These are the SEO Trends in 2024

If you want to celebrate successes in online marketing, you can't avoid SEO. Search Engine Optimization and SEO tools support you in making your products and articles more quickly discoverable in Google and thus getting the attention they deserve.

Even in the year 2024, this will not change quickly and therefore it is worth taking a look at the current SEO trends. What's coming, what's going, and what's staying - we want to show you in this article in more detail. With suitable examples and tips, you read what really matters in 2024 for your SEO success. We also asked the SEO- and online marketing expert Fabian Auler for his assessment, which we share with you here.

Keep these SEO trends in view

As in other areas of online marketing, trends play a big role in each new year. However, in the SEO field there are fundamentally no trends that would completely change this. “Many webmasters should rather first look at their SEO basics and get these under control,” says SEO expert Fabian Auler. “Making the website as crawlable and indexable as possible is the first important step.” You should optimize the relevance of your website content so that Google has no choice but to include it in the top 3 in the SERPs.

Furthermore, you should focus on the on-page measures of your website and regularly create content that is linked by relevant websites. This way, you are well prepared when new updates are implemented by Google updates. In 2021, the Google Title Update was a big surprise for many, as Fabian Auler looks back: “Instead of usually displaying the title tag in the SERPs, Google is now increasingly pulling a heading, like the H2 or H3, from an article and displaying this in the SERPs.” A suitable case can be found in this article.

If you consider these measures for your SEO strategy then you are already on a good way. If you want to dive deeper into the SEO game, a deeper look into the SEO trends 2024 is now worthwhile.

These are the 3 most important SEO trends in 2024

The SEO trends that we are now introducing you to are not novelties for all who deal with SEO on a daily basis. Nevertheless, it is important for successful SEO in 2024 not to lose sight of these trends.

Keywords and keyword research

The basis for success in SEO lies in the selection of the right keywords, at which very different research tools support you. And this is what specifically matters in keyword research:

• Search Intent: Search Intent is the intention behind a search query. You should ask yourself at every keyword research what users want to achieve with their search query. Due to new AI technologies, such as BERT or MUM, Google tries to understand the search intent of users better and better in order to play out the search results even more targeted. For this, it is important that you with your content exactly meet the search intention of users for the target keywords. If you want to use two very similar keywords, then often arises the question of whether you need a page for each keywords or can answer both on one, and then still rank. Fabian Auler has the following tip for you: “Look at the SERPs to your both terms: Are there different URLs displayed there or are there big matches in the Google SERPs? Depending on this, you can decide whether one page is enough or not.” In addition, you have the opportunity for example with the tool seobility to get a direct preview of the top 10 URLs on Google for each keyword.
• Zero Click Searches: In the past years, Google has introduced some new, so-called “Search Features” in the search results that provide users with direct answers to their search queries without having to leave the search results page. Thus, users receive an answer to their questions even faster, since the searched information is already presented in the Google SERPs and no click on another website is necessary. For users, this usually represents an improved user experience, from which Google also profits. This development leads to the share of zero-click searches continuously increasing and keywords for this are not very rewarding. The most common forms of zero-click searches include: The search for definitions, meanings or the correct spelling for a word. Fabian also recommends here not to invest time in keywords of this kind: “Ranking for something like this will not bring any traffic.”

Source: Seobility

User Experience

As part of the Page Experience Update, the Core Web Vitals were introduced, which simultaneously show in which direction Google wants to move. The Google Core Web Vitals currently consist of three key figures or metrics loading time, the response friendliness and the visual stability of a webpage when loading, which according to Google are particularly important for the user experience, so it is also worth investing the time in the optimization of the user experience in 2024.

E-A-T

The abbreviation E-A-T stands for the English terms “Expertise”, “Authoritativeness” and “Trustworthiness”. For all kinds of contents, Google presupposes contents that contain expert knowledge and stem from trustworthy and reliable authors. This is a kind of evaluation guideline according to which all three points are determined. You can underline the authority about your contents for example with suitable links and mentions.

As soon as you have once failed through E-A-T at Google, it is hard to build up new trust. This can take several months or even years. “Therefore, prove your expertise by giving interviews in other professional journals or by writing Wikipedia entries – all of this and much more can show your expertise,” says Fabian Auler.

Tips from the SEO expert

In addition to the three most important SEO trends, we asked Fabian Auler for his very personal assessment and summarized his most important tips:

Always keep your customer journey in view

Especially in the content creation, you should always think of the customer journey and ask yourself questions such as: What does the searcher want to achieve with the search term (Search Intent) and in which phase of the customer journey is he/she currently? Only if you can answer these questions correctly, can you also deliver the suitable contents.

