10 Top SEO Tips And Trends 2024
Table of Contents
Introduction
SEO is one of the most dynamic areas of digital marketing as it is ever changing with new and improved content. Google constantly rolls out updates and changes to it’s ranking algorithms to ensure the best user experience. So it is important to stay up to date with these changes to achieve that all important SERPs (search engine results page) ranking.
This means each year marketers have to re-evaluate their marketing strategy to suit new SEO trends and ensure websites are optimised with quality content to rank higher and get noticed on Google.
Here at Converrt we have created our very own list on what we think is important for marketers to look out for in 2023.
EEAT – Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust
Google will now consider the experience of the author when evaluating the quality of the content.
This will stress the importance on the author of the content as Google will evaluate first hand, real world experience of the chosen topic discussed by the creator.
The content creator for your website must be knowledgable about your business, the product or services you provide and the ultimate goals of the business. They must also have knowledge about how SEO works to get their content to rank! Check out our article on how to write SEO friendly content here.
Audience Targeted Content
There is a difference between audience targeted content and traffic targeted content. You want to be creating content that is relevant to your business that potential customers will find useful.
It is important you cover your general business topic as Google will be looking for first hand, real world experience to rank. This makes it vital to understand your audience and what they want to see, instead of trying to bring new unrelated traffic to your site.
The idea is to make people stay on your site as long as possible until they convert into customers. It is about ensuring people follow the buyer process and you make the customer journey memorable and a great experience for them.
Topic Focused Content
In previous years it has been useful to focus on a keyword to write your content about. Now content that uses multiple keywords without ever addressing a relevant topic will fail to rank well in SERPs.
Instead content should now be topic focused which users will find useful.
For example:
- Answering relevant questions
- Creating step-by-step guides
- Utilising the people may ask feature
- Provide context around your content
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Voice Search
Voice search is slowly taking over traditional type search and is something to optimise for to improve SEO.
To get started with voice search you need to look at data, analytics and dive deeper into your customer’s behaviour. This is going to help you understand how exactly your customers are using the voice feature so you know how to optimise your site for it.
To get started:
- Provide context about your pages on schema so you can inform people what your site is about. This gives Google more context and help them to show your results to more specific queries that are relevant to your website.
- Answer questions searched by your customers in your content. You can achieve this by adding a FAQ (frequently asked questions) section. This will help add additional keywords in your content.
Google Featured Snippets
Google snippets are a great way to get your content noticed. Snippets are selected by Google’s algorithms if they think the format of content will help people find what they are looking for easily. Google considers both the information from the snippet and the webpage.
There are several SERP feature snippets that Google will highlight if it deems it relevant. You must first search the keyword and examine what the results look like.
How to optimise for Google featured snippets:
- Think about how to answer specific questions your audience might be searching for.
- Directly address and answer questions
- Question style subheadings
- Creating lists
- Consider search intent
Google My Business
Local SEO is a great way to improve your ranking in SERPs for customers in your business area. Google My Business is a free tool that helps you optimise for searches like ‘companies near me’ and is useful for both brick and click businesses.
Local content takes into consideration location, time of day, and previous searches to decide what results to show.
For example searching for a restuarant – Google would take into consideration your location and if it is near you, if the restaurant is open at that time of searching and the type of restaurant depending on previous search history.
To optimise your website for local search you can:
- Include location names or specific location topics relevant to your business.
- Obtain backlinks from local businesses with high authority.
- And finally keeping your business information up to date by mentioning your location in your business description, adding opening times and all the areas you serve.
Blog Content
Blogs are still very much alive and relevant today as they were 5 years ago. Blogs are still an excellent way for users to discover your content in SERPs.
It is well known that your content must be written with your customers and audience in mind. Related to the helpful content update, it’s essential that your content from your blog is valuable, original and written for humans.
AI Content & Software
Google is quite clearly prioritising high quality content created by original authors. This means no shortcuts when creating new content.
Instead Google wants to see more content made by humans that is suitable for humans.
ChatGPT initially launched as an AI content writing software at the end of 2022 and has boomed in 2023. ChatGPT is a chatbot that responds in a conversational way.
The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
The free software allow any user to ask questions and get auto generated resonses that have been recycled and reused in website blogs. The information is collected from Google and generates in response to a users query.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis in marketing is identifying and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your own business compared to others in your market area.
The idea is to identify opportunities for your business and threats from potential competitors.
You can easily evaluate competitors to help form and shape a marketing strategy. There are many tools and software that can help you complete competitor analysis. It will help compare quality of content, backlinks, domain authority and more.
SEMrush is a platform often used for keyword research and online ranking data. This includes metrics like “search volume, keyword difficulty and overview”.
In this case we want to look at website URLs and their domain authority. We can find where they currently rank on Google and the keywords they are targeting. View our other article on how to use SEMrush effectively.
High Performing Sites
Since the page experience update released back in 2021, Google has emphasied the importance of high quality, high performing websites in its ranking algorithm.
Technical SEO refers to improving the technical aspects of your website. This includes making your website faster, easier to crawl and more understandable for search engines.
There are many tools to consider when improving technical SEO, such as Page Speed Insights and Core Web Vitals. These page experience reports can be viewed using Google Search Console.
Bonus Tip!
Optimising images on your website for SERPs is a great tool of improving technical SEO. The bigger your image files the longer it will take a page to load.
We suggest compressing your image files so that the page load speed can be lowered.
Also adding alt text to images so web crawlers can understand the content of the image better. This provides opportunity to add in keywords but to also aid people who are visually impaired understand your content.
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