2024 SEO Trends

One of my FAVOURITE subjects to cover for 2024 is definitely the one that can have the most impact on your website. There are many factors that work together to affect your website’s ranking, and in essence it’s much like baking a cake. We mix ingredients together to make a scrumptious cake – and the higher quality your ingredients, the better your cake will taste!  

So with that in mind, let’s dig into the main SEO Factors for 2024!

AI will play a larger role in content creation.
Content creators are going to use AI to create content at a much faster rate. But, content created by AI doesn’t automatically equal QUALITY content, and it doesn’t equal ORIGINAL content either. AI generates content based on what it has access to, therefore users can end up with factually incorrect content and/or plagiarized content. If you are using AI to support your content creation, it’s extremely important to play the role of an editor and thoroughly vet the content. Although Google does not directly downrank pages based on incorrect statements or duplicated content, there are other signals of low quality content that will cause a loss of ranking.

**Note: Google has mentioned that they may consider AI a negative ranking factor in the future.

Content quality is a ranking factor you should never ignore
Ensuring your content is palatable and consumable is at the very top of the list.  You should review every article for E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness), — these are major ranking factors. The length of your content is not as important as the content itself, (although very short articles are not likely to contain the depth needed for good ranking). Your article should provide thorough coverage of your topic, without inflating it unnecessarily. The goal is to prove that you have expertise, that you’re a voice of authority on the topic and that you are a trusted source for this topic. This can be done by providing linked references to your conclusions, and ensuring that jargon, industry terms and processes are explained in layman’s terms. Also don’t forget the basics: check your spelling, grammar and punctuation!

Voice Search Content Optimization
Voice assistants like Google, Siri and Alexa are changing how we create content for the web. With the number of active voice assistant devices expected to shoot beyond the world’s population in 2024, optimizing your site for voice search is becoming very important. In short, this means using conversational language and long-tailed keywords, as well as providing direct answers to common questions.

Focus on high-intent keywords
One of the SEO tactics you may want to integrate on your site is the use of high-intent keywords. “High-intent keyword” simply means a word or phrase that often depicts a desire to purchase. Crafting content with this tactic can help customers find your business at the moment of their highest interest.

There are 3 different main intents to focus on:

• navigational (intent to visit)
• informational (intent to acquire information)
• transactional (intent to purchase)

Some examples of high-intent keywords are: “purchase” or “buy”, but it could also be “near me” or “directions to”. When using these terms, you should focus on the long-tailed keyword. For example; instead of just mentioning “best price”, be more specific: “We’ll give you the best price on Samsung Galaxy Z phones”. This is much more detailed and targeted using the same high-intent keywords.

Build it right – Prioritize technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing areas other than content on your website, to improve both SEO and user experience. This includes: using secure https, mobile friendliness, Optimized core web vitals, structured data markup, xml sitemap, robots.txt, Canonicalization (fix duplicate content issues), site architecture, and meta tags.

Other items that encompass technical SEO are things like broken links or images, redirect loops, and other issues that affect user experience and readability. In essence, check your site for errors and use Google Search Console tools to help identify issues and improve your ranking factors.

Google Core Web Vitals
3 aspects to be the core of user experience when visiting a website:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures website loading performance. This means improving image size compression, and minifying CSS and JavaScript files. Testing your pages using Google’s page speed insights can help you identify issues. Your aim is to have the LCP occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
  
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is replacing First Input Delay (FID) in March of 2024. FID measured the time it took for a website to respond to a user’s first interaction. But the INP metric will instead focus on the measurement of the page’s overall responsiveness throughout its lifecycle. This is assessed through observing the latency of all click, tap and keyboard interactions. You should aim for an INP below or at 200 milliseconds.
  
• Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS) measures the visual stability of a site. Specifically, the amount of unexpected layout shifts of visual elements on the page. The CLS should have a score of less than 0.1.

Video SEO has impressive results
Video content is increasingly important for SEO with video results appearing more frequently in search results. In video, SEO transcripts and/or captioning are absolutely essential. Remember that search engines cannot crawl video content – they need text-based content to be able to understand the video. (Transcripts are direct audio to text document, while captioning is the process of splitting the transcript up into text chunks and time coding each to synchronize with a video.)
Another key area of video SEO is timestamps. When you search for things like “how-to” videos with multiple steps, search will provide these key moments that match with search.
Don’t forget to optimize your video title and description. Whether your video is using YouTube or another video streaming service, you need to ensure that the video’s description has at least one live link back to your website. 

Local SEO keeps playing a big role in 2024
Local SEO is a strategy that allows  your company to be found in local search results and increases local traffic.  Beyond your website, a very effective tool is Google Business Profile. It’s important to ensure that you’ve optimized this profile, and ensure that it is actively managed, updated and maintained! Make sure your listing’s business hours are up-to-date, add and remove products/services as needed, and respond promptly and professionally to online reviews – both negative and positive!
Whatever avenue you use for your local SEO (Google, Facebook, Homestars, etc.) I cannot underscore enough, the importance of ASKING happy clients to give you an online review. Some clients have a business card with the Google review instructions on it, so it’s easy to leave behind. You never need a PERFECT 5 stars – (in fact, perfect sometimes looks fake.) – but having a large amount of good reviews is important to offset any bad reviews that might come in. This absolutely contributes to a healthy local SEO!

While I’ve tried to give you a high-level look at the SEO factors for 2024, there’s always unique situations and circumstances. My Brother Darryl is proud to help companies thrive online.

You can contact us by email or give us a call at 1-905-852-2615.

Sources:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-seo-predictions-trends-2024-omoseye-alebiosu/
https://www.juniperresearch.com/press/number-of-voice-assistant-devices-in-use
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/the-role-of-technical-seo-in-site-security
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/core-web-vitals

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