SEO Experts Predictions For 2024

It is an open secret that SEO experts will agree to say that recently we have just emerged from the phenomenal times characterized by exceptional change and rapid learning. Indeed, such dynamics are due to the rise and further development of generative AI; notable instances include ChatGPT and Bard.

In addition, the constant updates from Google have played a major role in it. Moreover, the movement from Universal Analytics to a whole new structure called GA4 has become confusing for many of those who were not prepared.

Planning for 2024, with the adoption of gen AI has become very important in 2024 and beyond.

It should be clarified, AI is not designed to replace the writers who can write an appealing title and content for it and also SEOs that know a lot about what works.

What should SEO experts focus on in 2024?

In 2024, top SEO experts say we should focus on using smart tech to improve our website rankings. That means paying attention to how people use voice search, making sure our websites work well on phones, and targeting local customers. We still need great content, organized data, and to keep people’s privacy and security in mind to do well in online searches.

Kevin Indig, Growth Advisor:

With a series of life algorithm updates from Google in recent years, it’s become quite apparent that the bar for content and domain quality has skyrocketed past our initial measure. Moving into 2024, we must find many ways to effectively produce better content and grow our catalog.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) appears to be the most visible answer; however, it is mandatory for improving the quality and adding holistic human participation. Although certain limitations do constrain the AI as a content creator, it should be noted what opportunities for this technology are.

Pedro Dias, Technical SEO, Visively:

It is a very difficult question to answer — what should we focus on in 2024? This is because SEO significantly involves addressing very particular problems in the diverse stages of an e-commerce platform. Further still, each business might require different needs based on whether it is a startup or beyond that particular stage.

Nevertheless, if I were to point out a problem that is not only widely spread but also has a global grasp for now it would hardly concern the approaches towards SEO or any particular search characteristic itself. Instead, it is connected with the difference between expectations held by SEO experts and enterprises concerning search results.

SEOs must be able to offer real-life advice or rather practical recommendations and, therefore, they help businesses bridge the gap between their ability of end search results with actual meaning that suits them perfectly – now in this present year’s digital journey.

This is where many SEO experts have problems, as they usually do not know what type of performance the product that they are developing should demonstrate in the search. As a result, they often stumble upon many barriers and do not get the support needed for their further development.

Having a great command of Python, AI, or a profound understanding in some specific search niches does not matter. One needs to have a holistic approach to performing SEO.

Eli Schwartz,cGrowth Advisor:

Google is launching a great generative experience that alters the paradigm of representing information in search results. Rather than make use of structured data, Google will offer specific well-answered queries from the users.

This generative output will transform the SEO segment from concentrating on a high volume of keywords to hitting the right users with suitable keyword use. This change will need to transform SEO into a much more focused work. In general, this development shows the company’s tendency to give more valuable and individualized information to the users.

In the ever-changing trends in SEO practices, it is very important to consider its foundational aspects.

Shelley Walsh, SEO Content Strategist at SEJ:

Putting the user first is a core value of good marketing.

The further revelation is that the user’s clicks are very key in as much as visibility with the blow-by-blow coming from the issue of an antitrust lawsuit to Google. This demonstrates Google’s focus on user signals, where the important role of a user is being represented.

Embracing the notion that user friction has to be as low as possible for the users who perform desirable actions is very essential in coming up with an effective SEO strategy.

This further strengthens the need to rely on technical SEO and have content made for a purpose.

The main trick lies in understanding how the websites, search engines, and also users operate to link the two inputs accordingly. Although it is not a very sophisticated notion, the ability to implement this completely remains quite difficult.

Aim for the broad point of view – when both usability, conversion optimization, and high technical skills can be achieved as well as quality content is delivered.

Generative AI tools may be responsible for the way SEO implementation is going to develop in the future, but they cannot change its basic rules at all.

However, tools are only mechanisms meant to assist and should be used in conjunction with applied learning, experienced skills, and also expertise rather than taking over everything.

Jamie Indigo, Senior Technical SEO Lead, DeepCrawl:

It is important for ecommerce SEOs to note the changes taking place in Google’s role within SERPs if they are to keep their improved speeds and performance in a year or two. In an effort to rise above just being a search engine that helps one find websites having certain products, Google wishes to be the site where consumers buy their products.

