It’s not even the first quarter of 2024 yet, and Google has already disrupted search results and marketers’ lives by launching a core update for search. And this one seems to be a rather massive update, given the number of websites already experiencing the impact. (Hundreds of websites, that we know of, experienced major shifts in their rankings over the last month, both positive and negative.) Here’s all you need to know about the latest Google Updates and SEO trends in 2024.
Google clarified with its March 2024 core update its intention to completely revolutionize the SEO industry or the way search engine optimization works. This major update is cleaning up the search results in an even better way than previous major Google updates like the Panda and Penguin updates did, sacking low-quality websites like never before.
Many website owners and internet marketers we talked to have experienced the impact of this latest Google update and are perceiving it as a major update. This update is said to include core algorithm changes to improve the value and relevance of search results.
Google introduces many minor and major search updates throughout the year to improve search quality and reduce spam content from its search results. In this article, you can read about some major Google updates and search trends this year.
Has your website been hit this year? If yes, read here all about the latest SEO industry trends and Google Search updates to keep your digital strategy up to date.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process that includes various marketing and optimization techniques and helps websites improve their rank on SERPs for all the relevant keywords.
We would like to mention here that Learning SEO is not that hard. You just have to do research and gain up-to-date knowledge about its techniques, processes, parts, and methods.
You can start your journey with the following topics:
After SEO, here are some vital SEO practices that will help you to identify the top SEO (Search Engine Optimization) trends of 2024.
Instead of only focusing on Sales Conversions, you also need to focus on other parts, especially on the generation and conversion ratio and factors that are influencing potential customers. It can be fixed with web designing and keyword optimization.
Create a fair competition for your competitors. With better and ethical SEO, you can get a better rank for the keywords your competitors are ranking for.
SEO trends concerning Profit SEO will keep you up-to-date with the changes taking place in the industry according to the features and trends. It will help you to increase profit and conversation.
Top SEO Trends To Rank Your Website For 2024
Here is our list of top SEO Trends & Techniques that would affect your ranking on Google SERPs in 2024.
1. Technical SEO And UI/UX Factors:
People don’t want to dirty their hands with technical SEO and aspects of their website, they are just happy with the basic SEO.
However, it is a proven fact that avoiding all these small technical aspects of the website can harm your website’s health.
Make sure that your website looks fresh and engaging but also has the best and most ethical UI/UX. Additionally, also make changes keeping the site structure in mind.
How to Implement SEO-Friendly UI/UX on Your Site?
As we stated above Search engines and crawlers have grown up and now along with good content they also consider the UI/UX of the site.
They check whether your site’s UI/UX design is friendly or not. Google gives priority to fast and user-friendly websites, So make sure that your website meets all the UI/UX standards.
Here Are 4 Tips to Improve UI/UX to Boost Your Ranking:
Keep an eye on the bounce rate regularly and if the bounce rate is high then find the reasons and try to resolve it. Many experts state that a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 is good for the website, but a higher Bounce rate needs a solution as quickly as possible.
Monitor the Session duration of your pages, it will tell you how long the visitors last on your page. If there is any problem with the result try A/B Testing. It will give you an idea if page elements are performing well or not.
Create headings that create curiosity in the reader. It increases the CTR and also guides readers through your content.
Spend time improving your site’s navigation. Make it easy to assess and easy to navigate. Also, work on menus, and make them simple.
2. Provide Relevant Data For the “Audience”:
You don’t have to impress Machines and crawlers to grow faster; you have to impress all the visitors.
So, create quality and meaningful content and avoid keyword usage or stuffing in the content.
Keyword stuffing also harms the ranking and conversation so keep everything clean.
You can follow these tips to create quality content:
Identify your audience first and then start working on your content. While preparing your content try to keep your content natural, meaningful, and ideal for your visitors.
Add Keywords at relevant places, such as meta descriptions, meta titles, alt tags, etc.
There are 9 types of keywords, pay attention to them too, especially on long-tail keywords.
