New Google Update – Is your business ready for 2023?

Author: Guy Sheetrit Updated Date: March 7, 2026 Category: Local SEO , Online marketing

According to Google’s Search Essentials, the company focuses on rewarding content that demonstrates Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

Contents

Major Algorithm Updates 2023-2024

Helpful Content Update (September 2022 – Ongoing)

This ongoing update prioritizes content written for humans rather than search engines. Key characteristics:

People-first content over search-first
Demonstrating genuine expertise
Original analysis and insights
Avoiding search engine-first optimization

March 2024 Core Update

One of the most significant updates in years, focusing on:

Improved quality assessment
Better handling of sites with poor user experience
Enhanced ranking for authoritative content
Reduced visibility for low-quality AI content

As reported by SEMrush, this update affected approximately 45% of queries in various ways.

Key Ranking Factors for 2024-2025

Content Quality Indicators

Comprehensive topic coverage
Original research and data
Expert authorship with clear credentials
Regular content updates and maintenance

Technical Performance

Core Web Vitals remain critical ranking factors:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Under 2.5 seconds
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): Under 200 milliseconds
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Under 0.1

User Engagement Signals

Google measures user engagement through:

Click-through rate from SERPs
Time on page and dwell time
Bounce rate and pogo-sticking
Return visits and brand searches

A 2024 study by Backlinko analyzed 11.8 million Google search results and found that top-ranking pages share common characteristics including HTTPS usage, mobile optimization, and content depth.

How to Adapt Your Strategy

Audit Your Content

Review existing content for:

Quality and depth of information
User-first writing style
Author credentials and expertise demonstration
Accuracy and currency of information

Focus on E-E-A-T

Demonstrate:

Experience: First-hand knowledge and practical application
Expertise: In-depth knowledge in your field
Authoritativeness: Recognition from peers and industry
Trustworthiness: Accurate information and secure site

Monitor Your Rankings

Track algorithm impacts through:

Daily ranking monitoring for core terms
Traffic analysis for ranking changes
Competitor movement tracking
SERP feature tracking (featured snippets, AI overviews)

For comprehensive technical SEO guidance, read our Core Web Vitals checklist and competitor analysis guide.

Preparing for Future Updates

Stay Informed

Follow official Google resources:

Google Search Central Blog
Google’s @searchliaison Twitter account
Search Engine Land’s algorithm update coverage

Build Resilience

Create a diversified traffic portfolio:

Don’t rely solely on Google traffic
Build email lists and direct audiences
Develop multi-channel presence
Create content for multiple platforms

Focus on Long-Term Value

The best defense against algorithm changes is creating genuinely valuable content that serves user needs. Short-term optimization tactics increasingly fail, while quality content endures.

As noted by Moz, websites that focus on user value and sustainable SEO practices experience fewer negative impacts from algorithm updates.

Frequently Asked Questions

Google update 2023

Google 2023 updates focused on helpful content, spam reduction, and rewarding websites that provide genuine value while penalizing low-quality and manipulative content.

Prepare business for Google updates

Prepare by focusing on quality content, following Google guidelines, avoiding black-hat tactics, and maintaining a user-first approach to website optimization.

For a deeper dive, explore our guide on Google Business.

E-Commerce SEO in 2025: The Compound Effect of Technical and Content Excellence

E-commerce SEO is uniquely complex because you’re optimizing for three simultaneous goals: crawlability across potentially millions of URLs, keyword targeting across product/category hierarchies, and conversion optimization that turns traffic into revenue. A strategy that ignores any of these three pillars will underperform.

The brands dominating e-commerce SERPs in 2025 share common characteristics: exceptional site speed (Core Web Vitals in the top 25% of their niche), thorough category page optimization, and content programs that address the full purchase journey — not just bottom-funnel product keywords.

Category Page Optimization: The Highest-ROI E-Commerce SEO Activity

Category pages are the workhorses of e-commerce SEO. They typically target higher-volume, shorter-tail keywords and drive more organic revenue than any other page type. Yet most e-commerce sites have dangerously thin category pages — just a grid of products with a boilerplate H1. For a deeper dive, explore our guide on Local SEO Companies Acquire.

A fully optimized category page includes:

Opening editorial content (200-400 words): Above-the-fold text that establishes context for both users and search engines. Include the primary keyword naturally in the first paragraph, mention key buying considerations, and link to relevant subcategories or buying guides.
Faceted navigation managed correctly: Faceted filters (size, color, price) can generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs. Use canonical tags to point filter variants to the canonical category URL, or use noindex for faceted pages without search volume.
Bottom-page editorial content: After the product grid, include 300-500 words addressing common questions about the category, buying considerations, and internal links to related categories. This content doesn’t interfere with the shopping experience while providing keyword and topical depth.
Schema markup: ItemList schema on category pages helps search engines understand the product inventory. Include product names, URLs, and ideally price ranges.

