discussed, let’s see the top 7 SEO predictions for 2023.

1. Long-Tail Keywords Will Remain Essential

Long-tail keywords are those that are low in search volume but longer in length. Long-tail keywords yield long-term and better conversion value.

People aren’t going to change in 2023. If a person searched “Best Phone to buy in Columbia with battery 6600 mAH” in 2022, they wouldn’t search “Phone with 6600 mAH battery” in 2023. Long-tail keywords are essential for all businesses because they provide more personalization and value to user intent.

With 91.8% of search queries being long-tail keywords in 2020, they’ll remain equally important for SEO in 2023.

2. Mobile-Friendly Websites Will Become Even More Important

At the end of 2022, mobile devices generated 59.16% of global website traffic. But at the same time, 57% of users won’t use a website that isn’t mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendly websites will become more critical with the increase in mobile phone users to 6899 million in 2023. 

Google also ranks mobile-friendly websites on the top pages. So if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website for your business, now is the time to invest in one. 

3. Generative AI Will Be Good for General SEO but Not for Advanced

AI helps generate ideas and outlines and automates tasks. Generative AI is also valuable for extracting and comparing the top pages for a specific topic. But it doesn’t help write content, as it’s inaccurate and often comes with several plagiarism and copyright issues. Google has said the use of AI isn’t against their guidelines. But the use of AI for generating content to manipulate search rankings is.

The rise of generative AI has allowed marketers to experiment with it, but it can’t provide advanced results. When you use generative AI, you should treat the content it produces in the same way you would a junior SEO worker. You can give these tools basic and repetitive tasks for SEO but you shouldn’t rely on them for more complex tasks.

4. Bad Content Will Flood the Internet, but It’ll Be Penalized

In 2023, many brands will use AI tools for content creation as it saves time and creates a deceiving impression of great content. Every other person will be using AI writing software, increasing the number of websites with lousy content. But when Google pinpoints duplicated website content, they’ll penalize or de-rank it. 

This is yet another reason why you shouldn’t place too much emphasis on AI in your enterprise SEO initiatives. Only use it to help direct your content, and not to handle the whole process from start to finish. 

5. SEO Writers Will Still Be In-Demand

Content producers are worried about becoming obsolete and losing their jobs with the rise of AI tools. But this fear isn’t coming true, at least not in 2023. AI tools aren’t yet advanced enough to replace content producers. 

Although AI tools can produce impressive content when given proper instructions, they lack creativity and uniqueness. If everyone uses AI to produce their content without any human intervention, all website content will appear the same. To rank higher on websites, you should invest in human content producers. Give them AI tools to help, but don’t ever lose the human touch in your content.

6. On-Page SEO Tactics Will Remain the Same 

Although AI can produce and optimize outlines, headers, internal linking, and meta descriptions, the essential aspect of on-page SEO, i.e., the content itself, can’t be produced solely by AI. You’ll still have to verify the facts and figures, find mistakes, and make the content helpful, valuable, and unique. 

This means you’ll still have to do all the on-page optimization aspects, proofreading, and producing the content that Google loves and ranks. So in 2023, SEO content creators will hold on-page SEO optimization, though a little AI help won’t hurt.

7. Sophisticated Tools for SEO Strategy Will Take the Main Stage

If you create content without an SEO strategy, you’re doomed — no matter how good your content is. But with thousands of keywords, millions of websites on Google, and infinite information on the internet, creating an SEO strategy is complex. 

Sophisticated AI tools will become essential in creating a successful SEO strategy. Such sophisticated tools will ensure your strategy is updated, advanced, reliable, relevant, and fool-proof.

The Takeaway

The enterprise SEO landscape in 2023 is experiencing rapid change, technological advancements, and an increasing emphasis on user experience. These advancements are reshaping your approach to SEO strategies. 

The key to success in this year and beyond lies in striking a balance between leveraging AI tools for efficiency and automation while recognizing the continued importance of human expertise, creativity, and strategic thinking. By staying on top of industry trends and continuously optimizing and refining your SEO strategies, you can navigate the challenges of the current economic climate while still meeting your SEO targets.

As we forge ahead into an exciting and transformative year, you should embrace innovation, adapt to change, and maintain a forward-looking and proactive approach to your SEO strategy. By doing so, your enterprise will weather the storm, and emerge from it stronger and more resilient than ever before.