The State of Technical SEO Report 2023 comes from digital marketing agency Aira and the Women in Tech SEO community. So what will be important in 2023? Here’s a quick recap of some of the more interesting results.
Resources are important. The biggest risk highlighted by the report was organizational resource shortages. Insufficient resources means no changes or very slow changes. This means that your SEO results will not be great. So, prioritizing tasks is still very important if you work in a resource-scarce company.
Critical Tools and Technologies. Google Search Console is the most popular tool across all technical SEOs, with 92% reportedly using it. It was also the top tool (78%) used to measure organic search rankings.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider was commonly used for crawling and analyzing log files. Semrush, on the other hand, was the frontrunner for evaluating a website’s search visibility.
For non-ecommerce platforms, technical SEOs most preferred working with WordPress. Wix was considered the most problematic to work with.
Time is of the essence. Sadly, it’s pretty common to wait months for technical SEO changes to happen. 88% of respondents waited between 1 month and 24+ months for technical SEO changes.
Perhaps a little surprising, 22% reported waiting only a month for technical SEO changes to be implemented. On the other hand, 20% said he waited 12 months (this was slightly down from the previous year). Also, 11% of his respondents reported that she has been waiting longer than 24 months.
important skills. What are the top three skills required for technical SEO? According to respondents:
- Data analysis (72%)
- Read and understand HTML/CSS (58%)
- Content strategy (39%)
I was surprised that content strategy ranked so high. But as Steph Greaves pointed out in a comment on the report:
- “It definitely helps to know how content is related on your website in order to fully understand the internal linking opportunities to serve your users.”
Technical SEO = marketing. Search Engine Land contributor Mark Jackson argues that SEO is marketing. Therefore, we found marketing (74%) to be the top answer to this company-specific question.
Dig deeper. There is much more to read. Here is the full report without gates:State of the Technical SEO Report 2023
why you care. Overall, the report is good news for the industry. Clearly we have a problem. Most notably, the uncertain economic outlook. In addition, there were many layoffs. However, it is encouraging that the SEO outlook remains relatively positive and the report shows that demand for SEO remains strong.
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About the author
Danny Goodwin is Editor in Chief of Search Engine Land & SMX. Goodwin not only writes daily for Search Engine Land about his SEO, PPC and more, but he also maintains Search Engine Land’s roster of subject matter experts. He also helps program his SMX – Search Marketing Expo, his series of our conferences. Prior to joining Search Engine Land, Goodwin was an executive at Search Engine Journal, where he served as editor, leading editorial initiatives for the brand. He was also the editor of his Search Engine Watch. He has spoken at many leading search conferences and virtual events, and his expertise is provided by a wide range of publications and podcasts.
