SEO trends for [2024], what's new? 💥

Updated: April 8, 2024 | by: Martijn Assie, creating websites & shops since 20 years, also Linux-, Wordpress-,
Photoshop- and SEO expert. | NL DE

In this article for the top SEO trends for [2024] I discuss both on-page and off-page SEO aspects. For on-page the changes are not so fast, new is mainly Google's Core Web Vitals. Furthermore, the most important SEO rules such as Content is King, Mobile First Indexing, having good titles and descriptions, etcetera. One must also have a good layout for mobile.

Advertisement

Furthermore, a sleek design is important and everything must work properly, no dead links or buttons that refer to non-existing pages and things should not jump (Core Web Vitals). For off-page, links from other websites to yours are considered compliments by Google and the more of these backlinks you have the better. Also make sure you don't incur a Google penalty.

1. Content is king

It sounds trite by now, but unfortunately there's not much I can do about it. This is and always will be the most important SEO factor. Write catchy texts of a decent length, put in as much other material as possible such as videos, images, charts, lists and whatever else you can add useful info to it. A good title of around 64 characters with your best keywords for the page, the same goes for the description but in this case 155-300 characters.

Your keywords must appear in the text and titles of the article, but do not exaggerate, it must remain pleasant to read, otherwise you will be counterproductive. Furthermore, it is important that images have alt tags with the page keywords. If you want to know more about this, search for "Content is King" in Google and read an article that focuses only on that.

2. Website's loading time

Website loading times are a Google algorithm but are also part of other algorithms such as Bounce Rate, Core Web Vitals and the user experience. Loading time is therefore a very important factor to be found well. Read my article here on how to optimize loading time for your website.

In short, a website is made faster by optimizing all images properly and using Lazy Load so that not all images are loaded in the beginning. Furthermore, it is important to use a good cache plugin, better yet a CDN or even better an already optimized hosting environment.

3. Rankbrain and bounce rates

Rankbrain is a self-learning system from Google that records Click-through rates and session duration of visits to your website. Based on this data, Google believes it knows which and how much people are interested in your website. The longer people stay on your site and click on things, the higher you end up in the SERP.

Sites with a high SERP ranking, however, can drop quickly if visitors leave immediately after coming to the site through Google. In any case, always provide an accurate description for pages so that Google takes over and people know exactly what to expect on your website so that a high bounce rate can never arise.

4. Google's Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals gives Google an overview of how your pages are performing, based on real visitor experiences. It is important that visitors stay on your site for as long as possible, whereby 3 concepts play a role: CLS, FID and LCP. LCP is the time it takes to load the largest element of your page which shows the visitor that the page is loading, that's how it stays.

FID is when the page is loaded and the visitor performs an action, for example a click or scroll. CLS refers to elements that move during loading, which is disruptive to visitors.

5. Google BERT

After Google Rankbrain, Google BERT is the most impactful factor in searches. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and helps computers to understand language just like humans. By understanding sentences in an almost human way, the Google Search with the help of BERT is able to display much better search results. Furthermore, BERT is used by Google for featured snippets.

Despite the fact that Google BERT is now one of Google's algorithms, it has not used Google Rankbrain superfluously, both algorithms are used side by side. Google loves bidding algorithms as they find it practically impossible for SEO experts to optimize pages for it. BERT is also used by many more companies, so not just Google.

6. Google EAT

This term stands for expert, authority, and trust. In Dutch reputation, authority and reliability. Links from reliable websites are seen as valuable, while links from home pages without content, for example, are less and less successful. By being associated a lot with reliable websites, your own website slowly acquires trust and authority.

Visitors often have a lot more confidence in fellow visitors to a website than those who write articles for it. So always make sure you have good real references from customers who put in a good word for your brand and publish them on your website.

7. User experience (also mobile)

Websites must work well, pleasantly and quickly, and of course on all devices. Since more than half of the searches are requested via mobile, it is important to have a mobile-friendly website. Also take your visitors into account with regard to texts, do not only write for Google (keywords) but ensure that texts run smoothly and come across as pleasant to the visitor and that the correct information is conveyed.

Of course, keywords can certainly be incorporated in the text, provided that this is done in a subtle way. If your website is not yet optimized for mobile use, then it is definitely time to work on it in [2024]. Both a fully responsive website is good, but a separate special version of your website for mobile is almost even better.

8. Better results in SERP with structured data

In recent years we have seen a significant change in the SERP (Google search results page). Not only does Google display the search results in text and links, but also videos, images, extra links, Google companies and featured snippets. It is also the case that Google already tries to answer questions in the SERP, which means that people no longer click through.

So you do not only want to be high in the search results, but you also want to be in the featured and rich snippets and among the companies from Google maps that Google presents. You can display structured data in your own website with a good Schema plugin you can find a lot of information and examples how to work with it. Google can then literally copy this and show it on the SERP.

9. Google Voice Search

Almost a third of the 3.5 billion daily searches in Google are voice commands. Using “Personal Assistant Devices” such as Google Home and Apple's Siri, as many as 55% of young people and 40% of adults use voice commands. Google assistant can be found on smart speakers, smartphones, smart TVs, cars, smart watches and headphones.

Despite this being a trend, there is little you can really do for your SEO. In principle, whether texts are written or spoken makes no difference to the results. Since the summer of 2018, there is also the Dutch version of Google Assistant.

10. Other platforms and search engines

Search engines like Duck Duck Go and Ecosia are being used more and more. Of course the vast majority of searches are via Google but the competition in these search engines is much lower and one can take advantage of this to attract some extra people there and thus create more leads and conversion. Another SEO trend for [2024]: people are not only found with search engines, you can also advertise on sites like Alibaba, Amazon, or Youtube.

These platforms are booming and can be used very well to drive more visitors to your site. Certainly Youtube, which is already the largest search engine after Google, is probably the future of search engines. People prefer to watch videos than read texts and that is very noticeable. Videos already answer questions in featured snippets and rich snippets.

11. Topics instead of individual keywords

Google does nothing more than try to provide the best results in searches. Google is quite intelligent these days and stuffing texts with keywords is absolutely no longer necessary. Write texts that are attractive to your visitors and not to Google. When a visitor finds everything they were looking for on your page, they are overjoyed. So write texts that appeal to and help people. With particularly good content, many sites will automatically link to it.

Conclusion

Those were the main SEO trends for [2024], try to take advantage of them. Of course, smaller details are also important, which we have not discussed here. Read our article "120 Google SEO points for [2024]" if you want more in-depth information on tasks you can do to make your website better found.

Advertisement