Top SEO Trends to Watch Out for in 2024

Search engine optimization is undoubtedly one of the best digital marketing approaches. It has carved a niche for itself by offering a wide range of benefits to businesses.

With a carefully crafted SEO strategy, you can rank your website at the top of the search engine results for relevant keywords. 

Not just that, you can also improve your brand visibility and earn a reputation in the industry. 

SEO is dynamic, versatile, and a far better marketing approach than other digital and traditional marketing approaches. 

If you are aware of the latest SEO trends for 2024, you can amend your existing strategy and get all the benefits for your business.

Some people and digital marketing professionals believe that SEO is not relevant today and that other digital marketing approaches offer quicker results and more revenues compared to SEO. 

How about answering this rumor with some SEO statistics? 

• Do you know that 63% of online experiences start with search engines?
• Of all traffic, 53.3% comes from organic searches. 
• Furthermore, 60% of digital marketers confess that SEO is their highest quality source for genuine leads. 
• The top three results in Google SERPs get 54.4% of all clicks.
• Google is the most prominent global search market player with a market share of 83%.

This is how powerful SEO is. You cannot win the competitive race without a carefully crafted and implemented SEO strategy. This is a fact. Period. 

Yes, SEO is a long-term approach, but it offers some unparalleled advantages to businesses in terms of brand recognition, visibility, reputation, and of course, web traffic and revenues. 

In this post, we will discuss some of the top SEO trends for 2024 that you cannot miss. Follow these trends and amend your strategy to gain maximum advantages for your business. 

Stay tuned! 

Be Prepared to Add a New E in EAT

We all know about the common Google EAT acronym, which is defined as Expertise, Authority, and Trust. 

Now it is time to add one more E to it. This E stands for Experience. Google has recently announced that the experience of the author or creator will be considered while evaluating the content quality. 

Google will prioritize content that is written by an author who has first-hand real-time experience in the domain. This is one of the SEO trends for 2024 to work upon. 

For example, a pediatrician can speak with more authority about coughing in kids rather than a mere professional content writer. 

A ReactJS developer can write a blog about ReactJS development hurdles with more clarity and perfection compared to a content developer. 

Google will now evaluate the content quality based on whether the author is a working professional in that particular domain or not. 

It is the right time to check on your authors. You will need a team of content writers who can conduct in-depth research before writing on a particular topic. 

On the other hand, you can reach out to some industry influencers and request them to write for a particularly important topic if you want an authoritative tone and want to rank that particular piece of content on search engine results. 

You will also look at the topics you select for writing. For example, if you have a financial website, writing on sports or other topics might not be relevant now. 

You can stop such practices now and focus on your specific domain to get more traffic and leads.

Write for the Audience and not for traffic 

This is one of the SEO blunders that digital marketers and content writers make. 

They think of all the things such as websites, keywords, keyword density, traffic, and leads while writing content, but forget the most crucial thing: people. 

You need to please your audience with the right information. Remember, they visit your website for information and if you fail to offer this basic thing to them, they will simply move to your competitors. 

The most problematic thing is they will never come back to you. 

Google and other search engines also rank web pages that offer relevant, valuable, and right information for a particular keyword search. 

Amend your content marketing strategy by shifting the gear from traffic-centered content to audience-centered content. 

Add a human touch to your content and it will appeal to your target audience instantly. 

You can use various content writing and content planning tools to find highly relevant industry topics that your potential customers are searching for. 

Be a human and write for humans.  This will surely work in your favor. 

Approach to the right author for content writing 

Thanks to those amazingly sharp AI-powered tools that can produce high-quality content for any topic. 

The irony is that such auto-generated blogs and articles also rank higher in search engine results. 

This is the reason why Google decides to put more emphasis on the experience of the authors. 

Google simply wants to ensure that content written by real authors ranks in 2024. 

What can you do about it? First thing is to hire expert authors for content writing. You can also approach industry influencers who can write for you. 