In the future, SERPs will display products more and more directly thus eliminating the category pages and product listing. Traditionally, search queries like Shop {categoryName} would send the traffic to your category and product listing pages.

It implies that the users can see price comparisons, read product and seller reviews; go through several images of the desired consumer object or even make a purchase – all without leaving Google. In order to drive fast conversion, Google uses its Notes feature. The latter provides the ability to curate user-generated content UGC acts as social proof for the promoted brands or services.

With organic Shopping results becoming more available on the platform, visible by filtering Search Appearance to Product Results as opposed to other appearances and types of ads – it becomes now a key for SEO’s need in optimizing their feeds and appearing-based presence at the Merchant Center. Some optimizations, such as offers, can only be entered using Free Feeds because this allows Google to generate SERP shopping pages that show organic content; and if any is available in paid feed results.

Mordy Oberstein, Head At Wix:

According to Semrush data, there was a notable rise in rank volatility towards Q3 of 2023. Compared to earlier this year as well as in the previous years, there is a clear deviation from the general trends.

Even someone who is not a data scientist can notice this easily. In just four months, we have seen several updates come our way such as the August 2023 Core Update, September 2023 HCU, and October 2023 Link Spam update, and lately in November, there have been a couple of others including; Core Updates for both October that Google did not even bother to send out on Twitter.

The question that arises is: What is the role of AI in these changes? Is AI-written content legally accountable?

The situation is reminiscent of the effect that COVID-19 had. However, all was not good after the emergence of COVID-19 as the rankings went crazy. Outdated queries formed new to achieve the goals while it was necessary for the algorithm to understand and process some unknown old queries. The same appears to be the case with the current scenario. Though it’s due to the AI as well, there is also a deeper meaning.

However, when we look at some of Google’s recent announcements such as Notes (an experimental feature in Search Labs) and even their desire to reward content written from a direct experience perspective filters the fact that ‘E’ for Experience has been added into E-A-T a sea change is occurring on web sites.

AI helps a lot in this respect, as it definitely creates many opportunities. Nevertheless, the dynamic nature of trends in consuming the content must not be neglected. This is evident in the given above announcements and the underlying message they bear, the focus on information from real-life use cases of individuals as opposed to brands or authors who appear somehow artificial constructs existing solely online.

Google’s priorities will turn back to enhanced topical analysis, improved relevance, and also higher quality. Simply stated, following the common trend due to ongoing AI competition issues Google follows up on the arising user trends and products.

In 2024, SEOs should get out of the algorithmic bubble and see what different content types Google wants.

Katie Morton, Search Engine Journal

According to Katie Morton, flexibility and changing the approach are very essential not only for this year, but also in terms of the years to come. However, we can clearly see that with AI ushering in a new era, technological advancement is only going to increase at an accelerating pace. As a result, we need to be ready for the continuous dynamics of the SEO industry that can even be called disruptive.

As much as the significant algorithmic updates by Google were noticeable in 2023, the nature of the transition is expected to become even faster. SEO practitioners need to brace themselves for the unceasing changes in algorithm updates.

SEO practitioners and content strategists, in an effort to remain relevant on the SERPs, need to adopt a holistic method of having different kinds of resources available which are not only text-based.

Optimizing multimedia content will soon emerge as the single most important criterion, which would decide the fate and fortunes in a landscape of SEO.

With the progression of AI technology, Google’s algorithmic AI will develop in step with these advancements. Since the algorithm’s ability to understand media such as audio, video, and also image files is projected to improve significantly, it will be better in terms of indexing and serving multimedia content on Google. This even increases the burden of workload on SEO experts as they depend only on text-based topics.

With the current digital environment, it is fundamental to develop valuable content. Google, one of the leading search engines, attaches a lot of importance to the content being helpful as it is one of their top-quality filters. As users tend to view the content in different formats more and marketers would see how the video influences overall profitability.

Given the importance of helpfulness and Google’s improved knowledge regarding multimedia content, it is fair to assume that SERPs will prioritize multimodal content over single-mode text in the next year.

