Importance of SEO in 2023 and Beyond to Rank in Google

SEO is the key to success in 2023 and beyond among all digital marketing platforms. Do you really want to know the importance of SEO in 2023 and beyond to rank higher in Google? Don’t miss a single bit of this content. I have a question for you.

How frequently do you search for anything in Google in a day? 

Hope you search several times a day on Google. Now the question is what do you get when you search in Google?

When you search for something on Google, the giant search engine Google caters lots of information before you. The page where you see the result is popularly known as Search Engine Result Page(s) or SERPs.

SEO helps to rank higher in SERPs. So to increase your result high in SERPs, you have to concentrate on SEO.

Here you may have a doubt.

Is SEO the only solution to rank higher in SERPs?

No. There are some others like PPC and Search Engine Marketing. But these both are costly in comparison with SEO. Not only it, but also the CTR is better in SEO results in comparison with others. Remember, there is no competitor of organic search.

What is organic search in the Importance of SEO?

Organic Search is the most relevant search term which attracts a maximum number of traffics.

According to Wikipedia, the organic results are the paginated list based on the relevance of the search term. If you want to know the definition visit wikipedia.org.

Now, let’s discuss the importance of SEO with an example.

Suppose you are looking for “DIGITAL MARKETING SERVICES” in Google Search Engine.

You will find various types of results as above.

You see the organic results after paid ads and the local search results section.

This is the beauty of SEO. Hope you understand the Importance of SEO

These are three types of results available in SERPs.

I shall share a bitter truth.

The first and bottom part consists of Ads almost most of the cases. After the Ad section, you can find some map result which comes from Google My Business. It is technically known as Local Search Results.

The rest result is organic. Almost in a webpage, 3-5 organic results appear.

So, actually you have to rank within 3-5 on Google SERPs to get maximum traffic.

Now, I come to you about the unavoidable importance of SEO.

Why SEO is Important?

Hope you can understand that SEO means organic result in SERPs.

Here below I’ll point out some important facts why SEO is important.

• Organic Traffic is the primary source of traffic.
• Trust is mostly dependent on Organic Ranking.
• SEO gains the best User Experience always.
• To increase CTR, SEO has no alternatives.

I’ll discuss it in detail later. Before that, I have a question.

Do you know what is SEO?

If you know the answer, you can comment “YES” below, otherwise, read this article.

What is the Importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in Digital Marketing?

Here you can get another important word, and that is Digital Marketing. I hope you are familiar with the term Digital Marketing. If you want to know more about digital marketing, comment below. I shall definitely guide you.

Now the question is the importance of SEO in Digital Marketing.

To grow your business globally, the most important step you have to take to make a website for your business. Almost every business, you must have at least one web property. Among all web properties, the Website is the most important one.

If you want to grow your career as a blogger, you can also need a website.

If you run a business, or if you have a plan to start a business, startup, blog, always try to make your first and primary web property, website.

Now come to the point. The importance of SEO is the indicator of your online journey.

After making your website you definitely want more visitors. The maximum number of visitors is the maximum number of prospects. So, bringing visitors to your website is always important.

There may be another web entity is available like mobile Apps, but according to me, the website has no substitute.

Now, you may ask after making a website what to do?

A website is not the purpose of the showcase, rather it is next to important because it is your identity and property. So, always make a suitable plan when you make your website.

If you have a website and you are getting a good amount of business, a big thumbs up for you.

But, if you have a website, still you are not getting rank and traffic, you have to concentrate on SEO.

Hope you can understand the Importance of SEO.

What are the types of SEO?

In 2015-16, the SEO was of two types. But in 2023 and beyond, it is of 4 types. I shall discuss all in detail.

If you go flashback, in 2015-16, you can find most of the SEO experts focused on both Onpage and Offpage SEO. These techniques worked fantastic at that time. 

Now, you are in 2023 and beyond. Google algorithm has updated hugely. As a result, the SEO types have been changed. 

I have a question for you.

Do you really rank higher on Google? Or you want both rank and business?

