SEO Trends & Expectations for 2024

I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of New England B2B Networking to discuss the SEO Trends and Expectations for 2024! Check out the conversation below, then submit a question of your own for me to answer in a future blog or LinkedIn post!

Biggest Trend of  2024?

Kevin: Today I want to play crystal ball with you. I want to talk about 2024. And what do you see as the trend? So I guess the big the first question, what do you think's gonna be the biggest trend of 2024.

Emily: So I think the biggest trend of 2024 is something that we've already seen happening, but we're gonna see on a different scale. And that is, a lot of first person user generated content. So you know, if you get on like, Instagram or Tiktok, of course, you're seeing a lot of ads from brands and content from brands that show people who are apparently their real users using that content. And up to this point, a lot of that has been isolated to those video based social media platforms. But Google has rolled out a new search filter, like where you can click like shopping, or news. It's one of those called perspectives. And when you click on perspectives you get, you're supposed to get real people's first person accounts, and a lot of those come from, say, Reddit, or Instagram, but it is possible going forward for individual websites to show up in there. So I think we're gonna see a lot more companies posting that kind of content on their own owned channels, like on what might be their blog now, or their YouTube page, you're gonna see more first person content rather than slick marketing videos.

AI in 2024

Kevin: That'd be nice. So you and I have been joking for the last few months about AI. You know, so what do you think AI is going in 2024?

Emily: Well, it's definitely not going away. It's something that people are still interested in. And companies like Google and meta are pouring tons of money into developing it. But in all honesty, it's not quite yet at the point where it's truly going to revolutionize the way we do marketing like in the immediate future. Most of the tools that you and I have access to are still using old data from a few years ago, they're still trying to figure out how to make AI like connect to the internet and pull information in real time. And there's definitely some bumps to be ironed out. So companies like Bing and Google are working on adding AI into search. But it's not a finished product. yet.

I think that over the course of the next year, we're gonna need to keep doing what we've been doing in terms of marketing, don't throw out what's been working for you start paying attention to some news about AI and search and AI tools and marketing, and just thinking about how you might leverage them in different ways in the future. And I think by the end of 2024, if we do this crystal ball session, again, I think by the end of 2024, looking forward in the following year, we'll be seeing more of a direct impact in the way we think about marketing in the way we do our marketing.

Content: Quantity over Quality?

Kevin: Emily, one of the pressures as a business owner is to develop content, you know, to use the Content is king expression was so we hear it all the time, you have to have content gotta keep it out there, that sometimes we don't think about the quality of our content. So might that's my question for you. Is it quantity over quality? Which one should win?

Emily: At this point? That's a really good question. At this point, quality should win. So in the past, like even just like 5-10 years ago, quantity was really important. You needed to have a lot in order to be able to like it was evolving. It was a numbers game, it was sheer volume, could you produce more content than your competitors? If yes, then people are gonna see you more. Now that's not the case. Search engines have gotten a lot smarter. The people doing the searching have higher expectations now, because we've all just have years of like crappy content thrown at us. So whether you're creating video, audio written content, stuff for your blog videos for YouTube, you're gonna want to focus on high quality. That's what people want. It's what's going to keep them engaged. And bring it back to AI. My initial testing that I've done around how AI search will work in the future shows that these tools are trained to look for high quality content, they're not looking for fluff. So in the future when people searching Google AI is going to return a result for them and you'll be able to have a conversation with the search engine results page. And those tools are showing all the signs of looking for high quality, not volume.