Mix these keywords wisely in your content.
3. Mobile-First Indexing for Small Screen Users:
With quality content, AMP compatibility or mobile-friendly design is a must for a website to survive in this highly competitive internet world.
How to perform Mobile SEO:
Here are some vital tips to boost your SEO game in 2024.
Optimize your website with AMP and also achieve a good mobile page speed score. Work on redirects, browser caching, and minifying codes.
Also, provide a good user experience by including HTML 5 effects.
Make your website responsive for all major screen sizes.
4. Page Loading Speed:
Page Loading speed has become an important factor these days. Especially some new updates gave headaches to beginners or normal people who have slow-loading websites.
Google prioritises fast-loading websites on SERPs, and this trend will be effective in 2024.
Various tools can help you, especially Page Speed Insight. It will tell you the areas where some work is needed to improve the website’s page loading speed.
There are a few things you should look for in the report, and they are listed below:
First Contentful Paint (FCP): It measures how long it takes a browser to fetch the first piece of DOM(Data Object Model) Content when a visitor visits your page.
First Meaningful Paint (FMP): It measures when the primary content of the webpage is visible to the user.
Speed Index: It tells you how quickly the content appears to visitors during page loading.
First CPU Idle: It measures the time taken by a page to become minimal interactive for the user.
Time To Interactive (TTI): TTI represents the time taken by a web page to become completely interactive.
First Input Delay (FID): It measures the time from when a user first performs an activity on your site elements and the time when the browser actually responds to that action.
Here are a few tips for improving the Page Loading Speed of your website:
Minify or compress the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. Compress all files that are 150+ bytes.
Reduce redirects. It reduces the waiting time for the user.
Leverage browser caching, so the page loads a bit faster.
Improve your server response times.
Consider the Content Delivery Network (CDN) to manage the content delivery load.
Optimize all the images and use the right format of the image.
5. Include Videos To Improve Ranking And Engagement:
Videos or video content have the power to keep your customers on the webpage. Just make sure to use a video that is meaningful for the user and connected with the main topic of the page.
Content with video is more engaging and also has a high ROI. It is also observed that content with videos is ranking higher on SERPs.
People also started preferring videos over long content; it provides them with a clear picture of the product and also saves them time.
6. Voice Search is trending:
Voice search is the latest entry in SEO trends, with powerful artificial intelligence and the prominence of chatbots in the main domain. It is becoming the next big thing on the internet.
It is due to the introduction of smart gadgets such as Smartphones; smart speakers i.e. Google Home, Apple Homepod, Amazon Alexa; smart TVs, and various other IoT gadgets.
We are also observing that voice searches have shown massive growth in recent years, so make sure to include it in your strategy.
Tips for optimizing your content for Voice Searches:
Start using natural language flavours in your content, provide short answers, and satisfy users’ voice search queries.
Include long-tail keywords and practice writing long-form content. It was found that voice search queries are generally longer than those typed.
If you want to rank on “near me” searches, include the correct addresses or locations for your local listings with the right structured data.
7. Rich Content For The Snippet:
If you want your content in the first position then there are a few things you need to take care of.
You also need to set a defined pattern that Search Engines and their crawlers can follow.
Tips for Optimizing your content for the Snippet:
Make sure that the headings are relevant, and match the content and SEO title.
Configure the structure data to the appropriate standard
Stay up to date with the latest Google updates
Use proper keywords wisely
Create a Good Meta-description
Add your Brand to the SEO title
Carefully follow the Guidelines of Search Engines
Follow the Structured Markup and the standards.
8. Link Building:
Link Building is the key factor to ranking higher on SERPs, not just in 2024 it is in trend for the last 5-6 years.
It is a very important technique that helps your website to rank higher and get more traffic.
It is also observed that without a proper link-building strategy other SEO trends and work will be not that effective.
Mainly, Link building/ links are useful for Search Engines to uncover new web pages and also determine their position on the SERPs.