Recently, Google has launched its new multimodal AI model called Gemini. Gemini is created to have flawless reasoning between the text, image, video, audio, and also code. This state-of-the-art AI model will be implemented in a number of platforms like Search, Ads, Chrome and also Duet AIs.

The Gemini’s coding abilities, its ability to digest the volumes of data, and multimodal inputs for insights are just some functionalities provided by the tool. Even if there has been a lot of controversy about the credibility of Google’s launch demo, it can be still seen that Gemini is a very important milestone in the large language models (LLMs) and also massive multitask language understanding (MMLU).

However, with the release of Gemini Pro on December 13th, 2023 onwards and other version roll-outs planned throughout 2024, we can gauge its actual capabilities.

The reputation of Gemini is bound to move up and down as it gets compared with rival developments and also as the machine learner continues to learn at an exponential rate upon deployment.

Apart from the above-mentioned issues, it will be very essential to build effective partnerships and collaboration with marketing, sales operations as well as product development and web-development teams in order to integrate the newly developed tools into business.

Since economic difficulties are still being experienced, the Return on Investment is considered critical. One of the qualities that successful SEOs have is having a good business plan, such as individuals understanding how several revenue streams play into the different areas of businesses they work in. They also have the skill and knowledge of being able to pull in customers organically since marketing is important.

Because of this fact, SEO specialists will have to closely cooperate with the marketers and salespeople as well as the product team leads and also front-end developers on a website. SEO service is an effective tool but it needs to be aligned with user experience, content design, and conversion rate optimization. The flow of visitors that arrive at the business websites or platforms must easily convert into paying customers.

Change will be the only certainty in the SEO industry. Adaptability and strategic foresight will be necessary at all times due to the constant AI development, training, and integration of the content creation process with it changing over time and the corresponding definition from Google about what is called ‘quality’, as well as increasing global economic vulnerability.

Motoko Hunt, President, International Search Marketing:

We, as SEO professionals are very tempted to focus on the search engine algorithms, rankings, and also visibility.

In 2024, I hope that more SEOs will start focusing on the business objectives of the clients and give them compelling recommendations so they can meet their goals. It is one thing to provide a full list of 100 items, but the effectiveness will not be guaranteed unless all these efforts are employed.

Now, it is not uncommon for the delay in implementing steps to solve the current problems with organizations and institutions – indeed those clients may perfectly be aware of their needs.

Every company works according to a set of different processes, the availability and specification whereof strongly depend on various sources invested in them including budgets among other high priority items. It is important to do an overview of a client’s SEO content process in the word flow.

If action items can be segmented into smaller amounts that are much easier to handle, there is movement at a more consistent pace.

When we SEOs think with an attitude of knowing everything about the world, we forget that our clients do not know even a fragment. The people in charge of these discussions and negotiations on SEO as fixed discussions are also generally not search engine optimization experts. This makes it very easy for them to understand the recommended action items, especially when presented in small portions.

We are very lucky to live at a time when the majority of businesses appreciate SEO. It is no longer about persuading them to see its significance. Nevertheless, for millions of other SEOs competing with you focus needs to be necessarily not only on the skills that you possess but also on how effectively they can collaborate and engage clients in 2024.

Suganthan Mohanadasan, Co-founder, Snippet Digital:

Search marketers are required to pay attention to the changes in search behavior among users with a focus on new target audiences like millennials. Undeniably, it is very important to note that not all of internet users presently refer only to Google for their online search requests.

Nowadays, social media sites have become the most valuable search engines for many people who seek information on their travel vacations and tours or current recent trends.

On the other hand, medical and financial issues remain mostly prevailing among the reasons for googling. Therefore, it becomes very necessary to determine the situation by identifying the place where end-users perform their searches and adapting content strategy in relation to that.

This could involve making the content specific to the platform for some social media configuration or utilizing tried and true practices that support communication with intended users.

Duane Forrester, VP, Yext:

According to him, SEO is a very dynamic field which makes it interesting but also hard to foretell.

A very important area to detail is how the structured data should be and should not be presented. Data crawling is becoming more popular and this trend is increasing further, emphasizing the use of generative AI-powered systems that feed consumer answer system models.