I think most of the people love the second one.

So, not only try to rank higher on Google, Google’s new algorithm update focuses on some common SEO practices. These are

• White Hat SEO
• Black Hat SEO
• Technical SEO
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Local SEO
• Multilingual SEO
• Ecommerce SEO
• Negative SEO

According to Alexa Blog, the major types of SEOs are of three types. These are

• Technical SEO,
• Onpage SEO, and
• Offpage SEO.

You may be confused about what types of SEO are important to rank in Google this year? I think you can understand the importance of SEO in this perspective.

Don’t be confused. I am here to guide you properly.

According to Biva Technologies, the best SEO types are:

• Technical SEO
• On-page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Local SEO

Before entering the details, I am sharing some important facts.

Never try to do spam-like exaggeration in link building. If you avoid it, you can definitely skip Black Hat SEO.

Remember, White Hat SEO is always praiseworthy. Never do anything which may trouble your website.

What is Technical SEO?

If you understand the process of Technical SEO, you can’t avoid it anymore. It is very important for ranking high in search engine result pages.

If you really want to get good results for your website for traffic and business, practice this type of SEO first as it is so crucial for many ranking factors.

Look at the picture below. You will easily understand the importance of SEO.

What are the best technical SEO practices?

Technical SEO works mainly for search engine crawlers. It helps crawler to crawl and index your website.

You may think how crawlers crawl your website? Before that, I have a question. Do you know why Robots.txt file is important?

Before getting the answer you have to know what is robots.txt file.

Robots.txt is a text file that exists in the root directory of your website and gives the search engine the instruction to crawl and index.

Let’s have a look at the best technical SEO practices.

Excited!

Concentrate on URL structure.

URL stands for uniform resource locator. It is the address of your website. So, you have to concentrate on the URL structure if you want to rank your website higher. The importance of SEO also depends on the right URL structure.

These four things you have to remember about your URL structure.

• Always use lowercase characters.
• For separation of words use ‘-‘ between words
• Try to use the target keyword in your URL structure.
• Never do keyword staffing.
• Use an SSL certificate.

You have to secure a website with https. This https or hypertext transfer protocol is available if your website has the SSL certificate.

Https redirection is very important if your website has a payment gateway and if you sell any product or services.

In 2023 and beyond for blogging also the https is one of the most important ranking factors.

Easy Navigation Structure is the Importance of SEO Key factor for Website.

People love easy navigation. The website structure is the main thing for navigation. So try to make your website responsive for both the audience and the crawler with ideal navigational structure.

Here, you have to remember one thing, if you want a high conversion from your website, you have to work on your navigational structure.

In 2023 and beyond try to avoid multiple category pages and concentrate on a single category for better navigational practice.

Use breadcrumb menus

Breadcrumb is best for mainly two reasons.

It helps users to navigate the website easily without using the back button and

It helps search engines to understand the structure of the website.

Avoid canonical issue

You mean to observe, there are lots of websites which open with www and without www. In this case, the search engine thinks that these two are different websites.

At first, you have to fix anyone. You can go for the www website or the other which is non “www” website.

You may think, which one is better between www and non “www”?

I can see it entirely depends upon your choice. You can go for any one of them, but don’t use both for your website.

404 Page Optimisation

404 page is basically the page that doesn’t exist on your website. You have to optimize these 404 pages.

A maximum number of 404 pages can harm your website. Always try to be very alert about this.

Try to optimize those 404 pages properly to instruct your crawler that your website is ready to rank.

The importance of SEO also depends on the minimum or less 404 pages in your website.

Importance of SEO depends on the XML sitemap

The most important technical SEO element is the XML sitemap. It actually guides the search engine to crawl your whole website.

Try to optimize your XML sitemap for your posts categories and pages always. You can use it for other purposes also.

You have to submit your XML sitemap to your search console to instruct your search engine to crawl and index.

Website loading time

Today, one of the most important technical SEO factors is the website loading time.

The importance of SEO is also dependent on the website loading time.

The website which loads faster gets more benefits than slower loading websites.

