SEO & Content Strategies That Work in 2023

The world of SEO is constantly changing. By its very nature it has to change, lest the top ranking positions become a closed shop. And with constant change comes frequent frustration and a need to adjust and update your tactics to win traffic from search engines.

SEO has changed so much since its birth as an industry in the late 90s, and has even seen whole new subsectors spring up around it. From specialist SEO software to whole new ways of working within the parameters of what's "recommended" as best practice by search engines, we live in a landscape of SEO being an all encompassing term for everything related to website traffic.

But one segment within the SEO space stands out above all others: that of content marketing as a means to complement your existing SEO activity and ultimately improve your search performance. Content marketing as part of a wider content strategy is too big to ignore and too complex to automate. So what are the best SEO and content strategies to get results in 2023?

Defining SEO: Then & Now

SEO has often been seen as a land of smoke and mirrors. In its formative years few people knew even the basics of how search engines worked, meaning those that did get their heads around it could quickly find success. Once Google came along with its new ranking algorithm and floods of spiders crawling the web at a rate never before witnessed, early SEO pioneers were able to quickly identify the formula for ranking wins and all the glory that brought.

It was a simple recipe: identify your keywords, jam them into your website and then get a load of other sites to link back to yours - by any means necessary. In this Wild West of the Internet era, there were nefarious tactics aplenty with which to hoodwink both search engines and other site owners. Attitudes were different and we were all far less used to being constantly spammed across every channel imaginable. A polite request to point a link somewhere would barely raise even the slightest suspicion from the majority of 90s webmasters.

You could serve content purely designed to game the search engine spiders and keep this hidden from your actual human visitors who might be put off by repetition of the phrase "buy polyphonic Nokia ringtones online", subtly disguised by being written in white text on a white background. The wins came quick and easy in those days, if you knew what you were doing.

So What is SEO Today?

In short: Hard!

Where once there was a fairly methodical process to follow, ticking off a handful of items on a standard checklist, SEO has evolved into something far more nuanced and complex today. Sites have become considerably more complicated and expansive in their scope. No longer can one make tweaks to simple HTML code in a text editor and reupload via FTP.

Websites today are built using JavaScript libraries, cascading style sheets and whole frameworks related to specialist apps. Different content management systems (CMS') bring their own SEO considerations and conundrums. Whole industries of specialist businesses sprouted to cater to the phenomenal demand for specific SEO requirements across the likes of Shopify, WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Wix and Joomla. In fact even specialists dedicated to particular apps and plugins within these platforms became common, such as those familiar with WordPress' Elementor and Divi visual page editors or the Editor X interface for Wix.

And I've not even touched on the astonishing growth of smartphone capabilities, leading to more searches now being performed on mobile devices than on desktop and laptop computers (which has been the case since all the way back in 2015). This has obviously meant yet further specialist requirements and considerations for site owners and SEO professionals and there's no way you can get away without optimising for mobile in 2023, just like nobody would build a website that wasn't mobile friendly in this day and age.

The Primary Elements of SEO in 2023

If we strip it all back there are essentially three distinct pillars to making SEO work today:

> Technical - Can your site be effectively crawled and indexed by search engines, providing them with all of the rich additional data they now crave whilst also delivering a smooth and seamless user experience across all devices?

> Onsite Content - Does your site accurately explain what it is for, who it is for and why these people should be purchasing from you instead of your competitors?

> Offsite Content - Are you being talked about elsewhere? Do you have strong references? Have you got enough citations to bolster your credentials as a respected source?

I'm going to ignore the technical side of SEO for today. There are literally thousands of things that can go wrong from a technical perspective and running through umpteen elements to check and update in your backend would take forever. No, instead I want to focus on the other two elements: your onsite and offsite content.

The Google of today (and when we talk about what search engines want we invariably mean what Google wants, in the English speaking world anyway) tells us it's seeking to reward sites that can demonstrate what they call E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This was recently updated to become E-E-A-T, with the extra E standing for Experience (and there is no substitute).

What this means is that they want to be able to attribute some level of authority and understanding to the content you're producing. It's not enough to churn out generic blog posts credited to nobody and instead you've got to convince the Big G you know what you're talking about and therefore should be listened to.

How do they determine this? It might surprise you to know that it's not all robots, algorithms and AI. Google actually has real life human people manually reviewing websites to assess their perceived quality when measured against their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

Anything Else?

Yes actually. The same guidelines also require sites to be evaluated against what they call Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics. This essentially refers to content that could cause harm to others and if you can't demonstrate the appropriate levels of trust and expertise to be discussing such topics credibly, don't expect to be winning traffic from Google.

