With 2023 on the way, we’re ecstatic about what the new year will bring. One thing is certain: in 2023 Google search engine will remain a popular tool that Canadian shoppers will use to find product information or search for products consumers want to purchase. This is why search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO, will stay a powerful and relevant digital marketing strategy in 2023 and beyond. By using SEO approaches, your website can appear on the top Google search results for search terms related to your business.

To help you optimize your website for SEO in 2023, here are five SEO tips you can use.

1. Diversify Your Backlink Portfolio

   In December 2022, Google rolled out link spam updates by leveraging SpamBrain to neutralize the impact of unnatural links on search results. Websites’ search rankings may change as spammy links are neutralized and any credit passed by these unnatural links are lost.

   Going forward, as spammy or unnatural links are further neutralized, many backlinks that websites gain will have zero impact on a website’s search ranking.

   Google considers link spam as links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site. The following are examples of link spam:

   • Buying or selling links for ranking purposes. This includes:
     • Exchanging money for links or posts that contain links.
     • Exchanging goods or services for links.
     • Sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.
   • Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.
   • Using automated programs or services to create links to your site. Requiring a link as part of a Terms of Service, contract or similar arrangement without allowing a third-party content owner the choice of qualifying the outbound link.
   • Text advertisements or text links that don’t block ranking credit.
   • Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites.

   
   It’s incredibly easy for a backlink to be considered a “link spam” according to Google’s policy since most backlinks are created with the intent to benefit a website’s search ranking. Whether it’s through guest blogging or media outreach or feature, a backlink through some sort of SEO approach is designed to boost a website’s search ranking. To minimize SEO ranking volatility due to algorithm changes in the future, it’s best to diversify your backlink portfolio. You can gain some backlinks from guest blogs, some from media features and some from credible directories. Moreover, you can diversify your backlink portfolio by gaining backlinks from different websites so that you won’t lose all your SEO backlink value if you invest all your backlinks in one website and this website gets penalized by Google for link spam.

2. Invest in Google Ads Search Campaigns

   You can further expand your SEO efforts by investing in Google Ads search campaigns. Google Ads search ads are the ads you see on top of Google search results (most of the time) when you search for something on Google. Similar to SEO, Google Ads lets you display your website when users search keywords that you bid on. You can reduce your website’s risk of not appearing on the first page of Google search results due to algorithm changes affecting by allocating some of your digital marketing budgets to Google Ads; that way, your website can still appear on top of Google search results even if there’s a Google algorithm change and your website is impacted.

3. Include Targeted Keywords in SEO Page Titles

   Keywords in SEO page titles are still taken into consideration when Google is ranking a webpage. For example, if a webpage’s SEO page title says “Vancouver Law Firm | Vancouver Lawyers”, Google will display the webpage for search queries related to “Vancouver law firm” or “Vancouver lawyers”.

   If you want to find out which keywords your target audience uses to search on Google for products or services your business offers, use Google Ads Keyword Planner tool.

4. Use Google Search Console

   Google Search Console is a Google-powered webmaster tool that offers search ranking data as well as features that you can use to troubleshoot SEO issues on your website. For example, if you create a new landing page and the webpage hasn’t been indexed a week or two after the webpage has been created, you can submit the webpage to Google Search Console and request indexing. You can also submit the webpage for indexing as soon as it is live. Google Search Console is a useful tool you can use to ensure your website is doing what you need in order for your website to appear on Google search results or rank high for relevant search terms.

5. Migrate to Google Analytics 4

   Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is the latest version of Google Analytics. As many of you know, Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics by June 30th, 2023, which means that we will no longer be able to collect data using Universal Analytics after this date.

   If you want to see website behaviours from website visitors that come organically from Google, you can start using Google Analytics 4. You can even create segments to see organic traffic visitors from different geographic locations, browsers or devices, or compare organic visitors who have converted versus those non-converted and understand the difference between these groups, as well as find insights to improve your website and SEO performance.

If you have any questions about SEO or digital marketing, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help!