Furthermore, you also should start writing author bios in your content to notify Google about the experience and expertise of the author. 

Also, you can make a separate page for the author where users can find all the blogs and articles written by him on one page. 

Also, you can share the author’s social media handles on your website to make Google understand that he is a real person and not an AI bot. Hire the best SEO company in India with a team of expert subject matter experts for your blog and website writing. 

Using Reels and Videos for SEO 

TikTok is one of the most trending mobile apps that has carved a niche for itself by offering a platform for users to record and share reels and short videos. 

Not just TikTok, Instagram reels, Facebook reels, and other such video-streaming apps are trending recently. Here, users can become celebrities by posting almost anything. TikTok has more than 768 million global users who regularly use the app for social networking. 

In addition to that, more than 70% of these users fall in the category of Gen Z, your target audience. How about developing an SEO strategy to focus them and catch them where they spend their time? 

You can reach out to them with the right content and strategy to lure them to check out your products and services. It might help you get more organic traffic and leads. 

How to optimize your content for TikTok and other video-streaming apps? 

Use hashtags

It is the most brilliant way to reach out to your target audience on social media platforms. These hashtags are used by authors to categorize content so that users can easily find such relevant posts. 

For example, if you make and post videos related to yoga, some of the hashtags you can use are #yoga, #yogaforlife, #yogaforbeginners, #yogaandhealth, #yogaforfreshers, #yogatechniques, #yogaforkids, etc. 

Also, with such hashtags, you can also target relevant keywords in your posts to make it simple for users to find you. 

Add Keywords 

Another thing that you need to do is to add keywords in the description part. If you are a dentist in San Francisco, you can use keywords such as #bestdentistinsanfrancisco, #dentalservicesinsanfrancisco, etc. 

Make relevant Videos 

Yes, this is the main point. You cannot make irrelevant videos to attract your audience. Yes, you can come up with funny, creative ideas to lure your audience, but they must be relevant to your offerings or convey messages. 

If you are a dentist, you can come up with videos about your clinic aesthetics, your tools, treatments such as root canal and wisdom tooth removal, etc. You cannot post videos about dance and music and films. 

Furthermore, your videos should contain the right and valuable information. 

Sometimes, you can come up with funny wishes and all, but most of the time, you need to come up with valuable information that conveys your message and represents your brand. 

Hire expert video makers to create high-quality videos that look highly professional and aesthetically appealing. 

Always utilize structured data

We all know what structured data is. It helps search engines to understand the pages and how these pages are related to each other. It is some information about web pages that have machine-readable codes such as RDFa, Microdata, etc. 

You need to use this structured data in your website code to make sure that search engine crawlers can easily and effortlessly know about the web page and crawl them properly. It will also help you get more traffic and leads on your website. 

Updating Content Properly 

You might ask why you have added this to emerging SEO trends for 2024. However, there are digital marketers who make blunders when it comes to content updation. 

Google also ranks websites that update their content regularly. Not just that, users would also get some great insights from updated content. It will also improve their user experience. It will increase traffic and leads as well. 

For example, if you have written a blog about blockchain two years ago. Now, you can take the blog and add some relevant latest information to the blog and post it again. So, people would come for new information and you will get more traffic. It is as simple as that. 

Furthermore, your competitors are coming up with new content with fresh insights regularly. It will surely attract Google’s attention. 

To keep up with them, you need to come up with updated content for your blogs. Enrich your blogs with new information, data, statistics, and other latest discoveries to attract more users. 

Add value to your blogs regularly and they will not disappoint you. 

If you don’t update your blogs and website content regularly, they will become stagnant. Gradually, these blogs will go down in rankings and disappear from the top of search engine results. 

Even if your blog is highly relevant today, it will not stay relevant tomorrow. It will become unhelpful in a year or so for most users. 

Update your content regularly and enjoy the fruits it has to offer to you in terms of traffic and leads. 