In general the search engine labs those pages which load within 3 seconds.

Mobile responsive and friendliness

During this time every website should be mobile friendly and responsive.

You know a number of mobile devices growing day by day. So, always try to make your website ready for mobiles responsive and friendliness.

What is On-page SEO? What are the best on-page SEO practices?

According to Backlinko.com, on-page SEO is the anatomy of your website.

If you want to do your website rank higher you have to concentrate on the on-page SEO always.

here I will discuss the most important on-page SEO practices which can help your website to rank higher in SERPs.

Use keyword in your title

Always remember the title tag is the best on-page SEO factor.

So, you have to concentrate on putting the keyword in your title.

But don’t make keyword stuffy because that is not good and recommended for good SEO practices.

Look at the example below.

Attach modifier as Importance of SEO with your title

If you want to know the most searched term on the internet today, you can get a list of modifiers.

For 2023 and beyond the most commons modifiers which you can attach with your website like “best”, “top”, “checklist”, “review”, “how to”, “2023” and so on.

Proper use of <H1> , <H2>, <H3>…tags

According to WordPress, the blog title is a <H1> tag. When you write a blog post, you must focus on the best practices of using <H1>, <H2>…. tags.

<H2> is basically the sub-heading tag. It also helps works in SEO.

Remember, <H> tags are good ranking signals for your blog post.

Embed more Multimedia like Image, Video, Infographics

If you want to reduce your bounce rate, you must embed multimedia like Image, Video, Infographics, Gifs and so on. 

Remember, the multimedia attracts the attention of the audience and helps in growing huge amount of traffic. 

Put your Keyword within the first 100 words of your Article

This is a good practice to put your keyword within the first 100 words of your content. The best practice to drop your keyword is within 150 words. But do it as it seems natural. Never put keyword artificially.

Use Internal and Outbound Links

To rank your website higher, you have to concentrate on both internal and outbound links. Both are useful if you can use them in a proper way.

You may think of how many internal links are better for good SEO practices?

According to Brian Dean, you can use 2-3 internal links. Because most numbers of internal links are harmful to your website.

The same is for outbound links. Your outbound links to related pages help search engines like Google to understand the topic. It also helps to gain your website authority.

Try to use 0.3% outbound links for your website. For the 2000 words article, use 6 outbound links.

Use LSI Keyword

Importance of SEO works on LSI. It stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, which is always a good ranking factor for any website.

Do you know the benefit of LSI keyword?

Let’s see the top 3 benefits of the LSI keyword.

• Less keyword density.
• More conversion rate.
• Huge number of targeted traffic generation.

Using LSI, you can reduce the competition and make your chances to rank on SERPs.

Optimize Image with ALT tags

Image Optimisation is one of the greatest on-page SEO practices. The proper size of the image with alt tags are good SEO signals. Another important thing about image is, it must be related to the topic or subject (not only niche) of the website.  

Integrate Social Sharing Buttons to your Website

The most viral word in digital marketing is “GO SOCIAL”. Always integrate social sharing buttons to your website. 

Your social traffic can make your content viral. So, to get more traffic instantly, focus on social sharing. 

Social sharing is the key to interactions. So, never forget to integrate it.

Post Long Content

Long content is good for SEO. If you really want to grow your organic rank, you must have to post long and informative content. 

Do you know how important is content?

Content is King

Bill Gates, 1996

According to Bill Gates, the content is the king. 

Long content has more chances to rank higher. 

Not only the length of the content but also the quality of the content is also playing an important role in SEO.

Dwell Time factor

This is one of the most important Search Engine Optimisation factors. Dwell time means how long a visitor stays on your website. The more dwell time means less bounce rate. So, optimize your website with quality to increase dwell time.

Apart from the above, you can understand the top on-page SEO practices. 

Never forget, the quality of your website and content is your strength always. It helps to increase CTR (Click-through-rate).

You have to think about user experience also to rank higher.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO is basically a promotional method through which you can rank your website higher on Google. In a word, off-page SEO performs outside of your website.

