With more people and businesses taking advantage of the Internet nowadays, competition is getting harder. As of January 2020, there have already been 1.74 billion active websites online. Every day, the average user spends six hours and 43 minutes online, and with more than four billion active users, there are countless numbers of possibilities.
Every business entity is given a chance to create a good strategy that will make them the best among its competitors. One of the most significant factors that smart marketers have considered is practicing the use and optimization of SEO.
What Is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google searches. When you have mastered the use and integration of keywords into your site, your SEO rank will increase. This means your site will be found on the first page of search results when people search for keywords related to your niche. Depending on your effort, you may either be on top of the list or somewhere at the bottom. The more visible you are, the more you can attract potential customers and clients to patronize your brand.
Why SEO Is Important For Your Business?
As a regular activity, how many times a day do you search for something on the Internet? It doesn’t have to be anything in particular. It could vary according to a certain food you might be craving, clothing styles you wish to adopt, gift ideas, DIY articles to enhance your room’s look, native bags, or anything you feel like searching online. Let’s say you do around 50 daily searches. Imagine how many other people are doing the same thing daily.
As individuals who are always hungry for new ideas, online searches are the number one activity we all share. We produce keywords daily, which can be converted by digital marketers as an SEO bonus. Search engine optimization now becomes crucial because searching through browsers is something everyone does, and it produces so much traffic online.
2024 SEO Trends You Need To Explore
Your site’s visibility will drive growth to your enterprise when it’s SEO-optimized. With the constant influx of innovative ideas, digital marketers need to keep up with the new trends to improve their site’s performance further.
Here are some of those forecast trends for 2024 you might want to check out for your enterprise:
1. Artificial Intelligence To Help Increase Search Results
RankBrain is Google’s machine-learning artificial intelligence system. It’s integrated into Google’s overall algorithm called Hummingbird. Since Google’s goal is to help users increase their search results, they created RankBrain to give instant results. Once you type in a query on your browser and hit enter, it will only take a fraction of a second for Google to provide you with the best results.
With the combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Google’s RankBrain will be unstoppable in 2024 as it now acts quicker and more intelligently to provide the best customer experience.
2. Voice Search Is Now Going Up The Ladder
Over the years, voice search has become more sensitive and humanlike as the world’s biggest tech giants improve their respective voice search technology systems and related products. Voice searching is clearer and crisper today, as the technology can well identify words even when one doesn’t articulate them clearly. Simple voice commands spoken over the latest tech devices will garner an instant reaction or reply.
With so many advancements, voice search technology has started making a name for itself in SEO optimization. Now, people don’t need to type in long words. The new technology can now identify particular keywords by listening to the voice commanded by the speaker.
3. It Pays To Be User-Friendly On Mobile
In 2020, there has already been a recorded number of 3.5 billion smartphone users, which garnered a 9.3% increase from 2019. Smartphones have multiple abilities. You can play games, take photos, and conduct online searches through the phone’s built-in browser—even those you downloaded for yourself. As a website owner, you need to make sure your site is appropriately fixed, even for mobile view.
If you’re using a WordPress site, you have two editing view options—mobile and web. Reviewing each picture and making the necessary adjustments will give you higher chances of being viewed online via mobile. Google likes user-friendly pages, so instead of adding complicated swipe actions for your site, make it as simple as possible. There are many mobile-friendly tests online that you can utilize to test your site’s Google-friendly capability.
4. Following The Google EAT Principle To Increase Visibility
To simplify, Google’s EAT principle means expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These three things are Google’s basis in determining the effectiveness and usefulness of each site’s content. Thus, every digital marketer must live up to these three pillars to warrant their continuously increasing SEO ranking.
Intensive study and research about your consumers and clients will help you produce quality content that will be useful to them. By studying their data closely, you’ll know how to market your expertise correctly and build a reliable reputation. Likewise, in creating your content like blogs and articles, back them up with reputable sites using top-level domain names, such as .com, .edu, or .org, whichever applies to your enterprise.
5. Include High-Quality Long-Form Content
With your expertise in a particular niche, you could surely provide in-depth articles for your readers. For 2024, one of the newest trends is having to develop long-form pieces. Long-form articles are usually those with 3,000 words.
This article type has 3.5 times more backlinks, with four times more shares and three times more traffic than 750-word articles. This is because long-form articles are very detailed, and every aspect is broken down and given a proper and more in-depth explanation, allowing readers to understand and grasp the content in full.
6. Featured Snippets Are Also Important
There’s something else you can do aside from writing long-form articles. If you don’t want to congest your site with so many words, you can opt for featured snippets, a feature rolled out in 2017.
As the name implies, featured snippets are very short and concise. If you search for something on Google, you might have noticed that, aside from the clickable links you can choose from, there’s also a summary at the top of the page which shows a Q&A or a bulleted list of answers. These are known as featured snippets, and they usually offer small chunks of information that immediately answer a search query.
7. Get In The List of Predictive Search
With a predictive search algorithm, Google launched a predictive search that suggests recommendations based on the first keyword a user types on the search bar. The things included in the list of results in the predictive search include keywords that are often searched the most.
Sometimes, it could feel like Google can read your mind. Users don’t have to do anything at all. They can merely look over the suggested keywords on the predictive search and either find what they were looking for or continue typing if nothing pops out of the results list.
Thus, digital marketers should find ways to include their specific keywords within this predictive search system to increase their chances of getting more online traffic.
8. Videos Are The Way To Go
According to YouTube’s 2020 statistics, there are roughly 30 million active users on their platform daily, with two billion active accounts monthly. If you’ve noticed, more people are aspiring to become vloggers now. You can make different exciting content in your video, and, depending on its execution, people could patronize and reshare it right away.
Thus, make your videos more enjoyable to capture more audiences. Likewise, your video’s caption and description should contain keywords familiar to your audience. Tech forecasters have been saying this past decade that videos will soon surpass all other content forms in the future, and it could be starting right now.
9. Optimize Your Image
Visuals are essential when marketing your content. Some people prefer ‘reading’ things like infographics instead of long paragraphs. With infographics, everything is presented in a visually appealing way and broken down to make it more understandable and straightforward. Likewise, when adding featured images to your blog posts, use quality images—those that will capture the essence of your content.
Also, provide alt text to your pictures so people don’t need to keep guessing what your photo is all about in case their Internet connection is terrible. The alt text will still consist of keywords that can be used for SEO optimization.
Stay Knowledgeable And Updated
While there are already established trends for 2024, continue to learn more about SEO. This year, developers will indeed become more creative as more people are shifting to the digital world every day.
Thus, it would be best if you learned to read the latest news articles that provide updates on possible releases throughout the year. Being updated with SEO trends will help you form an excellent strategy to increase your online presence and drive traffic to your site.
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i agree with voice searches since voice searches are not populated your brand can easily be found