SEO is the dynamic tool your business needs in 2024 to navigate the treacherous waters of the digital landscape in this day and age. Search engine optimization (SEO) has changed significantly over the years due to sophisticated search engines and intense competition.
You may have stumbled across articles and blogs claiming SEO is dead or dying in 2024 but that is far from the truth. Businesses looking to increase their website traffic and gain exposure are still employing SEO and as long as users are using search engines and scouring the web to find what they’re looking for, it will never die out. However, a more ethical, technically sophisticated, and user-centric strategy is becoming the norm in SEO going forward.
Here are some SEO trends and predictions for 2024 that you should be aware of:
E-E-A-T in SEO
Google’s emphasis on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) brings to the forefront the importance of ethical and high-quality content creation. This means that to rank well in search results, your brand needs to produce content that not only satisfies user intent but also meets these criteria. Moreover, with the rise of AI-driven technologies like ChatGPT, SEO is evolving to be more conversational. This implies that search engines are increasingly favoring content that mirrors natural human interaction patterns instead of rigidly structured and keyword-stuffed content.
AI is great, but your SEO strategy should focus on the end-users, minimize the use of AI, focus on the human factor, and prioritize higher-quality content written by human SEO writers to create content that interacts and connects with your target audience.
Search Generative Experience (SGE)
SGE is the new way to search the web by using Generative AI. What is generative AI? You might ask: Generative AI is a category of AI that specializes in creating entirely new content by learning language models and existing patterns; one such example is ChatGPT.
Now onto Google’s SGE. Let’s take an example: you search for something like “East Way to Cook Pasta” or “How to Write a Formal Letter?” SGE provides you with a list of websites with detailed instructions but also a step-by-step guide for ease of access, basing the entire content around user experience and user satisfaction. SGE has been predicted to decrease organic traffic and visibility, affecting your business negatively. Adapt your website to SGE by improving your E-E-A-T, making your content easier to read, and elevating it with custom images and videos.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a method that can help any business or brand that operates locally in a specific area by improving its web presence to enhance local traffic, exposure, and brand awareness.
Millions of people search Google for business information every day. With local SEO, you can target customers who are actively looking for products or services in your area through local keyword optimization and location-specific content creation to drive organic traffic. For example, if someone is searching for a sports center, then Google is going to target their local area to display businesses near them in the search results, even if their intent is not local. SEO increases your chances of appearing in the top results for local searches like these.
Backlinks
Link building is one SEO strategy still going strong in 2024, and although backlinks are easy ranking factors to manipulate your web traffic and visibility, backlinks are becoming an even bigger ranking factor than AI in 2024 and are still the top decision-makers on the internet. Despite Google’s E-E-A-T strategy, links continue to be an indicator of the expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness of any product because every search costs Google about 0.3 cents, and there are almost 8 billion searches made every day and analyzing the data of every single page on every single search is bound to be expensive.
User Experience
As mentioned before, Google focuses on the user experience to determine rankings and website traffic, and you need to optimize your content for the same by making your website as simple and straightforward to use as possible. While ranking websites, the Google algorithm considers factors like site speed, ease of navigation, accessibility, personalization, relevant content, and user interaction. By moulding your website content according to these parameters, you can build a brand reputation that consistently ranks at the top and also provides user satisfaction in 2024.
