What to expect from SEO in 2024?
SEO is one of the key digital marketing activities that delivers the highest return on investment (ROI). If you still don’t know what SEO is and how this technique will benefit your business, check out our article "Search Engine Optimisation " (SEO).
With each passing year, SEO becomes even more relevant to businesses. Search engines have been updating their systems to get better and more clever every year. Therefore, we as marketers need to be able to keep up with the updates and trends.
Here are some of the top 5 SEO trends and tools you should be looking out for to improve your ranking in the coming year:
Table of Contents:
- Focus on the on-page experience.
- Content will still reign supreme next year.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) will be fundamental for topic and keyword research.
- You must start optimising for voice search
- Local SEO should become a priority.
1. Focus on the on-page experience.
The quality of a webpage has always been crucial to gaining authority and ranking on Google. The search engine prioritises the quality of the user experience, and recent updates reveal this. This year, Google has disclosed that page experience metrics will become another crucial factor for ranking on search pages. The page experience search metrics include the Core Web Vitals (loading, interactivity and visual stability) alongside other algorithm updates.
Use tools such as:
- Google’s Lighthouse,
- Core Web Vitals,
- PageSpeed Insights and others to see where your web page can improve.
2. Content will still reign supreme next year.
If there is one thing 2020 has taught us, there is still much to learn. Content will never be one-dimensional, especially now, during a global pandemic, as it’s yet to be reinvented, reapplied, and re-learned.
According to Google Search Trends, 2020 was the year of online and drive-thru concerts, social and racial causes, diversity in the film industry, and Asian and Middle Eastern food.
In 2021, most countries started their vaccination plan, but doubts about the Digital Certificate and social contact were still visible. The use of social networks accelerated, and there was a development of e-commerce, especially in establishing marketplaces on the most used social networks, such as Instagram or Facebook.
Content has gradually become more personal, more empathetic and serving an experience to the recipient. For this reason, videos, podcasts and co-watching have seen increasing success in 2022 and are estimated to mark the future trend.
The relevance that certain content brings to the reader is a priority to Google, which focuses on highlighting results that meet users’ real needs. In this sense, the Google Helpful Content Update is one of the updates that will be part of the SEO strategies of 2023.
3. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be fundamental for topic and keyword research.
Using AI (Artificial Intelligence) in digital marketing activities is not new. However, it is important to observe its evolution and the emergence of new AI solutions for the industry. Artificial intelligence has gradually improved the quality of topic and keyword research, saving marketers time by taking on time-consuming tasks such as grammar checking and readability, testing content performance, improving the quality of work and more.
Popular tools that use AI include:
BrightEdge: shows keyword searches, recommendations and rankings in real-time.
Wordlift: is an SEO tool that helps marketers with content organization, text analysis, internal linking, customizing the correct vocabulary for your audience, suggesting images, recommending articles and more.
MarketMuse: helps marketers create strategies and optimize content. This tool uses advanced topic modelling to improve content creation and natural language generation to generate the first draft of an article.
Kafkai: is a tool that writes content. It will save marketers time when writing, allowing them to focus more on editing.
Google MUM or Multitask Unified Model: is an artificial intelligence algorithm from Google that allows raising search performance levels, as it allows to respond to complex requests by users and provides comprehensive and informed answers in more than 75 languages.
4. You must start optimising for voice search
Given the experience of living in a global pandemic, what will change? Numerous hands-free solutions have been developed to keep up with changing behaviour.
Google shared that 27% of the global online population uses voice search. In the US, a Gartner study showed that 39% of the population uses virtual assistants on their phones, yet 15% of brands have optimised their mobile applications (apps) with voice search. In its 2020 study, Perficient found that 55% of respondents included voice search in their top three ways of asking questions on their smartphones. By 2022 ClearBridge Mobile estimated voice shopping to be around $40 billion.
Although voice search is not growing as fast as many thought, the global pandemic has changed our habits forever. The expectation is that these numbers will continue to rise in the coming years.
Optimising voice searches are becoming increasingly urgent, making marketers look at new ways to achieve this. For example, as voice searches tend to be longer than written searches, it will be necessary to:
- use longer keywords;
- capture nuances of natural language;
- improve the quality of content production.
In addition, in 2019, featured snippets are 40% of Google’s responses for mobile searches. Therefore, you will also need to add schema mark-up code to your website to improve voice search results.
5. Local SEO should become a priority.
While 72% of local Google searches resulted in a visit to a shop, around 56% of local businesses do not have a Google My Business profile. Bing business listings showed even more shocking figures, with 82% of local companies with no business profile.
Having your company profile on a platform like Google or Bing will improve your results page ranking position (SERP). Google, for example, improved its platform for zero-click searches by making the most relevant information available on the SERP.
To put it into context, when a user does a search and the SERP presents the relevant information for them, if they finish their search, there it is called a zero-click search. So not having a business profile or having an outdated profile will put you at a disadvantage.
This year, Google My Business has made several updates simplifying various processes. From new health and safety attributes, more hours setup, service attributes like video calling and delivery attributes and so on. In this way, updating your Google My Business has become easy. In addition to a complete and updated Google My Business profile, you should also keep in mind that local searches are affected by other indicators, such as the use of local keywords through the complete business data (address, phone number, category and attributes), photos, positive comments, responses to comments and most used keywords.
The effort an SME has to invest to keep up to date and implement adequate SEO strategies is often too high. SEO depends on time and constant learning because only this will ensure that the efforts will turn into results.
Our priority at Link37 is to be up-to-date and implement the best strategies to give our clients online visibility. Book a meeting with us and find out how we can improve your ranking in search engines.
LAST UPDATED ON MARCH 2024
