Search engine optimization (SEO) is always evolving, but it seems it has been changing more rapidly in recent years. This has put a lot of pressure on marketers and SEO experts to keep up. To do so, they must understand the latest trends and strategies in the industry, including the intriguing developments and changes that are just over the horizon. Let’s look at some key SEO trends you should know in 2024.
Artificial Intelligence Will Play a Bigger Role in SEO
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become very popular in the last two years, propelled by the advancements in and popularity of large language models like Bing AI and ChatGPT. It now plays a significant role in content creation and SEO optimization, which is why businesses have embraced it at the rate they have.
It has also helped improve data analysis, helped businesses gain better insight into their SEO strategies, and saved them time so they can focus on creating better strategies.
AI has also permeated search engines and is changing them in several significant ways.
The first is Google’s integration of AI into its search algorithms. In addition to helping the search giant analyze large volumes of data faster, it has helped its algorithms better understand user intent, natural language use, content and context. The result is more precluded and highly relevant search results.
Google has also said that using AI for content creation is not an issue as long as the content is useful and relevant for a reader or user of its search engine. However, the company emphasizes that there is no way to game rankings using AI-generated content because it is using its own AI algorithms to ensure all content that ranks meets its quality guidelines, whether created by humans or AI.
Lastly, Google has adopted AI to help improve its link quality assessment and to detect spam links. By doing so, it ensures that only content with high-quality and relevant content ranks on its result pages. The result is a better user experience on these pages, which Google has always said is the aim since it released the Panda update.
An Increased Emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness
Google introduced its Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) guidelines to help assess the quality and relevance of websites and their content.
The aim is to ensure its result pages surface content from people with experience and expertise in the subject matter, that the website has the authority to post content in a given field or topic, and that the information is reliable and credible.
Demonstrating E-E-A-T is essential for ranking and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. In addition to demonstrating expertise, researching thoroughly, and having topical authority, SEOs can improve E-E-A-T by building strong brands around their websites.
Mobile-first Indexing Will be Crucial
With the number of mobile internet users exceeding the number of desktop users, Google has placed a lot of emphasis on websites to provide the best experience to mobile users. The result is a focus on mobile-first indexing, where Google uses a website’s mobile version to index and rank it. Websites that are not optimized for mobile risk a drop in traffic, ranking, and visibility.
Google has set aside some criteria that ensure a website is ready for mobile-first indexing:
- Using a responsive design
- Ensuring Google can access all content, including content that may lazy load on desktop
- Ensuring similar content on desktop and mobile
- Using the same structured data on mobile and desktop
- Ensuing ad placement does not impact user experience on mobile
- Optimizing images for size and weight
- Minimizing the use of interstitials and pop-ups on mobile
These best practices are crucial for ensuring visibility and ranking high when users search relevant keywords and queries on Google. Therefore, SEOs will need to implement them as soon as possible if they have not done so already.
Video Content and SEO Will Play a Bigger Role
The preference for video content over textual content has been a growing trend in recent years. With all social media platforms placing a bigger emphasis on long and short-form video, doing the same for websites will be crucial in 2024.
Video SEO is crucial because it increases how much time users spend on a website. It can also earn backlinks and traffic if done right. Businesses and SEOs will have to do keyword and user intent research to ensure the videos they create and post fit what users are looking for. They will also have to:
- Optimize video so their smaller sizes improve loading times
- Provide transcripts to improve accessibility and crawling
- Optimize video metadata and title tags to improve discoverability
Technical SEO’s Importance Will Evolve
Many people see technical SEO as a strategy that supports keyword research, content creation, and other SEO strategies. However, Google keeps improving how it understands and interprets websites, meaning technical SEO will become crucial in 2024.
Better technical SEO will make it easier for search engine bots to crawl, interpret, and understand website pages and the context of their content leading to better ranking. It can also improve user experience because websites with great technical SEO are more likely to be optimized for factors like navigation.
Voice and Image Search Optimizations For Better Ranking
Search engines are starting to become answer engines, meaning they are becoming better at answering questions. Knowing this and that people typically ask questions through voice, SEOs should optimize their websites for voice search.
While doing so, they also have to consider other aspects like using the right long-tail keywords and keeping their content conversational so people can understand it easily.
There is also a growing number of people who are searching for products using images as services like Google Lens make this much easier. Optimizations like using descriptive file names, creating image sitemaps, image compression, and adding alt attributes can all ensure websites and their images appear high on image search results.
Conclusion
With all the changes happening in SEO and many more coming in the future, experts in the field must be passionate and dedicated to continuous learning. Understanding trends like how AI, video marketing, technical SEO, and changing user intent will affect SEO will help them stay ahead and leverage key SEO trends in the coming year.