2024 SEO and Content Trends

2023 has been a wild ride for the SEO and marketing industry. With the introduction of AI content and with it a sea of AI tools to help SEO and content writing, the landscape has changed at an incredibly fast pace.

This year, Google and other search engines have also moved at a fast pace with a magnitude of SERP changes and feature announcements including the rapidly evolving helpful content updates by Google.

As we go into 2024, our team at Find Digital are expecting more of the same. We expect to see a deeper integration of AI and SEO, a heightened emphasis on expertly written content and further changes to search engines to combat the rise of AI content. This includes Google’s hotly anticipated Search Generative Experience (SGE).

In this article, we’ve put together our 2024 predictions for SEO and content and what you need to do to keep up with the changes we are likely going to see unfold.

 

Emphasis on Google’s EEAT

With the rise of AI and along with it AI content, Google is leaning more towards its helpful content approach, utilising the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness factors. These four vital pillars are a measurement of your website’s overall quality and will determine how and what you rank for on Google.

EEAT aims to sift out subpar content and give a boost to material that’s pertinent and helpful to users. Believe it or not, the technology was first implemented by Google in 2014. But, with the rise of AI content and an increasing amount of devalued content on the web, this technology has become increasingly important in 2023 and will continue to be in 2024.

We wrote an article explaining Google’s EEAT ranking factors.

 

AI content writing

It’s no surprise that AI content has reached our top trends for 2024. AI content hit the SEO scene hard in 2023, with millions of websites and landing pages seemingly being generated overnight thanks to AI tools like ChatGPT.

We believe that AI content writing will continue to be at the forefront of SEO and content writing throughout 2024. With the introduction of GPT4 and smarter AI tools launching every month, content writers now can write factual, well-written, well-documented content in minutes not hours.

In 2024, we will likely see more authors utilise AI to either write their content or at least assist them in writing.

 

Programmatic SEO and content

It’s safe to say in 2024 that everyone is using programmatic SEO to create content for their websites. With the introduction of AI and the mountain of content writing tools on the web, programmatic SEO has never been easier.

Knowledge Check:

Programmatic SEO is where website authors create a large amount of landing pages and content in a pragmatic format. Instead of manually crafting individual landing pages for each, Programmatic SEO streamlines the process by creating multiple and unique landing pages optimised for each keyword or set of keywords. The result is a large number of pages which are – hopefully – all varied, optimised and indexed on Google for the correct keywords.

It’s worth noting that Programmatic SEO is nothing new. It’s been around forever. It’s just the hot thing right now because AI tools like Chat GPT have made it far easier and more accessible.

While programmatic SEO can be useful, you shouldn’t use it to generate thousands of pages which has little to no meaning or don’t serve a useful purpose to the end user. Google’s John Muller commented on the overall use of programmatic SEO saying it’s often just spam.

I love fire, but also programmatic SEO is often a fancy banner for spam.

— I am John – ⭐ Say no to cookies – biscuits only ⭐ (@JohnMu) July 25, 2023

 

Schema Markup

With the introduction of various new features across Google Search and an emphasis on trust and expertise, Schema has never been more important. 2024 is the year when the value of Schema will go beyond rich results. Schema is already being utilised by AI and Large Language Models (LLM) to gain a greater understanding of your content and your business.

Website owners will need to ensure they include detailed, accurate information in the Schema. This schema will help build your content knowledge graph which will be used by AI and search engines to understand the relationship between entities across your website. Schema will also act as a control point for your brand, ensuring your content and brand are understood as you intended it.

 

Are you ready for 2024?

So, these are our top expected trends for 2024. We’re likely to see a continued rise in AI content, a much greater emphasis on Google’s EEAT, increasing adoption of programmatic SEO thanks to AI content and a growing importance to adopting Schema Markup on websites.

Is your business ready for the SEO changes coming in 2024? If you’re unsure or need help with your SEO, give our team a call today or book a free discovery call with our SEO experts.

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