Expect Lesser Organic CTR

Yes, you might find it disheartening, but it is true. 

Thanks to those multiple SERP features that Google introduced to search engine results, organic results are going down. 

Users are also not clicking on organic results as they are finding answers directly from various SERPs. 

Users don’t have to navigate away from the first search engine page result as all answers are there only. 

This is because Google wants to keep its users within its ecosystem so that it can offer highly relevant information to them. 

Another reason is to let users navigate to Google’s associated services such as Google Maps, YouTube, and others. 

Let’s understand it by an example: 

Suppose you have entered a search query as listed below: 

“Best refrigerator under 30000” 

Now, this is what you will find on Google for this particular search query. 

First, you will see ads at the top of the page. 

Then you will come across the “People also ask” section. 

Then, you will see relevant similar product lists. You can clearly see that the first page is all about Google’s SERP features. 

If you have written a well-researched article for the same topic, it will be hard to get listings on the first page of Google. 

When you are not even on the scene, your website will get lesser click-through rates than what you estimated. 

Google really wants users to use their own associated verticals. So, this trend will continue to increase in the near future. This is one of the SEO trends for 2024 you cannot ignore. Address this issue as quickly as possible. 

Google’s identification of AI content 

AI content generation tools are used widely by businesses and small companies. AI-powered content looks exactly like human-generated content and Google finds it really tough to identify such AI content. 

Also, companies are coming up with AI-powered advertisements as well. It will be interesting to watch how Google reacts to such practices. 

Also, it would be interesting to see how ChatGPT evolves in the future and Google’s reaction to it. 

Google has recently released many valuable and helpful content updates in 2022 related to AI-powered content. 

However, companies that generate AI-powered content did not take these updates seriously. 

As the matter of fact is that Google is still struggling to identify AI-powered content. Their algorithms are not that advanced as of now. 

It also means that AI algorithms are way more powerful at generating content that is hard for humans to distinguish from human-generated content. 

Don’t mistake AI-powered content for content spinning. Google can easily detect spinned content. 

Also, even if Google can identify AI-powered content in the future, how would they evaluate the quality and reliability of content, is also an interesting thing to look forward to. 

Also, would Google prioritize content written by humans in SERPs? It is also a question that needs an answer. 

Google will reduce crawling and indexing frequency

Do you know how frequently Google crawls and indexes a particular website? Well, we don’t have an idea, but we have noticed that Google has already cut down greatly on the number of crawling and indexing websites since 2021. 

We all know why Google crawlers crawl and index a website. It is to find and add websites to their databases. 

If we look at it from the environmental perspective, the impact of crawling and indexing is very minimal. However, it might contribute to gas emissions and other environmental issues. Google is highly committed to its carbon-neutral policy. 

They can do crawling and indexing through renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power. 

Another way is to build and optimize algorithms that can reduce the amount of energy needed for indexing and crawling websites. 

It is a good sign that Google is committed to minimizing carbon footprints and working towards more sustainable options for energy consumption. 

Product page SEO

Google has a tendency to always reward long-form content that is highly informative, valuable, and engaging. This is the reason why there are good chances that your product pages can rank at the top of search engines. 

You can make product pages full of content by adding FAQs, product descriptions, customer reviews, product specifications, etc. 

Come up with unique, but common questions that your customers usually ask and you will be rewarded by answering them on product pages. 

Some of the sample questions are like:

• What are your shipping criteria?
• Do you offer free shipping?
• Can I track my order?
• Tell me about your return policy
• Do you offer a warranty? 
• What are the other add-ons that you offer?

These are some questions you can add in the FAQ section. 

In this manner, you can add some more content to your product page to reap all the benefits long-form content on a product page has to offer. 

SEO competitor analysis

Can you imagine an SEO strategy without a competitor analysis? Well, it is not possible. It is the smartest way to amend your SEO strategy after carefully evaluating what your competitors are doing. 

There are various tools you have to use for this task. 