You Might be aware of the fact that Link Building can be done in two ways i.e. External Link Building and Internal Link Building.
External Link Building: When you want other websites to link back to your website, it comes under External Link Building.
It is a time taking work and requires a lot of effort. There are a few tips for building external links in 2024:
Create meaningful, trending, and quality content so people want to refer to it.
Connect with influencers in your story mentions and reviews of your product and services.
Connect or communicate with people you know who have relevant content or work and try to get a backlink from them.
Free Guest post is another efficient way to get backlinks.
Internal Link Building: Just opposite of the first one. It is neither time-consuming nor needs more effort.
It is something linking to other content that exists in your own domain.
Here are tips to boost your internal linking game in 2024:
Use correct Anchor Text.
Choose the page and part of it wisely.
Ensure the quality of content on the linking page.
9. The Evolving SERPs:
SERPs stands for Search Engine Result Pages, and in the last few years, it has undergone various changes.
Some easily Noticeable differences are like:
Inclusion of Featured snippet
The Percentage of ad share has increased.
The percentage of answer boxes has increased.
The ”People Have Also Asked” section and “FAQs” are getting more attention.
Inclusion of Video Results, Top Stories, and Q&A on Google.
These features are good for searchers but not that beneficial for small blogs or website owners, as people will get details from SERPs without opening their websites. Thus, gaining organic clicks will be much harder in 2024.
What you can do?
Focus on the Quality of content.
Follow all the Search Engine guidelines.
Focus on Voice Search Query.
Keep your strategies and content highly flexible
10. Social Listening And SEO:
It is a process to handle all the social activity of your brand’s social media handler. It involves tracing custom feedback, mentions, discussions, and comments.
It plays an important part in increasing brand awareness and increasing your reach.
There are a few things you can do to Step up your Social Listening and SEO Game in 2024:
Look for Brand Mentions
Use Awario, Brandwatch, and Talkwalker tools.
Search For Guest Posting Opportunities
Learn From Your Competitors
Be active and promote your products and services frequently.
11. Work on Core Web Vitals:
source: google
Core Web Vitals are three metrics that score a user’s experience loading a webpage. These metrics score how quickly page content loads, how quickly a browser loading a webpage can respond to a user’s input, and how unstable the content is as it loads in the browser. These three metrics are going to be bundled alongside Mobile Friendliness, Safe Browsing, HTTPS and Intrusive Interstitials into a signal Google is calling the “Page Experience Signal”. This is the reason website owners have to look into and try to upgrade the website accordingly.
TikTok is a very popular and fast-growing social platform where users share content in the form of short video clips. TikTok enjoys a whopping base of 1 billion active users from over 150 countries. A lot of these people, if not all, can be your target customers. As a business, you can use this platform to market your website, content, blogs, products and/or services by creating engaging, short videos on topics like how-to guides, memes, tips & more.
source: google
One of the benefits of TikTok SEO for your brand is that a large number of the platform users are Gen Z looking for or creating interesting content relevant to a large variety of topics. You can leverage this audience and the popularity of this social networking app to boost your website traffic and grow your business.
When creating videos on TikTok, make sure to use proper hashtags, relevant keywords and appealing visuals, and create videos around your relevant content to get more exposure.
13. Use of AI:
The use of Artificial Intelligence in marketing is everywhere. Many businesses are already using AI in their marketing and growth campaigns in more ways than one. These include using AI-based chatbots to ensure a great user experience on the business website. AI can be used to automate marketing campaigns and provide support to customers around the clock. It will not only improve the user experience on your site but also reduce the cost of operation. However, for the success of AI-based tools in marketing, they should always be accompanied by manual strategy and planning and should be strictly supervised by actual persons.
source: google
AI can greatly reduce the turnaround time of data & competitor analysis in SEO and can give much better data-driven insights for marketing professionals to work on. For one, AI can automate analysis between search engine rankings and websites and/or content and will accordingly suggest the best ways to improve the ranking of a website through content and website optimization. Content creators will create results-driven content based on insights provided by AI through analysis of past data and competitors.