Structured data is very important for understanding the content well on all the platforms and not only in some versions according to Google. Therefore, shutting off or lagging in this area leaves a big opening for competitors to exploit. Close this gap, and take action NOW.

Moreover, a fresh vision of the content value and customer journeys is going to come. Instead, even though being useful has been the priority for search engines over the past few years, SEO teams mostly focus on keyword research, filling up gaps in content and publishing.

Although these components should remain within a holistic SEO plan, the teams must now integrate customer listening and sentiment extraction as well as intent understanding.

However, with the advancements of competing companies actively listening to the consumers and providing them precisely what they are looking for, an outdated methodology that is keyword research doesn’t suffice as a best practice approach.

One of my most immutable predictions is that marketing teams, content creators, and their SEO counterparts will understand the need for close cooperation with all barriers preventing collaboration. The SEO program needs to comprehend how things work in social spaces.

With conversion being a very compelling insight provided by paid advertising, SEO will be able to fine-tune their strategies focusing on the correct type of content. This is just one of the many more cases available, however, I am hopeful that 2024 will be a year where we see an actual change in businesses towards relevant cross-team conversations. So, let’s do that in 2024 – the year of meaningful conversations when teammates gather and agree on mutual goals over some pizza.

Search engines, virtual bots or GPT-like systems will have the same searching capacities as the users. However, as their use continues spreading among people and businesses, the latter will have to adjust by focusing on structured data along with user value for them to not lose its relevance.

Dan Taylor, Partner, SALT.agency:

Google’s work to bring out the ‘hidden gems’ of search is steadily beginning to impact how we will need to present value propositions and benefits from our web pages.

I also believe that this focus on driving ‘real content’ is responsible for Reddit’s significant gain in search visibility. Even though many people differ regarding the quality of the information presented on this platform, it seems they cannot deny that these insiders offer genuine and first-hand knowledge. However, this might be an initial ‘over-correction’ right now.

The challenge comes in trying to scale these efforts across large sites. However, it is possible and one methodology to do this in any organization is by building a collective ‘WE’ experience using the content created around your evangelists.

For e-commerce businesses, this can mean singling out your best customers by sales and LTV read in a way to involve them more or less passively in the content creation process with regard to certain product category changes.

Similarly, SaaS firms can bring community-based content by establishing a place for product debates and at the same time online discussions taking vital hints from often third-party forums that allow opponents to engage.

Navah Hopkins, Optmyzr:

In the privacy-first web era, a good UTM strategy and integrating cookie consent into marketing operations are key. Overlooking these elements can lead to traffic misattribution and reporting oddities, especially with the phasing out of tracking IDs such as GCLID and also FBCLID. It is therefore crucial to find a way of ensuring that the UTM system used in the organization is uniform for the smooth running and coexistence between PPC and SEO.

Cookie consent is a legacy requirement in the EU and will soon further expand to other states of the US by 2024. Cookie consent implementation does not have to be complex or obtrusive but instead, it should remain a dialogue of opt-in giving the users an option on which cookies are they willing enough to allow you to track them.

Ross Tavendale, Managing Director, Type A:

It’s important for the SEO expert to welcome AI’s promise in 2024. Instead of considering AI as a medium for the full automation of content creation, it should be considered an instrument allowing access to the enormous processing capabilities exceeding those that can be achieved on laptops and also virtual desktops.

Based on this, there is a need to critically rethink the way we consume these deliverables and what end goals we seek. With the transferable trained model of GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and a data explorer, we are able to combine the collected information quickly while also cleaning it for further manipulation.

Furthermore, by going the creative route, we can convert the knowledge gained from SEO gurus such as John Mueller and Matt Cutts into online products. One can compile the transcripts of their vast pools of videos, podcasts, and articles that go way back a decade to create an easily customized GPT bot tasked with responding specifically to SEO queries. This new trend opens up a store of invaluable knowledge and expertise.

Gianluca Fiorelli, SEO Consultant:

An important point of emphasis in the current era should be the search journeys analysis as facilitated by Google. In fact, the Messy Middle is a precursor to what we see today with the bloated search results pages and also the emergence of “0 click SERP”, which are direct consequences of Google’s way of addressing this phase.

