It's that time of the year when everybody in SEO shares their take about what's going to happen next year.
I had the chance to do a Crawling Mondays a few days ago about this topic with Lily Ray, Kevin Indig and Cindy Krum, that you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-TkJdtGnlc
Here we discuss a few areas that pretty much we all agreed will have an important impact in SEO in 2024:
Google will become human first: On one hand as a reaction to AI content -with the need to give a layer of "human" validation to their highlighted content in results and on the other, as a reaction to some people going to TikTok/Instagram to search. We already are seeing some of this with the perspectives filter, surfacing more UGC content in SERPs, giving the ability to mark up forum content and profiles with structured data, and more will come accordingly too.
EEAT principles for your content will become fundamental: How to stand out in a human first Google? Ensuring that your content is not purely automated, that if you leverage automation, you do it with care and good validation process, and that there are always human expert insights, with unique and insightful takes.
The SGE won't steal traffic for real businesses, but will shift the pages that attract it: The sites that will end up getting affected (if it's released as it's being tested at the moment) are those middlemen, affiliate websites offering very little extra value and targeting informational/broader commercial queries. Other businesses, like ecommerce, will see traffic shifting from PLPs (as this experience will be recreated by the SGE snapshot) to the PDPs, which is why is fundamental to optimize your PDPs (!). However, the SGE experience is overall less than optimal still, offering a duplicative and little added value for so many queries, I don't expect is released as it is.
What else? What are your takes on the trends for next year?
I think one advent of all this is that EEAT is going to become a lot more dynamic - folks are going to have to show actual EEAT that's embedded into the content itself. I think, in a weird way, it almost deemphasizes things like author profliles or some facy acronym after a fact-checker's name and puts the focus on: does the content itself show you that it was written by an actual expert with actual experience.
For example, I think what I'm calling "situational content" will do just that. If I write a post on how to keep your kids from crying in the car on long trips and I include what to do if the tips don't work (i.e., if "Y" doesn't work - try a or b instead in the following scenarios") the mere fact that I'm able to predict the various outcomes and then offer advice around them shows you I am an actua expert with actual experience. Prediciting outcomes and implications is a great way to show REAL EEAT and I think those sorts of things are going to come into focus for Google.
I had mentioned how I didn't expect the SGE to be released as it ism and seems that it will continue to be tested in 2024: "Google Search Generative Experience December End Date Removed".
Thanks
A brand's Subject Matter Experts are going to become a key part in earning rankings and achieving SEO success. A brand's experts can help them to: - Create content that has unique insights and adds value beyond what's already on the SERPs - Identify hot topics before they're trending, helping you create content before everyone else - Create and plan content based on the problems your customers have and are coming to you with, rather than just what's showing in a keyword research tool - Earn press coverage (and links) by using these people as experts to be quoted in journalist's articles - Leverage their experience, expertise and authoritativeness to demonstrate E-E-A-T
My research has shown that Google is fine with AI-generated content. There is one warning. If Google sees signs of spam or poor user experience, content written by AI will be seen as an aggravating factor in lowering a site's quality score.
I look at my 15-year-old for inspiration. Mobile-first, Tik-tok driven, and assistant-reliant (for common queries - time, weather, etc.). Types doesn't talk. (to me, apparently😁), and has a very short attention span, making seconds to satisfaction a key component of any information resources she is seeking. So. UX/UI will be massive. Easy discovery of information (information architecture), easier still ways for Google to find your data, and for users to find what they want (paths to satisfaction) From my perspective... content needs to be entity-driven, with the inclusion of key questions and answers for your various audience types (driven by intent). UGC will be a great place to add opinions, build trust, and earn credibility... all this will be both your 'sphere of influence' and your 'sphere of expertise' which as a brand or person will contribute to what you see on the web, as well as how you - and your content - will be seen on the web. So 2024... the year of the graph. 😎
I tend to agree with all of the above. Additionally I think we will see a shift from vanity metrics and outdated metaphors like "traffic" and "Web site" towards more all-encompassing approaches.
IMHO useful metrics like brand sentiment, engagement rate and share of voice will have to be embraced to measure what I increasingly view as and I like to call social SEO.
The latest Google updates have shown sites like Reddit and Quora gaining more visibility. Think about the questions clients and prospects may be asking about your products and services and get involved answering those questions on those sites.
Google is targeting Amazon with their Google Deals pages which will likely have a bigger impact than SGE for etailers. Make sure you make use of Merchant Center to your advantage, and make sure to have valid product schema markup with full descriptions, ratings and reviews.
I agree with the three points you listed (by the way: wonderful video!).
Personally, then, what I foresee is an increasingly bigger difumination of the Search enviroment.
Let me explain it.
Until a few years ago the biggest percentage of searches were inside the classic Universal Search of Google, then people started doing specific sets of searches in specific search enviroments (i.e.: YouTube).
Then new generations started to use some some social media (TikTok, but also Instagram and, before, Pinterest) for search.
ChatGPT, Bing Deep Search/AI Search and the Gemini-fueled SGE and Bard are the new comers places for search.
So... what I foresee is that Search Engines (or, better, the companies behind the search engines) will try to govern and guide this centrifuge trend of searchers and to guide even more than they do now with a centralized source of answer that could be, for instance, Google Assistant or applications based on Agents, that will nudge searchers using their ecosystems, even if they will be still physically different "websites".
For us, this will mean that:
Technical SEO will be even more important;
Semantic Search (not just structured data) is going to assume a central role and an obligated knowledge SEOs must have.