Technical SEO report reveals what matters in 2023

The State of Technical SEO Report 2023 is out from digital marketing agency Aira and the Women in Tech SEO community. So what matters in 2023? Here’s a quick summary of some of the more interesting results.

Resources matter. The biggest risk the report highlighted was an organizational lack of resources. A lack of resources means changes don’t get made or are very slow to get made – which means less than stellar SEO results. So if you work at a company where resources are lacking, prioritization of tasks will continue to be critically important.

Tools and technology that matter. Google Search Console was the most popular tool for technical SEOs overall – 92% reported using it. It was also the top tool used (78%) for measuring organic search rankings.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider was popular choice for crawling and log file analysis. Meanwhile, Semrush was the top choice for assessing the search visibility of a website.

For non ecommerce platforms, technical SEOs most preferred working on WordPress. Wix was considered the most problematic to work on.

Time matters. Sadly, waiting months for technical SEO changes to happen is fairly common – 88% of respondents waited anywhere from a month to 24+ months for technical SEO changes to be made. 

Perhaps a bit surprising: 22% reported waiting only a month for technical SEO changes to be implemented. Meanwhile, 20% reported waiting 12 months (which was down slightly from the prior year). And 11% of respondents reported waiting 24 months or longer.

Skills that matter. What are the top three skills a technical SEO should have? According to the respondents:

1. Data anaysis (72%)
2. Reading and understanding HTML/CSS (58%)
3. Content strategy (39%)

It was surprising to see content strategy ranked so highly. But as Steph Greaves pointed out in the report comments:

• “It’s definitely helpful to know how content relates on a website to fully understand internal linking opportunities that serve the user.”

Technical SEO = marketing. Search Engine Land contributor Mark Jackson has made the case that SEO is marketing. So it was nice to see that marketing (74%) was the top answer to this in-house specific question: “In your organisation, in which team does accountability for technical SEO sit?

Dig deeper. There’s much more to read. Here’s the full, ungated report: The State of Technical SEO Report 2023

Why we care. Overall, this report is good news for our industry. Clearly, we’re facing issues, most notably an uncertain economic outlook. Plus there have been many layoffs. But it’s encouraging that the report finds the outlook for SEO is still relatively positive and demand for SEO remains in a good place.

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About the author

Danny Goodwin is Managing Editor of Search Engine Land & SMX. In addition to writing daily about SEO, PPC, and more for Search Engine Land, Goodwin also manages Search Engine Land’s roster of subject-matter experts. He also helps program our conference series, SMX – Search Marketing Expo.

Prior to joining Search Engine Land, Goodwin was Executive Editor at Search Engine Journal, where he led editorial initiatives for the brand. He also was an editor at Search Engine Watch. He has spoken at many major search conferences and virtual events, and has been sourced for his expertise by a wide range of publications and podcasts.