Product Page SEO: Converting Rankings Into Revenue

Product pages need to satisfy both ranking requirements and conversion requirements simultaneously. The optimization checklist:

Unique product descriptions: Never use manufacturer descriptions verbatim. Duplicate content across multiple retailers using the same manufacturer copy is a systemic issue that holds back e-commerce rankings. Write unique descriptions that emphasize use cases, benefits, and specific differentiators.
Product schema with reviews: Product schema with AggregateRating is one of the most impactful schema implementations in e-commerce — it triggers star ratings in search results, improving CTR by an average of 35%.
Image optimization: Every product image needs descriptive alt text, compressed file sizes (WebP format, under 100KB for most product images), and ideally, multiple images showing different angles and use cases.
User-generated content: Reviews, Q&As, and customer photos add unique content to product pages that can’t be duplicated by competitors, and directly improve conversion rates. BrightLocal data shows 87% of consumers read reviews before purchasing.

The Content Funnel: Capturing Research-Phase Traffic

The majority of purchase journeys start with informational searches: “best [product type] for [use case]”, “how to choose [product]”, “[product type] vs [product type]”. E-commerce sites that only target transactional keywords miss the opportunity to capture customers at the research phase and guide them toward purchase.

Build a content hub strategy: for each major product category, publish 3-5 supporting content pieces (buying guides, comparison articles, how-to content, expert roundups). Link these to relevant category and product pages. This creates topical authority signals that lift rankings across your entire product catalog, not just the pages with individual link equity.

Advanced Strategies for Maximum SEO Impact

The difference between good SEO results and exceptional results often comes down to execution depth. While most competitors implement surface-level optimizations, the brands that dominate competitive SERPs invest in strategies that compound over time: technical infrastructure that supports rapid content scaling, link profiles built on genuine editorial relationships, and content programs tied to measurable business outcomes. For a deeper dive, explore our guide on Professional SEO Agencies Business.

Here’s what separates top-performing SEO campaigns from average ones, based on data from thousands of campaigns across industries:

Competitive gap analysis done right: Rather than simply identifying what competitors rank for, elite SEO campaigns identify the specific content, link, and authority gaps that explain performance differences — and address each gap systematically. This means analyzing not just keyword rankings but content depth, structured data implementation, Core Web Vitals scores, and backlink profile quality.
Search intent alignment: Google’s algorithm has become remarkably good at identifying when content doesn’t match what a searcher actually wants. A page optimized for “best CRM software” that promotes a specific product instead of providing comparative evaluation will underperform regardless of its technical SEO quality. Match content format and depth to search intent first, then optimize.
SERP feature targeting: Beyond organic rankings, SERP features (featured snippets, People Also Ask, local packs, image carousels) represent separate opportunities. The click-through rates on featured snippets often exceed position 1 organic results. A systematic approach to capturing SERP features can double organic traffic from existing rankings without any new link building.

Measuring What Matters: SEO KPIs That Reflect Business Value

The SEO metrics that impress in reports aren’t always the ones that drive business results. Ranking for 10,000 keywords is meaningless if none of those keywords deliver qualified traffic that converts. Building a measurement framework aligned to business value:

Organic traffic by intent segment: Separate branded traffic (people searching your company name) from non-branded traffic (people searching for what you do). Non-branded organic traffic is the cleaner indicator of SEO performance — it represents new audience capture rather than existing demand.
Organic revenue attribution: Connect organic sessions to revenue using GA4’s conversion tracking and revenue attribution. Even an approximate figure is vastly more useful than traffic metrics for justifying SEO investment.
Share of voice: Track your keyword visibility relative to competitors across your target keyword set. Share of voice trends reveal whether you’re gaining or losing competitive position, even when absolute traffic fluctuates due to seasonality or algorithm changes.
Content efficiency metrics: Revenue or leads generated per piece of content, or per hour of content creation investment. This reveals which content types and topics generate the highest ROI, informing future content investment decisions.

The Future of SEO: What to Invest in Now

The SEO strategies worth investing in today are those that will still be relevant as AI-powered search continues to evolve. The principles that have driven SEO results for the past decade — genuine expertise, helpful content, authoritative signals — are becoming more important, not less, as AI systems learn to better reward real quality.

Invest now in building your brand entity’s authority in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Invest in creating the genuinely best resources on your core topics — the pages that should rank regardless of algorithm changes because they most thoroughly serve searcher needs. And invest in understanding the new AI search landscape where your content needs to be citation-worthy, not just rankable. These are long-term competitive advantages that compound over time. For a deeper dive, explore our guide on Factors Rank Higher Google.