Why Off-page SEO is important?

Actually, off-page SEO helps to bring traffic and rank. It helps your website to rank higher in SERPs. 

Do you know how off-page SEO helps to rank your website?

The ideal cause is the backlink of your website. Google treats the authority from the backlinks you get.

So, you have to remember, you can only take authority backlink to rank your website higher in search engine result pages.

What are the best Off-Page SEO Practices?

Off-page SEO was popularly known as link-building SEO. As a result, once upon a time, most backlinks helped websites to rank higher.

But, now to maintain your website for ethical SEO practices, you have to concentrate only on the quality Off-page SEO practices which are popularly known as the White Hat SEO methods.

What factors are important for Off-Page SEO in 2023 and beyond?

There are several factors that are important for Off-page SEO in 2023 and beyond.

Are you eager to know what are they?

Let’s See.

Referring Domain Strength 

Always remember, referring domain is the key to your SEO success. It is because the referring domain means unique backlinks. So, more referring domain gives you more ranking.

Link Authority in Off-Page SEO Practices

If you get a quality backlink, you will rank faster and better. But if your referring domain does not have quality, your ranking may affect. 

According to Ahref.com, a higher authority backlink is better than a low-quality backlink. So, try to get a more high-quality backlink. Quality backlink helps increase page rank which is a good signal for the search engine to put your website higher in the search engine like Google. 

I have a suggestion for you. If you really want to high-quality backlink, you have to concentrate on your content, website architecture, and page rank.

Combination of Dofollow and Nofollow link

Once upon a time, only Dofollow link juice passes better-ranking signals. But now, as per Google’s new algorithm update, both dofollow and nofollow are treated as same. However, try to make a balance of it. A good combination of dofollow and nofollow links helps better ranking.

Use Anchor Text carefully

Anchor Text is one of the biggest ranking factors. But you have to use it carefully. Don’t make unnecessary anchor text to misguide search engine. 

Backlink Relevance

Backlink relevance is another ranking factor for SEO. It is always one of the greatest SEO practices. So, try to ask for backlinks related to your subject, topic, or niche.

I shall tell you other off-page ranking factors which are not directly associated with a backlink, but more than that.

Brand Mention and NAP citations

Brand mention and NAP (Name Address and Phone No) are one of the greatest ranking factors for SEO. These are essential because, through these, you can easily increase your authenticity. 

What are the Best Off-page SEO Practices for the Importance of SEO in 2023 and beyond?

If you want to do White Hat SEO practices, do the following practices. Always remember, work carefully to rank in the proper way.

Here is a list of best Off-page SEO techniques in 2023 and beyond.

Guest Post is the Best Practice for SEO

If you really want to get a good quality of a backlink, you can definitely go for a guest posting. There is no substitute.

According to softscotch.com, it is one of the best inbound marketing strategies and plays an excellent role in digital marketing.

However, you have to remember something before doing it.

You have to take permission for guest posting.

Always try to research your parent niche and try to write content for those which allow the guest bogging.

• Write a unique and informative article for your host website. 
• Never make stuffy with so many links to your website in your article.
• Your article must be at least 1500 words. 
• Try to cover those facts which are not discussed before.

Blog and Vlog Creation Regularly

Blogging is always good practice for digital marketing. Even blogging is treated as one of the most famous and important inbound channels. Regularly blog posting is simply the best ranking factors.

The same is for Vlog. Vlog is a combination of video and blog. It is also very important for ranking higher in SERPs.

As a digital marketing professional, I can recommend one thing and that is content is the best SEO signal.

Engage more in Social Media

Social media is the heart of Digital Marketing. The best SEO practices are to engage more in Social media. It not only helps engagement but also it gives you relevant traffic for your website.

You may ask why social media is important for SEO?

You know almost 85% of internet users are connected socially. So, you can understand the importance of your reach. Even social media has the power to make your content viral and bring huge amounts of traffic to your business. 

Use Content Publishing Platforms to get a good amount of traffic

So in SEO content plays the uppermost important part. If you simply post good quality content, your website will get a good rank even without any SEO practices.

