The Most Important SEO Trends In 2024

Ally or nightmare? SEO helps us gain visibility online compared to the competition and increase our authority as a brand. But it can also be a big headache, especially at the beginning as it is a strategy with medium-long term results. Be that as it may, it is a technique that must be known in order to be successful both in search engines and in different platforms or social networks , with different SEO actions that must be followed in each one. Now is the time to learn about the trends in digital marketing to give it your all in the new year, so here we leave you the SEO trends for 2024 that are going to hit the hardest. Stay tuned because some very interesting ones are coming.

Master the Core Web Vitals for maximum performance

Do you know what Core Web Vitals are ? No? Well then let’s start at the beginning.

Google’s Core Web Vitals are a set of 3 metrics that are responsible for measuring the quality of the user experience on each website , that is, its usability. The analysis is carried out through algorithms and, specifically, those metrics are the following:

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS ): Measures unexpected layout changes that occur during website loading.
• Largest Containing Element Rendering (LCP) – Measures the time it takes for the page to load and become visible to the user.
• First Interaction Latency (FID) – Measures the time it takes for the page to respond to the user’s first interaction.

A worse result in all or any of them will also affect positioning in Google. However, Google announced that it is removing this last metric to replace it with another, as it believes that this way the user experience will be better analyzed. And the FID had some limitations.

The new metric is called Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and will officially go live in March 2024. Therefore, you may still be able to see the old metric in Google Search Console reports . In short, what the INP will measure is the time it takes for the page to produce a visual change on the screen from the moment the user interacts with it.

According to Google’s explanation, just because a website currently has a good FID does not mean that the INP will also be positive. So it’s time to get to work with this new metric that promises to be one of the most important SEO trends for 2024 for web positioning experts.

Artificial Intelligence for SEO optimization

We are all clear that Artificial Intelligence is a great support for creating content in all types of formats (text, video, audio, image…), as well as for designing strategies and analyzing the large amounts of data that reach a company. But, did you know that it can also be really useful for SEO optimization tasks? That’s right and in 2024 it will be used more than ever. Positioning professionals can also use this technology to obtain optimization advice and keywords according to market preferences and consumer behavior.

In short, what SEO-oriented AI tools allow is to perform those positioning tasks that are a little more mechanical , such as searching for suitable keywords, their natural inclusion in the text or carrying out web audits, among others.

Be flexible with structured data

Structured data is code in HTML format that tells search engines like Google how they should interpret and display website information. In that sense, they are important for SEO positioning because they help these search engines understand the content of the pages .

Structured data is what makes possible, for example, the existence of rich results , that is, in the search results we not only see links in blue to click on, but also images, carousels or entire fragments of text, among others. And it is precisely here where we are going to see new developments for 2024. And, Google has announced the change in some of these enriched results , specifically those of FAQ (the “More questions” section) and “How-to” , in regarding its visualization. What Google is going to do with the FAQ section is try to allocate it only to appearing answers from official, authority and government pages . And as for the section listing instructions on how to do something, this will only appear in searches made through computers, not mobile devices.

Of course, as a Google Search Console user, you will notice all these changes if they have already arrived at your location (which is most likely), since it is something that is going to be done at a global level and that will affect your SEO strategy does include positioning through one of these ways, or both.

Google Search Generative Experience changes the rules of traditional SEO

Google Search Generative Experience is the company’s new search engine proposal powered by AI. With it, users will live a different experience when searching for information . But this not only implies changes for users, but also for SEO strategies, which will have to adapt to the new ways.

These are some of the changes that the new search engine will offer:

• Click-free search : it will no longer be necessary to enter a page to resolve a question. Google promises to offer a complete answer on the search page itself by uniting information from different sources. But don’t worry, the results will continue to appear at the bottom as before. And did you know that in 2022 almost 50% of searches did not generate any clicks? This means that website traffic is on the decline, at least that which comes from the search engine.
• More cake for Google : it is also expected that more screen space will be dedicated to the search engine’s functionalities to the detriment of organic and paid results. This will cause the space dedicated to them (especially organic results) to become increasingly contested and the field of SEO to become increasingly competitive.