Proven Tactics to Accelerate Results in Competitive Markets

Competitive niches require a different strategic calculus than low-competition markets. Simply publishing quality content and building links at a sustainable pace won’t close the gap against entrenched competitors with years of domain authority and content depth. Accelerating results in competitive markets requires identifying and exploiting specific leverage points:

Targeting competitor content gaps: Use tools like Ahrefs Content Gap or SEMrush Keyword Gap to identify keywords that multiple competitors rank for but your site doesn’t. These represent proven traffic opportunities where the market validation has already been done — someone else is getting the clicks you aren’t.
Acquiring underperforming domains: Established domains with relevant backlink profiles and topical history can accelerate SEO results significantly compared to building from scratch. Domain acquisitions priced under $10,000 can deliver link equity equivalent to years of outreach campaigns.
Strategic content partnerships: Co-authored content with recognized industry figures, joint research publications, and content syndication agreements with complementary non-competitors can build topical authority and link equity faster than independent content programs.
Programmatic SEO at scale: For data-rich opportunities (location pages, comparison pages, product listings), programmatic content generation from structured data can create hundreds of rankable pages faster than manual content production. The key is ensuring each programmatically-generated page provides genuine value — not just a different combination of the same template text.

Common SEO Mistakes That Waste Budget and Time

Understanding what doesn’t work is as valuable as knowing what does. These are the most common SEO mistakes that cost businesses significant time and budget:

Optimizing for vanity keywords: High-volume, broad keywords are seductive but often wrong for conversion. A legal firm ranking #1 for “lawyer” will underperform one ranking #5 for “employment lawyer San Francisco free consultation” in terms of actual client acquisition.
Ignoring existing content performance: Most sites have a long tail of underperforming content consuming crawl budget and diluting topical authority. A quarterly content audit — identifying pages to update, consolidate, or prune — consistently delivers more ROI than new content production alone.
Building links before content is ready: Links pointing to thin or low-quality pages are wasted. The correct sequencing: build the best possible version of a page, then build links. Investing link equity in weak content is the SEO equivalent of promoting a product that hasn’t found product-market fit.
Treating SEO as a one-time project: SEO is an ongoing program, not a one-time implementation. Competitors continuously publish new content and build links. Algorithm updates periodically revalue different signals. Markets evolve and searcher intent changes. Treating SEO as “done” when initial optimizations are complete leads to gradual, often unnoticed performance decay.

How to Build Sustainable Competitive Advantage Through SEO

Sustainable SEO advantage isn’t built on any single tactic — it’s built on a compound stack of authority signals that become increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate over time. The components of a durable competitive moat in organic search:

Topical Authority at Scale

Google rewards sites that comprehensively cover a topic more than sites that have individual high-quality pages. Building topical authority means creating an interconnected content ecosystem where every major subtopic, question, and use case within your domain is addressed with purpose-built content. Ahrefs’ research shows that sites with concentrated topical coverage rank for 2-3x more keywords than sites with scattered content coverage at similar domain authority levels.

Start by mapping your topic universe: what are every question, concern, comparison, and decision your target audience makes related to your core service area? Each of those is a content opportunity. Prioritize by search volume and conversion relevance, then build systematically from your core topic outward.

Brand Authority That Extends Beyond Your Website

The strongest SEO signals come from sources you don’t control. Wikipedia mentions, industry association features, academic citations, news coverage — these create the external authority signals that Google’s algorithm trusts most. Building these requires genuine achievement and visibility: speaking at industry conferences, publishing original research that journalists cite, winning industry awards, and building relationships with the publishers and organizations that matter in your niche.

This isn’t fast work. But the brands investing in genuine authority building in 2025 are laying the foundation for search dominance in 2027 and beyond. The compounding nature of authority means the investment made today generates returns for years — while brands relying purely on tactical SEO must continuously reinvest to maintain positions.

Technical Excellence as a Permanent Standard

Technical SEO isn’t a one-time project — it’s an ongoing commitment to maintaining the infrastructure that allows all other SEO investments to perform at their maximum potential. This means quarterly Core Web Vitals reviews, regular crawl audits to identify emerging issues, and a development process that includes SEO review before any significant site changes are deployed.

The cost of technical debt in SEO is enormous. Sites that have allowed technical issues to accumulate often find that years of content and link building investment is being held back by crawlability problems, duplicate content issues, or performance metrics in the bottom quartile. Treating technical SEO as a permanent standard — not a one-time cleanup — prevents this outcome.

Key Takeaways for SEO Success

Achieving and maintaining strong organic search performance requires aligning strategy, execution, and measurement around a coherent framework. The most successful SEO programs share these characteristics:

They’re built for the long term, with tactics that improve in value over time rather than tactics that degrade as algorithms evolve
They’re measured by business outcomes — revenue, leads, pipeline — not just traffic and rankings
They’re integrated with other marketing channels rather than operating as isolated silos
They’re executed with genuine commitment to quality — content that deserves to rank, links that deserve to be given, and user experiences that deserve to be rewarded

The businesses that approach SEO this way consistently outperform those chasing shortcuts, and they build competitive advantages that become more valuable as the search landscape evolves.

By Guy Sheetrit
Feb 1, 2021

New Google Update – Is your business ready for 2023?

Major Algorithm Updates 2023-2024

Key Ranking Factors for 2024-2025

How to Adapt Your Strategy

Preparing for Future Updates