Lot’s of Digital Marketing Agencies, Professionals, Bloggers (what my wife calls graffiti with punctuation), etc… this time of year come out with their Predictions for the following year.
Well, its December 13th, 2023 so that means we are less than 20 days left in the year – so yup – ‘tis the season’ For 2024 SEO Predictions.
This SEO Content Goblin is going to make his 2024 SEO Predictions right here, right now – no beating around the SEO bush…are you ready? It’s a bold one…even for this content goblin.
Over the last couple of years, and accelerated with ChatGPT, Bard, etc.. it’s really simple what Google wants.
CREATE HELPFUL CONTENT FOR THE USER!
Google’s algorithm updates like SPAM, Helpful Content, and Reviews is all about helpful content for the user. Google changed their stance – whether it’s AI or Human – create content that helps the user. However, the catch 22 with that is Google also wants you to demonstrate E-E-A-T – Experience – Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness…How does AI, or Can I demonstrate EEAT?
Technical SEO is still important and it goes hand in hand with Content. Technical SEO lays the foundation – if you have a great content but Google can’t crawl and index your content, or the user experience – like page load times are really slow – or broken links – whatever – your content won’t rank well. And Vice versa – you could have the most technically sound website out there – pass all your core web vitals, and have great structured data, image ALT-text – but if your content is thin, doesn’t demonstrate EEAT, isn’t unique and original and wasn’t created with “how does this help my user” you won’t rank well.
Here are the facts of what is going to happen in 2024:
Google is going to come out with more algorithm updates to their ‘systems.’ People will try and predict them, there will be SERP volatility and people will guess on unconfirmed updates. But truth be told – nobody really knows.
AI, Artificial Intelligence, SGE, Search Generative Experience, co-pilot, whatever you want to call it, Bing vs Google in the AI Arms Race, is coming. But when? Google labs experiment ends this month December 2023, or will it? Will it roll out in January, first quarter 2024, in 2024 at all? What does it look like, function, how does paid play into it? Again – nobody is going to know until Google does it…and I doubt we get any really meaningful data on how to track
So it’s really simple for 2024 SEO Success – here my 5 Expert SEO Tips:
Create ‘helpful content’ that helps the user with those Do – Know – Go – Buy moments in the customer journey.
The content needs to demonstrate EEAT – whether that’s 250 words or 5000 words – don’t concentrate on word count – answer the users query and match their intent and up front – don’t beat around the bush.
Reviews of your product – high quality reviews – helps the user in their decision making process – include them!
Images and videos – most of the time they are the bane of technical SEO with trying to ‘pass core web vitals’ – which is really, really hard and most sites – even some of Google’s don’t pass. But – making them helpful images and videos getting indexed in Google and used in SGE and Bing Chat.
Structured data – yes Google removed howto and faq rich results and de-prioritized, and they brought it back – kinda? – the fact is you need to have really great structured data that ‘helps’ Google understand the data of your site – it might make you eligible for rich results and featured snippets – which have really high CTR – the other big piece – I said this from late 2022 and early 2023 when ChatGPT and Bard were released – that structured data is really going to become important to show up in Bing Chat and Google SGE. Only 33% of all websites use structured data correctly – huge opportunity to methodically do this.
Lastly – OWN. THE. SERP. – Paid and SEO need to work together – they need to collaborate so one doesn’t cannibalize the other. This relates to #4 above too – do Images and Videos Good – I mean really good – the SERPS are becoming more visual. For a non-brand or brand queries make sure you are in the 10 blue links, in SGE, featured snippets, knowledge graph, images, videos, etc. Have as many of your assets and pieces of content show up. Don’t just concentrate on Position #1 – we in the 2024 SEO world should be way beyond that now – shouldn’t we? Do your research on the SERP – whose number one?, who are in the top 3?, where are you? One of my biggest gripes is that people use Industry Terms and Internal Terms within a Brand. Guess what? People don’t search that way – don’t hurt your organic traffic because you are calling something by an internal or industry term which only get’s searched 10 times a month – you could be going after a term that get searched over 10000 times a month – you have to do your keyword research, competitor research, use those third party tools as guides, use the SERP as scripture.
One bonus one – Marketing Teams and departments from IT, to Digital, Social, Paid, Organic, MARCOM – to succeed in SEO is not just content, it’s not just technical, or images and videos, or collaborating with paid. Proactive – Offensive SEO involved Everyone – in all stages of the content lifecycle – SEO can’t be in a silo and an afterthought.
I feel with all this AI talk – and how to rank better on Google – we need to go back and do the basics really, really well – and not just ‘one thing’ there is no magic silver bullet. You have to do everything in the aggregate – doing on page, technical, content, off page SEO pretty good is going to lead to better results. Data based decisions, and making adjustments will future proof your SEO and organic performance – no matter what confirmed or unconfirmed updates Google or Bing release…or what unforeseen 2024 Goblins pop-up.
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