The AI market is an ever-growing one and you can use this futuristic technology in your brand marketing strategy to achieve new heights in 2024 and beyond. To know how to contact SAG IPL right away.
14. SEO for user intent:
For a long time, businesses and marketers have been doing SEO for search engines. In fact, a lot of SEO professionals believe that the goal of SEO is to increase the search engine rankings of a target website. But, that could not be far from true. This is not the actual goal of SEO.
source: google
The actual goal of SEO is to improve user experience on your site. The increase in your website’s ranking on search engines like Google is simply a by-product of a great user experience. This is, in fact, how Google actually works. To rank a website, Google considers user experience a crucial factor. A website that may not be very good-looking but has a high user experience rate will likely be ranked higher in search results. One way to achieve this is by ensuring your website is designed with a focus on User Intent, i.e. the actual goal of a searcher. In simpler terms, your website should be able to provide what your target users are looking for (information, product, service, etc.).
One way to do User Intent SEO is to ensure that both your website design and content are created primarily for the user and then for search engines and not the opposite. The website should be accessible, readable, relevant and with useful content.
15. Pay more attention to Analytics (data):
Data is the most crucial part of an SEO strategy, though not many people use it as effectively as they should. For your business success in 2024, it is imperative that you give your brand data the importance it deserves and use it to improve your SEO game. Here’s how.
source: google
Google Analytics is a great tool for collecting useful data related to your business performance. This tool can give you a variety of SEO insights, from sources of traffic to your website to data on mobile traffic, bounce rates, engagement, backlinks, keywords that are drying the most traffic, top-performing and low-performing pages on your site, and so on. This is all very crucial data that you can use to evaluate and modify your SEO strategy to improve the overall performance of your website and business.
For instance, if a particular page on your site has a high bounce rate, you can analyse it to understand what’s causing users to leave it quickly. You can add more content to it or make it more interesting in any other way. Similarly, you can start focusing more on keywords that are bringing good traffic to your site.
16. On-page SEO tip: make your website responsive:
A responsive website works seamlessly across all platforms and devices. Whether you open it on a desktop, tablet, or a very small mobile device, the website still looks good and is easy to access and read.
source: google
You must have seen websites that get distorted or lose their format as soon as you open them on a device for which they were not originally intended. This is because these websites are not friendly to mobile devices or any platform but the one they were created for. This is not going to work in 2024. As more people adopt mobile-first search (using their mobile devices over a desktop to perform a Google search), it is crucial that your business website is designed to be responsive on these handheld devices and for all types of platforms.
According to a study by Statcounter, more than 50% of all web searches now originate from mobile devices. This should be a subject of concern for businesses still running mobile-unfriendly sites. Creating a mobile-responsive website or turning an existing website mobile-friendly is quite easy. If you don’t know how to ask a web developer at SAG IPL.
Amit Gupta, who is the CEO and Founder of SAG IPL, founded this company with the vision to become the #1 provider of quality-driven and cost-effective blockchain marketing and development services in the world. As a Chartered Accountant with a keen interest in software and web development, he manages a team of over 200 professionals, comprising designers, developers, and marketers, committed to delivering top-notch web, software, mobile, and blockchain solutions to clients worldwide.
Linkedin
WHY CHOOSE US
Improve your reach & visibility on Google and get more customers/sales through high-quality and effective digital solutions from SAG IPL digital marketing agency.
Quality Assurance
Get the best quality digital solutions, website or marketing services every time with guaranteed results.
Dedicated Teams
Hire any number of developers, designers and/or marketers to work as a part of your own team. Pay as you use.
On-time Delivery
Always get the delivery of your project on time with 24x7 support and free changes or modifications.
TAKE THE FIRST STEP TO DIGITAL SUCCESS
Fill out the form to schedule a FREE consultation with one of our experts. We promise it’ll be worth your time. Tell us about your project and/or requirements in a few words.
