SEO Trends 2024 — Tips For Successful Promotion
In the coming year, there will be many challenges for Digital Marketing and SEO. It is clear that there are no easy solutions in this area, and with AI, we can only speculate how our industry will change next year. However, the key to success will be professional experience, useful content that is maximally user-oriented. Artificial intelligence does not just stimulate this process, but changes approaches, processes, and the market as a whole, although it is still not the only solution.
That is why reflections and discussions about possible trends, changes, and secrets to success in SEO in the next year have become extremely sharp and relevant. If in previous years technical topics such as «voice search» (which no one talks about anymore) or user experience often ranked among the most discussed SEO trends, then this year the challenge is completely different.
The basis of success is a clear and logical path of development, but recently there have been difficulties. This is primarily due to the rapid development of generative AI technology.
Over the course of this year, AI tools have reached a certain peak of popularity and have proven their effectiveness, when used wisely. On the other hand, they can also lead to a flood of very similar, boring content without any added value. In the worst case, such content can contain gross errors and contribute to the spread of fakes.
Google is emphasizing personalized content
For this reason, Google is increasingly emphasizing personalized content that expresses the opinions, experiences and views of users, of specific people. This is evident, for example, in the new «Perspectives» filter, which is so far only available to users in the US. Posts from social networks, forums and other platforms where users can express their personal views appear here.
Also, displaying the number of followers for social media profiles in search results emphasizes the growing importance Google places on content creators and, by extension, authors.
On top of this, there are many other social features, such as the subscribe feature in Google Discover and search, and the ability to comment on search results using «Notes».
Personalized experience gets maximum value
Personal experience and reviews are becoming the most important parameters, although this trend has been consolidated since Product Reviews, when Google emphasized that reviews are very important when evaluating products.
All these trends contribute to the definition of human-generated content and automatically generated content using artificial intelligence. And while Google has already officially dropped the requirement that content must be created only by humans, content must still be created primarily for humans and not strictly for search engines. We are talking about the so-called People-First Content. Today, we do not exclude the use of artificial intelligence when creating such content, but you should avoid creating content solely using artificial intelligence without adding your own ideas, data, facts, opinions and other information with unique features. This is the only way to create real value. Anything else is just recycling information that already exists.
What is EEAT?
To distinguish between quality content created by experts and automatically generated content using artificial intelligence, Google will have to rely even more heavily on EEAT — that is, on recognizing practical experience, professional expertise, authority and trust level. Authors play an important role in this. However, the author name block alone is not sufficient for this. Links to the main user profiles are important.
In addition, it is important to build a good reputation, e.g. through publications on other websites and online mentions.
Ad oversaturation negatively impacts User Experience
In 2024, a good User Experience will also be important. This means, for example, avoiding excessive and annoying advertising. After all, the Helpful Content Update in September showed that mediocre content combined with excessive advertising can lead to a drop in search.
SGE: Google’s new search using artificial intelligence
There hasn’t been much news lately around Google SGE, the new experimental search using artificial intelligence. Perhaps the euphoria around AI in search has subsided, or it’s the lull before big changes. Basically, it’s in Google’s best interest to keep the classic search results, which are still the basis for generating steady ad revenue. However, it’s clear that Google will be introducing some AI features into classic search next year.
Gemini
Also worth highlighting is Gemini, a recently announced multimodal AI model:
Google promises to integrate Gemini into search, ads, Chrome browser and Duet AI. Using hints, Gemini is capable of generating code, combining text and images. It is also capable of understanding, reasoning and suggesting research on huge amounts of data.
After its full launch, we will have to wait a bit and see if Gemini can live up to its expectations. It is likely that Gemini’s popularity will depend on how it compares to its competitors’ results and how quickly the AI model continues to learn after its public rollout.
Summary: Simple and yet complex
The clarity of certain aspects in SEO does not make the task globally easier, because competition in all niches is intensifying intensely. The more websites appear on the market and the more content is created, the more difficult it is to stand up to competitors.