This new search engine is reaching more and more countries. And although as we write these lines it is not available in Spain, it may be when you read it. We encourage you to discover it!

Mobile-first indexing

Another trend in SEO for 2024 is that mobile indexing will continue to be the main method of the Google search engine when classifying and crawling web pages . Therefore, as a brand you must ensure that your website is adapted to these devices and offers the most satisfactory experience possible to smartphone users.

At this point, any web page should have a “responsive” design, that is, it should offer the same content regardless of the device on which it is opened, but that it adapts to it perfectly in design and functionality.

Make sure your content is useful to Google

As you may already know, Google uses automated ranking systems to sort search results, rewarding those with reliable and useful information and ranking them better.

It is very common for the company to implement changes in the classification systems, and these have been the most recent and the ones we must attend to the most by 2024:

• The ranking algorithm that classifies the usefulness or non-usefulness of content has improved . Let’s say it has become more demanding.
• Although in 2022 Google announced that it would reward content generated by and for people, in 2023 the “by” has disappeared from its guide. Therefore, this means that the content generated does not have to be created by people for it to rank well . This is obviously due to the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and their use by content creators. And the fact is that, although Google was previously opposed to this type of technology, it has ended up joining it and moderating its position with respect to it, accepting the content it creates as long as it benefits the user.
• Finally, its most notable novelty. Content evaluation and classification systems will now also take into account third-party content on a website , even if it is in page-specific directories or subdomains. In this way, abuses known as “parasite SEO” will be stopped, a practice that consists of publishing content on a third-party website that has a high authority to better classify said content. This in itself is not bad, but the problem comes when it is used for covert advertising , something that theoretically we will begin to see less of.

Increased traffic through voice searches

No less than about a quarter of Americans used Google Assistant (Google’s virtual assistant) in 2022, which works primarily by voice.

In Spain, Alexa (Amazon’s virtual assistant) is the most used , followed by Google Assistant and Siri (Apple’s).

In short, voice search is here to stay and, consequently, SEO is also going to begin to change, since a written search is not carried out in the same way as a voice search. When we ask something orally, the words and expressions we use are not the same, so the keywords that a page has to use to appear as a result will not be the same either. In that sense, a brand’s keyword strategy when creating content should also be geared towards voice searches .

It is for all this that voice search is going to become one of the SEO trends for 2024 to which positioning experts should pay more attention, especially when we talk about local searches, since 58 % of Google users Voice searches use it to ask questions about local businesses.

To be more specific, the so-called long-tail keywords are going to become increasingly popular, as they are the ones that are usually used when performing voice searches. These keywords are characterized by being very specific and have always had a small search volume, but it seems that this is going to change.

Google launches Discover feature on PC

Google Discover is nothing new. Until now, this functionality could be accessed from the smartphone in two ways: by sliding the main mobile screen to the left or by accessing the search engine and clicking on the asterisk (*). This section shows the user a mix of current news and evergreen articles.

Google’s goal now is for this section to be more adapted to users’ previous searches , that is, to their tastes, and for there to also be a computer version .

As we write these lines, the PC version is still in the testing phase, but it is very possible that it will be ready by 2024.

Also Read: SEO Mistakes To Avoid In E-commerce: Keys To Optimize Your Online Store

SERP Updates

We finish the list of SEO trends for 2024 with 3 of the most important Google modifications in search page results:

• Shopping Guide – This new feature is being worked on for mobile searches and aims to offer users drop-down menus when searching for a product that display different features to help them in their search process. It may not have arrived at your location yet, but maybe 2024 is the year.
• Things to know – This feature displays a list of topics and questions that users typically search for when researching a topic on Google. Like the previous functionality, it may not be ready in your country yet.
• Continuous scroll : you may have already seen this functionality. And on Google, when performing a search, we no longer see at the end of each results page a strip showing the number of pages there are and the one we are on, but now you can see up to six pages of results simply by scrolling on PC . On mobile, it drops to four before a “More” CTA button appears. With this update, users are more likely to reach pages that are less well positioned, thus increasing traffic to them.