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.