The most obvious example here is if sites dish out medical advice without any real credentials qualifying them to do so. YMYL topics are a spectrum but broadly speaking it's only something you need to be concerned with if your site could be considered to be sharing recommendations that aren't entirely harmless. In an era of mass online propaganda, widespread disinformation and troll factories, you can understand why Google have taken a strong stance on this one.

Anyway, the point is that there are myriad elements to take into consideration when preparing an effective SEO strategy today, compared with ten to fifteen years ago, in simpler times.

How About Content Marketing?

As a term, content marketing broadly refers to the creation and sharing of content to help market your website and brand, or simply provide value to existing and future customers. "Content" in this context could mean anything from simple articles on a given topic, a series of short videos designed to provide support to existing customers, a regular or occasional podcast or even in-depth graphical visualisations designed for dissemination.

Your blog, your social media activity and even offline PR can all be considered part of the content marketing mix. Generally it relates to what is considered inbound marketing, as opposed to your outbound marketing that might have more specific reach and direct calls to action (such as targeted ads).

Content marketing as a concept has effectively grown out of the SEO boom. It's a younger discipline but one that is today no less nuanced and complex.

Depending on your reach and business size, you might require whole teams of people to deliver your ongoing content marketing strategy. Or it could be you're a one person band trying to juggle this alongside your SEO and other marketing activity (in which case you're insane I might add).

So SEO and content marketing/strategy go hand in hand and few can afford to ignore these channels, making it imperative you understand how best to make the most of them, in 2023 and beyond.

Remember when everyone in SEO was repeatedly crowing that "Content is King"? Well as boring and hackneyed as that phrase has become, it's no less true today. This is why content marketing plays such an important role in driving effective SEO.

Content Marketing Then & Now

Perhaps one of the most well-known content marketing strategies from the early days of its being recognised as a legitimate industry in its own right, rather than some irritating stepchild of SEO, is the Skyscraper Technique. This concept was all the rage about eight years ago, popularised by self styled SEO guru Brian Dean, who founded the SEO blog Backlinko (though Google Trends suggests the term was popular long before Dean's original 2015 post).

The Skyscraper Technique basically meant one-upping your competition by taking content that was performing well (i.e. it ranked well for competitive keywords and had attracted plenty of valuable links) and improving and expanding upon that content - adding more levels to your skyscraper, making it bigger and better than the original. Then you would have the top content and, in theory, it's an easy sell to have everyone who was referencing the original content, to instead reference and link to your? ?p?l?a?g?i?a?r?i?s?e?d?? improved version.

For a while it was a pretty good tactic for building out your site's authority, particularly if you were happy to pester people about linking out to you. However, I personally believe the tactic was overused and is now considerably less effective for a number of reasons. Namely:

1. Big brands know to keep improving their own content to prevent it getting "skyscrapered" by rivals.

2. Outreaching to linking sites with a new value proposition has been done to death and let's be honest, we've all been spammed with requests for links (even if you don't have a website) which just go straight into the junk folder now.

3. As with anything that starts getting exploited in the world of SEO, Google shifts to make the tactic less effective.

Ultimately once a topic is covered to death across numerous different sites there's a limit to how much more can be done with it. A skyscraper can only be built so tall after all.

However, the popular SEO tool Ahrefs did a post on this just recently, suggesting the Skyscraper Technique can still yield results when done right.

Is it still the one? Probably not. But don't write it off completely, particularly if you're in a fairly specialist niche with relatively low competition currently. If the super top awesome content in your field doesn't yet exist then there's no reason not to be the one who creates it.

Incidentally I recently saw a variation on this theme recommended by Steve Toth of SEO Notebook, which he calls the Inside/Out Content Strategy, so there's life in the content-focused SEO strategy that kickstarted the trend towards more involved content-focused SEO strategies. Though today there are several top tactics gaining attention and driving SEO success which should be where you focus your efforts in 2023 and beyond. Let's take a look at them.

Hub and Spoke

We already know Google and other search engines love to consume content and often tend to reward the sites with plenty of it. But just chucking out blog post after blog post without a plan isn't going to deliver results like once it may have done.

Instead you need content to be organised and you need it to be thematically relevant to what you do. That might sound obvious but it's amazing how often brands lose sight of their core messaging and end up sharing content that doesn't suit their agenda. Topical authority is a big factor in ranking algorithms. In fact it's one of the core metrics used by SEO tool majestic.com.

Majestic determined that by assessing site content they could assign clear topical themes and then follow these themes around the web depending on how sites linked to one another. So a site with content about bicycles might be assigned a topical relevance for the subject of "sports & leisure/cycling", then sites being linked to from that site would also be attributed some topical relevance for the same subject. Their Topical Trust Flow metric has become a really useful way of understanding thematic relationships between sites, as well as being able to easily identify sites closely, or broadly, related to your niche.