The process of anticipating the possible search paths a user can take from an initial query has never been more critical. Although the methodology to run research is acceptable, and we are not reminded about any other interesting methods of conducting experiments like focus groups or audience analysis, one significant thing still stays aside from all operations performed by us – discrepancies between our findings according to Google’s perception.

It leads to a question of how we can learn about the search paths that Google considers as the most likely one. This can be done partially in terms of one element that has been a part of Google since its inception and presently underwent updates – it is the search menu featuring Filters and also Topics.

But how can we really use these aspects? We can consider them as a kind of the ‘People Also Ask’ feature to define the potential informational hub topics. Likewise, we can go with the outlined topics in the Search Menu also.

Jono Alderson, Independent SEO Consultant:

This clearly leads us to the conclusion that SEO is trying — and easily failing at in most cases-, to cross its own definition of borders, now being treated upon by Google and other search engines reinventing “search”. Such transformation of the interrelations between search engines and publishers is supposed to shift the importance sphere in respect to content creation. The eye-popping eminence of this derivative maelstrom online revamped a selection procedure on the part of Google, so as to only index and display what was likely more vital for the users.

Simply developing the content, building links, and having a robust technical basis is not enough to guarantee indexing or traffic from Google. This is thus a constraint to the SEO industry which has concentrated more on producing content, reaching coverage, and improving the website.

In order to solve this problem, a number of practical steps can be taken. To start with, we need to review our content marketing approaches and make sure that they genuinely help our customers instead of trying to sell something only to solution-aware buyers. Second, we should not necessarily allocate the entire budgets for link building to the acquisition of links but rather invest into educating our call centers staff together with enhancement on oral designs and accessible design.

In addition, they should be media-coached to guarantee that the senior executives are easily accessible for interviews and comments either in person or online. Moreover, many high-quality resources provided for free can contribute to trust-building and also audience engagement.

This industry can move beyond the level of a content producer, link builder and also website enhancer which was like its traditional role. Leveraging our unparalleled domain expertise, and focusing on increasing the overall usefulness of businesses to their respective audiences, we can become a truly indispensable industry.

Sherry Bonelli, Founder Of Early Bird Digital Marketing:

In 2024, search engine optimizers will need to make informative articles for the users instead of targeting SEO-optimized content if they want the best ranking on Google. With regards to Google, its approach has been that of the Helpful Content System which stresses on treating everyone who builds content for the end-users instead of search engines.

It is this system that Google uses to evaluate the content of a given page in the search results by checking for originality and helpfulness. Therefore, SEOs need to change the way they write and also optimize content.

To start with, think about the questions asked by your clients concerning their interest in the products or services you offer. Create engaging and informative content in relation to these issues totally disregarding the compulsive use of keywords. Rather, focus on giving full responses to the queries.

Always be prompt on the specific inquiries and focus, as it is only inspiration that is a major. Do not use long and irrelevant paragraphs for the only purpose of maximizing the word number. Provide direct responses to the questions immediately.

Additionally, you can differentiate your offering from the competitor offerings by including such unique features as proprietary research, case studies, and surveys along with exclusive author commentary.

This is what will set your content apart from the many others that are almost like it. However, practice crawling on other competitive sites so you are able to spot better and rise high above the average.

In addition, make it clear within the content that authors write from what they know the best. Google appreciates genuine people who are very authoritative because of their real-life experiences. As such, it is crucial to demonstrate the fact that the author has direct experience in this domain.

Alli Berry, SEO & Content Consultant:

From the perspective of planning for 2024, I greatly recommend following up with an antitrust lawsuit against Google and other possible lawsuits. This might be only the starting point not just for Google, but also for other large tech firms.

We have the D.O.J to thank for providing a closer look at Google’s algorithm, especially what will be useful information to people involved in SEO.

For instance: We now understand that ranking comprises three elements: on-page factors, links + anchors, and user interactions accurately described the influencer as on-page elements were represented by the document’s content; link+ anchor was associated with how webization documents saw it while users’ interaction showed feedback about a given item.

If we have known the on-page and links + anchors factors for a long while, the factor of user interactions has been somewhat hidden all along. Formerly, Google stated that it did not utilize any click data for the ranking.