Create a keyword mind map

Especially helpful with websites with many keywords is the creation of keyword mind maps. Here, think about which keywords your URLs (for example categories, articles, products etc.) should rank for. With the ranking tracking tool of seobility, you can look at the rankings everyday and measure your SEO performance. Without monitoring, successful SEO is hardly possible. Therefore, use all data that are available to you here.

Adapt year numbers

Check for example in the Google Search Console which URLs to keywords with the year 2023 have rankings – these should lose significantly in relevance in 2024 and should be adapted. Here, make sure that you do not only exchange the year numbers in the headings, but also update or expand the contents accordingly.

Refrain (still) from AI-generated texts

AI-generated texts are not yet optimal for SEO and should always be revised. Although the technology is getting better and better here, it is still not able to create complex topics, news and similar flawlessly.

Create a content moat

Behind a content moat or a “content moat”, you can implement contents that cannot be simply copied by your competition. Therefore, stick to contents that you extend with audio or video contents (podcast, YouTube etc.) or with own data, such as studies and interviews.

Do not make yourself dependent of Google!

Although Google has a market share of over 90 % in Germany, but what happens when this traffic channel suddenly disappears, for example through new Google updates, Google penalty, new competition or negative SEO spam is replaced? Therefore, it makes sense if you do not only rely on the one traffic channel, but build up a healthy marketing mix. This way, you can for example offer newsletter and use social media as further channels.

Which SEO trends stay and how to implement them correctly

In addition to the SEO trends, that could become even more important in this year, there are also some evergreens that remain important. We show you which these are and how to practically use them.

Technical SEO Basics

Also 2024, technical SEO basics and on-page SEO are an important basic requirement for successful SEO and good rankings. These include among others:

• Accessibility, crawlability and indexability
• Errorlessness of the website (especially technical errors)
• Page Speed
• Website structure and sensible internal linking
• Meta information for the SERPs (especially meta title as ranking factor and meta description)
• Mobile optimization (keyword Mobile First Indexing)

For websites with more than 1,000 URLs, clean URL structures are particularly important. Especially for online shops, URLs with dynamically generated parameters are used more and more frequently, through which much duplicate content can emerge on a website. Although this cannot lead to a penalty by Google, but the crawlability and indexing of your website will so more quickly be complicated. With too many duplicate contents, these can no longer be correctly assigned by Google.

The SEO tool seobilityautomatically checks a website for the most important on-page factors and directly points out errors and optimization potentials.

Source: Seobility

Content

High quality content is and remains essential in the SEO work, however, at the same time it gets more and more difficult to stand out of the mass. Consequently, you should put even more emphasis on unique content that especially stands out. With content hubs, you can underline your topic authority. For this, you create a central distributor page that picks up the “main topic” and links further suitable sub topics on the website. So can for example write an article about SEO and connect other sub topics, such as On-page optimization, Google updates, link building and many other related topics, on further subpages with each other. With a topic cluster of this kind, you show Google and your visitors that you are an expert in this area.

These points make high quality SEO content:

• meets the search intention of your visitors
• shows (new) insights or solutions for your target group
• is highly informative and provides a real added value (“This is nowhere else to read”)
• is authentic and true (do not tell tales)
• is well researched including details of sources
• is very well written: Well readable/scannable (content design and structure), easy to understand, error free and delivers exactly the information that are promised in the headline

Also in the text optimization, seobility can support you. With the so-called WDF*IDF analysis, seobility compares your texts with those of your competition and examines the content relevance as well as completeness of the search term.

Backlinks

In comparison to earlier, backlinks have lost in relevance, however, they are still an important ranking factor for your website. Therefore, you should pay attention to these factors:

• Strength of the referring domain/URL
• thematic relevance of the link
• position of the link on the page
• link text and text surrounding the link
• number of external links on the site
• Link attributes (nofollow, ugc, sponsored) prevent a transmission of link juice

Tip: With the backlink analysis of seobility, you can monitor the quality of your backlink profile and thus receive support in the link building.

Source: Seobility

Moreover, it is worth taking a look at the link profiles of your competition and to check where the links come from. However, please note that you never blindly rebuild the links, as this can lead to a penalty by Google.

Also smaller actions, such as interviews with other experts or interesting studies, can already bring in some good backlinks. Important here is the distribution (also “content distribution” called). Other webmasters have to know about your high quality content to link to it.

Further SEO tools on OMR Reviews

If you are still looking for the suitable SEO tool then also gladly take a look on our software evaluation platform OMR Reviews and get inspired by the experience reports here. You get an even deeper insight also in our OMR Reviews briefing on the topic SEO.

In total, you find among others these SEO tools on OMR Reviews:

• Sistrix
• Ryte
• SE Ranking