So, we know topical relevance is super important. And to bolster your topical relevance for given subjects you need to be considered experienced and authoritative in your field (covering those E-E-A-T bases). This is easier to do if you have lots of content covering lots of topics all loosely related to the same overall theme.

A Hub & Spoke Example

Going back to bicycles, let's say you have a bike shop. Lots of other bike shops exist and want to sell bikes online so it's not going to be enough to simply talk about selling bikes in order to be considered a bike shop authority. This is where creating a hub and spoke strategy can help. You build a hub page which acts as the master topic page and this then links out to lots of subpages (spokes) which cover related topics. So the hub might be a bike buyer's guide and then your spokes could be more specific content pieces around different types of bikes: mountain bikes, racing bikes, hybrid bikes, commuter bikes etc.

All of this content talks about buying bikes. That's what you want your site to be known for. You have each page linked from the hub page AND linking between one another. So for instance the main bike buying guide links to your individual bike-by-type pages and these pages link to one another. One way to do this would be to explain the particular benefits of, say, mountain bikes but then conclude that for cyclists who primarily want to cycle to work or around their city for leisure, they might be better suited to a commuter bike or a racing bike, or for a best of both worlds, could consider a hybrid bike, particularly if they live in a hilly city. You've given yourself entirely legitimate cause to link to all of your other spoke pages and the value of each contextual internal link should not be underestimated.

As a further benefit, you can send users on a useful journey around your site, as they read up on the different pros and cons of the styles of bike available. This shows search engines that users are actively engaged with your site, with a high dwell time and a low bounce rate. Strong positive signals indeed for Google et al.

Your hub is strong because it's in-depth but also refers to other pages with even more depth in related categories and those spoke pages can each capture search traffic related to their specific focus whilst also strengthening the overall topical authority of the hub. More authority for the hub means more chance of it ranking for the most competitive terms.

You'll find examples of this all over the web on high quality well ranked sites as it has become a trusted SEO tactic, and one that's not easy to half-arse. If you're going to invest the time and resource into producing engaging, useful, authoritative content that provides value to search users then the search engines will look favourably upon you. After all it's not the kind of activity you can just bang out in a couple of hours. It takes time and effort to do properly. And that means having your content be well researched, citing relevant sources as appropriate (which would of course be within your topical niche, further strengthening that topical relevance score as you're linking out into a thematically relevant neighbourhood) and also looking the part with proper consideration given to the design.

Make it look nice with custom graphics and design elements that break up the text. Again, this shows you've put the effort in, and also helps keep users interested. Nobody wants to read a long essay of dispassionate text. It needs to be easy to read, broken up into bite size sections with relevant attention grabbing headings, shifting focus around the page with those jazzy design elements.

What About Content Pillars or Cornerstone Content?

This refers to really meaty content that tries to cover every individual element of a major topic in full detail, in one place. Though content length and authority shouldn't technically be related, in practice they frequently are. After all it's easier to be an oracle on a subject if you're explaining it over 4,500 words as opposed to using under 1,000. Sometimes less is more of course. But usually, more is more.

Like with the hub, design is super important here. Keep users on the page and it'll be considered higher quality content than if visitors fail to be inspired to keep reading.

In some respects this is more like the old Skyscrapered content, as you're trying to get absolutely everything you possibly can into one place to make it the number one resource on that subject. A good example of this is Neil Patel's What is SEO page. Over nearly 10,000 words and numerous customised illustrative graphics (no stock imagery here) Neil has tried to ensure his content leaves no stone unturned in the quest to be considered the fountain of all knowledge on this fiercely competitive topic.

This page ranks on page one when you search SEO so it's definitely working. Meanwhile Search Engine Land also occupy a page one position for the same very broad search query, but their What is SEO content uses fewer than half as many words as Neil has. The difference is that the SEL page is a typical hub page, with over 20 links to pages elsewhere on their site that further expand on different areas of the main topic.

So What's a Content Silo?

This is more like the hub and spoke, but here we're specifically looking at clustering your content into related silos. Everything that's about buying bikes can be linked together and easy to reach from all related content whilst articles about bike maintenance would be kept in a separate silo, and all of that content then links together. Essentially you're keeping the overall theme about bikes and cycling but segmenting the content that fits the category of bike buyers guides to keep it separate from the content about bike maintenance and perhaps even a third silo all about cycling gear.

The content silos exist independent of one another, but also all sit within the same overarching framework. There's an excellent piece on using content silos to your advantage from well-known SEO guru Bruce Clay (yes, another SEO industry name) which I'd recommend.

Ultimately the hub and spoke, cornerstone/pillar content and content silo techniques can all deliver great results for your site as long as you can really do justice to the topic you're covering. Pay particular attention to the keywords you want to be drawing traffic from and the quality of existing content in your niche. If nobody's completely smashing it, then why aren't you?