This is a clear sign that you should not only include the keywords in your metadata. It also has to have some intrinsic value to the user, be informative, and develop some level of trust that will drive many clicks. Moreover, after you’ve got the click take care of making the visitor satisfied so he or she stays most important.

Cyrus Shephard, Founder at Zyppy SEO:

Given the avalanche of evidence in keeping with the US vs. With the start of a Google antitrust trial it became more obvious than ever how much data about the users’ behavior is crucial for Google’s formation if in web rankings. For years, Google has emphasized the importance of “focusing on the user,” but we now understand the underlying reason: user behavior is 100% behind all the ranking-based data, this includes clicks, scrolls, and further searches.

But how is it actually supposed to focus on the user? It goes far beyond hollow words. It encompasses a believable title, description, and also favicon that really earns actual click-ins. Another aspect of this involves building a navigation structure that demonstrates your EAT – expertise, authority and also trustworthiness.

Like a regular visitor, I am limited by the time for examining each page according to Google norms. Does your page say what you are a specialist in straight away? Or do users need to go and find it? Does your logo depict what you do?

Indeed, Google may not ‘read’ your logo but the users can and so does the analysis of user behavior by Google. Likewise, if you call your blog section «Blog» in the navigation menu, think of calling it something that will indicate what quality professional is behind such a page like Protein Researches\ Tennis News or Coffee Blog.

Finally, make sure to respond very quickly and specifically to the user’s question. Google is very good at deciding if the user got what he wanted. While all these aspects may sound cliché, we are now finding the real scientific foundation for what Google is advising.

Dixon Jones, CEO, Inlinks:

AI, however, is at the verge of a significant breakthrough and although resistance may be very tempting; it would in essence make one comparable to an intellectual censor or damper on progress. Adopt it as a constructive power that is going to settle in bringing the new times, even if minimal originality may be left.

If you have unique information, then it gives you a lot of benefit over everyone else. Use it to know what others do not always know.

This can act as a basis to come up with convincing views and also incisive analysis.

Despite the AI’s help in processing quickly, original and unique information always makes you special since it is informative content that people need or find very useful.

Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager – Microsoft Bing:

IndexNow is a game-changing protocol that helps websites to be able to index their content and avoid using the traditional unreliable crawl methods. The ping replaces the need for updating content in multiple search engines as websites can update entire groups of search engines virtually and instantaneously with each change.

Irrespective of any addition, alteration or deletion it is always reflected as a result in the search engines very quickly and provides the best relevant information available with respect to consumers’ search.

The need for expansion is continuous, and by 2024 more than ten search engines will be supporting IndexNow with millions of websites adopting this ground-breaking protocol.

Martha van Berkel, Schema App:

The importance of Schema Markup would go even further from creating only rich results in 2024. The semantic value of it will be very important for search engines and also other AI-based products to understand your marketing content and give answers to the customers.

This change will force SEOs to move beyond just optimizing the pages and get good at telling the brand’s story in a language that is understandable for machines – Schema. This is possible through the development of a Schema Markup-driven content knowledge graph.

Using your content knowledge graph, artificial intelligence and search engines will capture the relations between these entities on your website to an extent in which they fully understand what you want them to know about it.

When humans read the content, they do not simply take in words but also attach meanings to those concepts based on their own know-how and further knowledge gained. For example, when we hear of the mention of candy, it makes us imagine our favorite type of candy back to our childhood. In the same way, news about shifting of ranks can be able to evoke both emotional feelings and lessons learned from either oneness in position SEO or past challenges.

There is no doubt that SEO nowadays experiences unprecedented changes in its 25-year-long history. Experienced SEO experts face many problems due to having established a specific work routine and also difficulties associated with developing new skills aimed at mastering modern AI technologies. However, their deep horizontal understanding of the search evolution domain allows them to view the problem-solving metrics more vertically.

Conversely, first-timers in the industry have entered a dynamic age and are much more apt to adopt new technology while developing creative approaches. Nevertheless, understanding the basic principles is very vital because it helps to understand the efficient use of tools that should be applied at appropriate moments and in suitable contexts.

Original Source – https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-experts-predictions/503049/