This article takes a deep dive into the future of SEO in Europe.
This article is part of the international report SEO & Content Marketing 2023 by WhitePress and is used with explicit permission. Download the full report for NL with expert comments here.
It is a rare opportunity to be able to ask more than a thousand leading European SEO specialists for their opinion. So we’ve decided to seize it and question them about their predictions for the future. In the field of Search Engine Optimization, predicting the future is a complicated task, so it is no surprise that one in three respondents to our questions consistently answered that it was “difficult to say”.
Even though some industry techniques have hardly changed in a decade, changes in the algorithm can happen overnight. Nevertheless, after years in the industry, many SEO specialists already have a sharp eye for trends and can predict them with ease. So what will change in the near future, and what will the next few years look like?
SEO of constantly higher quality?
Studies clearly show that the days of amateur page optimization are over. According to 65% of those surveyed, links will have to be of increasingly higher quality in order to stand a chance against competition, as well as against search engine politics.
Despite the upcoming challenges, including the previously mentioned high-quality links, a whopping 69% of surveyed specialists believe that SEO will continue to evolve. Even considering the ongoing headache for SEOs, which is changes in Google’s policies, this is something that specialists are prepared for.
The SEO industry certainly seems to be looking towards the future. This is probably because the work of specialists is fundamentally based on adaptation and dealing with changes. The dynamic nature of SEO and the constant need to stay up-to-date and react to evolving algorithms and user behavior, create an atmosphere of continuous development, maintaining high motivation and engagement among specialists.
Another interesting aspect discussed in the study is behavioral factors; over 60% of respondents believe that they will have an increasingly significant impact on positioning and optimization. Their nature and impact at this point are difficult to estimate, but they certainly remain a crucial factor for the industry, and over time, they will need to be taken into account more.
So, have we found the answer to the question of how SEO will look in the future? As usual, it depends. It will definitely stay with us, in its current form or slightly modified. The key insight we can glean from the data and previous statements is that we are getting closer and closer to a middle ground between the algorithm and the audience. Therefore, it’s possible that the future of SEO will be something more user-friendly than just a necessity aimed at appeasing search engine mechanisms.
AI and SEO?
However, what remains a mystery is the impact of artificial intelligence on the work of an SEO specialist. Here, three phenomena can be distinguished.
Firstly, implementing chat with artificial intelligence into search engines, which has been taking place at Bing and Google (experimental Bard) since February 2023 and at the Opera browser since March 2023. Will this completely change the way users search for key phrases? There is already a growing percentage of people who are satisfied with the answer included by Google at the top of search engine results in the form of Feature Snippets. To the dismay of SEO specialists, using a smartphone, more than 60% of people already do not click on any search results (data from SimilarWeb, Ubersuggest and others). The possibility of receiving ready answers through a chat with AI may further discourage them.
The second phenomenon is the possibility of creating free content in seconds, which is already possible thanks to artificial intelligence. Will such content be in any way penalized as unoriginal? And if not, will the Internet soon be filled with billions of articles written by AI? For now, a small percentage of respondents use texts created by artificial intelligence.
- This phenomenon is also addressed in our article on the future of content, which you can read here.
60% do not entrust AI with content, even under supervision (i.e., in the model where AI “writes” and a copywriter verifies and corrects the text). 82% never use AI services without verification.
The research was carried out in late 2022 and early 2023, before the surge in popularity of ChatGPT and other such platforms.
In the future, will more and more SEO specialists resort to the help of AI when writing texts? It is possible to assume so, given at least its current capabilities and the rapid growth of the popularity (and capability) of GPT-
4. Writing simple back-end content for keywords, or even sponsored articles, is no longer a problem for AI. In the course of our study, we’ve asked SEO professionals whether they thought that in the future most content would be produced by the aforementioned AI and whether it would be highly ranked by Google’s algorithm. You can find their answers below:
Perhaps it is precisely high-quality human-written content that will be not only detected by Google in the future, but also highly valued and rewarded for its authenticity and relevance.
To learn more about AI detectors, read this WhitePress® article.
The respondents also mentioned the third phenomenon while answering the survey 39% believe that SEO will become increasingly accessible through automation tools.
Alli AI, RankIQ or Frase have made life much easier for SEO specialists in recent months. Automatically writing meta titles, creating links or descriptions under images saves hours each week on activities that could, in fact, have long been taken over by a machine. ChatGPT has accelerated this even further, offering the ability to analyze competitors’ websites or plan keywords in seconds. It sounds beautiful, but AI also brings threats, such as the previously mentioned wave of low-quality content, which is sure to be noticed by Google. This can lead to a tightening of link policies and, consequently, a decrease in the profitability of using such generators. However, experts approach the topic cautiously, aware of the potential consequences.
The emergence of artificial intelligence has significantly enriched the field of SEO, providing immense value to its practitioners. By utilizing AI technology, SEO professionals can accomplish more tasks in less time while simultaneously minimizing errors along the way.
In conclusion, contrary to what has been repeated over the years, SEO is not dying and will continue to be highly significant in the upcoming years. Even though, to a certain extent, articles may be supplanted by social media posts and further by images, videos, and eventually AI-created content… SEO specialists will certainly be needed to optimize them for a long time, and AI will be, for sure, their most valued assistant.
This article is part of the international report SEO & Content Marketing 2023 by WhitePress and is used with explicit permission. Download the full report for NL with expert comments here.