Competitor analysis can help you in many ways. For example, you can choose the right topics, follow the right keywords, get good guest post topics, and many more things. You can check out their backlinks, domain authority, and others. 

You can accommodate these insights and findings in your strategy to gain benefits. 

Image SEO revitalized

One of the crucial things that digital marketers don’t give attention to is images. However, the percentage of people who prefer image searches is huge. 

In addition to that, image optimization also allows digital marketers to add additional keywords into the content in terms of alt text. 

Alt text and schema markup help Google crawlers understand the image content and its relevance. When you have optimized images properly with alt text and schema markup, Google will give rankings based on that. 

Not just that, image SEO is bliss for the visually impaired and people who have low bandwidth and connection issues. 

Some tips for image optimization are listed below. 

• Reduce image sizes with the help of compressor tools. 
• Shoe images in highly recommended formats.
• Ensure that you scale your images that work well with your website. 
• Try to come up with original images that can be linked properly to form an image bank. 
• Don’t forget to optimize your image titles, captions, and alt text. 
• Ensure that people can easily share your images. 
• Go for lazy loading for images to improve the page speed. 

Featured Snippets are Still Relevant

Though Google introduced featured snippets for mobile optimization earlier, it has completely revolutionized the way mobile screens look when someone searches for something. Featured snippets occupy more than 50% of a mobile screen. 

The most noticeable thing in Google SERPs is that featured snippets appear twice. Earlier, people hesitated to click on them due to confusion, but today, they have become an integral part of any organic SEO strategy. 

Google has launched a wide range of featured snippets to offer the best possible answers to users. You can utilize this crucial feature to draw more traffic and leads for your website. 

Blogger Outreach and Personal Branding 

Getting floodgates of traffic on personal blogs is becoming very rare. You have to be an extraordinary blogger to draw such a massive amount of traffic for your blog. 

This is the reason digital marketers are emphasizing more to publish blogs on reputed websites within their specific domain. 

It is the best way to reach out to a larger audience. 

Furthermore, as Google now maps each author based on their digital footprints for a particular niche, bloggers must ensure that they have enough digital presence to make Google believe that they are credible and highly experienced in their specific domain. 

Passage Indexing 

Google has recently announced Passage Indexing, a new algorithm for long-form content lovers. Do you have any idea about this latest discovery? 

It is a common issue amongst long-form content generators to not drive enough traction, if you fall into this category, Passage Indexing is for you. 

Google has published that it will use the natural language processing feature to understand the real content of each passage while indexing websites. 

For example, if someone searches for “the process of utilizing waste to make bags at home”, and you have discussed the whole process in any of your article passages, Google will show that particular passage in the search queries. 

As per Cathay Edwards of Google, Passage Indexing will impact search queries greatly. 

Ensure that all your web pages have structured content to get listed passages on search engine result pages. 

Quickly Loading, High-performing Websites 

This is basic. You cannot expect a website to generate a huge amount of traffic and leads if it fails to load quickly. Furthermore, Google simply loves websites that load fast and offer a pleasant user experience to visitors. 

This is the most basic thing digital marketers must work on. If they don’t achieve this simple objective, they will fail to get a competitive edge. 

Ensure that you monitor core web vitals and page speed insights to evaluate your website performance and speed. Hire the best professional SEO services India to design a results-oriented, comprehensive, and unmatched SEO strategy for your website. 

Conclusion 

Search engine optimization is a long game. You might fail sometimes and win sometimes. The main thing is to stay there on the ground and keep fighting. 

In this post, we have discussed almost all present and upcoming SEO trends for 2024 that can help you amend your SEO strategy. 

When you think of your audience and not of bots, you will surely win the race. Keep in mind these latest SEO trends and stay updated with the latest SEO news and Google updates to modify your SEO strategy accordingly. 

An SEO strategy must scale as per new rules, guidelines, and wisdom. Make it a dynamic one that has a full scope of scalability. It will take you places.