You may publish all types of content like infographic, powerpoint presentation, Blog content, Article, and so on.

Try to use some content publishing platforms like Medium, Slideshare, Tumblr etc to get the best SEO benefits.

Engage more in Question answer Sites

Question and Answer are very important because it helps to know the user intent.

There are many questions and answer sites available. Quora is one of the best question and answer sites today. Engage more on those platforms.

Blog commenting and Forums Posting

Blog commenting is mainly used to engage more readers. It is a very good method of gaining your SEO score. However, you have to be very cautious before doing Blog commenting.

You have to share your valuable opinion, suggestion, prospective etc through the blog commenting.’

Now come to Forum posting.

Forum is a discussion platform. You can understand this is mainly a problem-solving platform. So, mostly you can find similar people to discuss your topic or niche. 

Both Blogs commenting and Forum posting are important for mainly two reasons. One is you can get the content idea and the other is how to give a better solution.

More focus on Visual Marketing using infographic, video, and image

People love videos. As a result, the video has a good chance to attract the audience. Not only video, the image, infographic, gifs are also important to attract more audience.

According to a professional blogger, more than 80% of communication is visual. So, never deny the platforms where visual communication is key.

Practice Link Baiting SEO

According to Moz, the link baiting is important because it provides valuable content on your website and asks other websites naturally link to it. It can make your content viral and increase huge number of quality traffic.

Before link baiting, you have to remember the following tips.

The content should be immortal and evergreen and shareable.

Concentrate on Review, Infographic, Whitepaper, Case studies, Stats, Facts and figures, quizzes, tutorials etc to grow for link baiting. 

Use Empathy

Always try to make compelling content. The best practice is to use ‘how to’ and tutorial types.

Why Podcast is important in SEO?

The podcast is actually the audio. It is one of the most successful growing channels in SEO. It has an immense role in Voice Search SEO.

Though all digital marketing professionals are not using podcasting, Now podcasting is growing. So I think every digital marketer should use it.

How Webinar Helps in SEO

The webinar is the Seminar via Web. It is an online presentation of video, image, infographic, and others to attract the real-time audience.

Only invited persons are allowed to join the webinar. You have to pick the ideal time for the webinar.

Actually, podcasting helps to establish you and your brand.

Focus on Press Release for the Importance of SEO

Press Release is one of the good SEO practices. Only try to focus on quality. 

Remember, your press release must be unique and really necessary for people.

Off-Page SEO Outdated Practices

There are some SEO practices that are actually outdated in 2023 and beyond. Some of them are:

• Directory Submission
• Classified Ads
• Reciprocal Backlinking method
• Web 2.0 (due to methodology quality and uniqueness)

These outdated SEO practices are not banned by a search engine, rather it cannot help in good SEO score. So, according to me, I always advise practicing the genuine Off-Page SEO techniques which I’ve discussed above.

Why Local SEO is Important Today?

When you are talking about Local SEO, the first thing that comes to our mind is Google My Business. 

You can understand using Local SEO, you can rank your business higher in less competition. 

• Local SEO has an area orientation. It is extremely good. 
• It is based on NAP. You know the importance of it in your business. It is one of the easiest ways to get the ideal traffic to your business.
• It has a good conversion rate also. It works fantastic in local search ranking factors. 

There are Important local SEO platforms available today.  Google my business and Bing places are the most popular among them. 

You have to optimize your local business using Google my business. Definitely it will bring a great result. 

Don’t miss the SEO Expert Neil’s Advice to bring a leverage volume of traffic to your website.

Conclusion

As a digital marketer and a blogger from India, I can say that SEO has no alternatives. In this article, I’ve tried to cover all the important facts about Search Engine Optimisation. I hope you can easily understand what is the importance of SEO in 2023 and beyond to rank higher on Google. If you have any queries, suggestions, opinions, advice, you can comment below. 

Reference: Neil Patel, Wikipedia, Google Search, Backlinko, Ahrefs Blog