5 Situations Where You’ll Need an SEO Expert in 2023

There are plenty of moments in your website’s life cycle when you’ll need an SEO expert. As 2023 gets underway, skipping professional help in the following five situations is one of the surest ways to lose rankings, traffic, and revenue.

• Website redesigns
• In-depth audits
• Ranking for highly competitive keywords
• Keeping up with Google’s changes
• Technical SEO

1. Website Redesigns

Many businesses use the new year to refresh their website. The problem is that SEO is rarely part of the conversation during a website redesign. And that’s a real problem.

A site migration happens whenever a website goes through major changes, such as new URLs, a redesign, a new content management system, or a new hosting provider.

Each of these changes can hurt the site’s performance in search results if it’s handled poorly.

Make no mistake, there’s a lot to keep track of. So much that when we work on a site migration, we usually split our SEO checklist into pre-launch, launch, and post-launch tasks.

Even when a migration is done right, a temporary dip in organic traffic is common, and most SEOs expect one. In theory, though, traffic should recover quickly and then surpass previous levels.

If it doesn’t, something went wrong. The site may never fully recover and could see a long-term decline in traffic.

So if you’re planning major changes to your website, make sure an SEO expert guides you through the entire process. A web design firm that doesn’t do SEO won’t have the expertise you need, which is exactly where an SEO agency comes in.

2. In-Depth Audits

Even if you check every box on the SEO checklist, something problematic may be hiding deep inside your website and dragging down your traffic. Only a thorough audit can uncover it.

Site owners often focus only on their top-performing pages. But those are just a small part of your site’s overall quality. The remaining pages, often the vast majority, can drag down your site’s overall quality and relevance, and with it your traffic.

Don’t underestimate the impact of high-quality, well-organized content, either. Google’s SEO Starter Guide makes the point that good site navigation helps visitors find what they want quickly and also helps search engines understand which content the site owner considers important. Even though Google ranks individual pages, it also wants to understand the role each page plays within the site as a whole.

In other words, web pages don’t exist in a vacuum. In many cases, Google looks at the site as a whole when ranking it.

Other hidden issues are easy to miss without a technical SEO audit. For all these reasons, site owners need the deeper understanding of their website that only a proper audit provides.

3. Ranking for Highly Competitive Keywords

Let’s be honest: which keywords aren’t competitive these days? Search for almost anything and you’ll find millions of results. Yet page one is the only page that matters.

Some keywords are easier to rank for than others. For example, you’d likely have an easier time ranking for “best video games of 2022” than for the single word “games.”

Ranking for million-dollar keywords doesn’t happen by following a checklist. It takes deep SEO expertise from professionals with years of experience who live and breathe technical SEO and understand what’s happening in search right now.

Sure, you can get SEO advice anywhere. But if you’re trying to rank for highly competitive terms, don’t settle for that. Work with an SEO expert.

4. Keeping Up With Google’s Changes

Search results pages are constantly changing.

In 2020 alone, Google reported more than 4,500 changes to Search, about 12 changes a day. Do you have the time to follow and dissect every algorithm update, as we do in our explainer on how Google core updates work, and figure out how it applies to your website?

Algorithm updates can reshuffle page one, and competitors pull ahead. Maybe they have more resources or a bigger budget, or maybe they simply did slightly better than you. Either way, you need to figure out what changed and how to regain the lead.

Countless factors influence your rankings, and making sense of them is the job of an experienced SEO professional.

5. Technical SEO

Anyone can handle basic on-page SEO, but getting the technical side right takes knowledge and experience. That includes mobile usability, site speed, structured data markup, robots.txt, server maintenance, page experience, and much more.

Technical SEO requires a professional who works hand in hand with your web developer or webmaster to make sure the right changes are made correctly. One mistake can quickly undo your SEO results.

Every website has to get the technical side right to rank. Why? Because if a site can’t be crawled, it won’t be ranked.

Google’s Gary Illyes made the same point on Reddit: he wished SEOs would get back to basics and “make that damn site crawlable” instead of chasing made-up update names, then spend more time talking with the site’s developers.

Improve Your SEO in 2023

A new year brings new opportunities for your website.

Now is the time to think seriously about how you’ll bring expert SEO strategies on board if you want a real shot at competing on Google’s first page.

Référenceur, Your Experienced SEO Partner

SEO is a profession in its own right. It deserves extra attention in the five situations above for one simple reason: your Google rankings drive your revenue. And in the end, that’s what this is all about.

Référenceur is a French-speaking agency from Belgium and Luxembourg with more than 15 years of SEO experience, and we work with U.S. businesses remotely, through video calls, shared screens, and monthly reporting. If you want to grow your organic search traffic, request a free assessment.

Where things stand in 2026: Since this article was published, Google has folded its helpful content system into its core ranking systems (March 2024), launched AI Overviews in the U.S. (May 2024), and kept announcing core updates on its Google Search Status Dashboard. The five situations above still call for expert help, and AI search has added another: making sure your brand appears in AI-generated answers, which is the focus of AI search optimization (GEO).