Whether you are new to search engine optimization (SEO) or a seasoned veteran in the field, you’re probably reading this blog because you’ve heard having an SEO strategy is important to boost organic traffic to your website. No matter how familiar you are with SEO, you should make it a point to keep up with the latest trends to ensure that your SEO strategy for 2024 and beyond meets search engines’ standards. Appeal to the search engines, be found by your target audience, keep your target audience on your website, and you’ll see your organic traffic go way up.
Yes, SEO is still relevant in 2024, and it will be for the foreseeable future. That’s because SEO is what helps search engines crawl and categorize your website so that it can better rank web pages when users type in a search query. Search engines like Google aim to help users find answers to their questions. Using the right SEO marketing strategies indicates to search engines that your pages can answer their users’ queries. It also helps your target audience find you when they use the same keywords in your content to find answers to their solutions. So as long as people use search engines, it’s a safe bet that the future of SEO in 2024 and beyond is bright.
That’s not to say that SEO should steer your entire content creation process. Rather, you should include it in your content as an extra boost for findability. You should place most of your focus on creating helpful content, which the latest Google algorithm prioritizes.
A recent Google update to note when thinking about SEO trends in 2024 is the helpful content update released in August 2022 - and we continued to see updates related to helpful content throughout 2023. The update works to rank helpful content written by humans (an important detail we’ll discuss later) higher to improve the search results of Google users.
To understand why Google creates these algorithm updates, you have to understand their mission: “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google was created to help people find useful information. If your strategy solely focuses on SEO for SEO’s sake, your website won’t succeed in the long run. Instead, your strategy should center around search engine marketing trends that guide your team in creating educational, useful content that people want to read.
Writing helpful content is a key trend for SEO in 2024. We know we’re repeating ourselves, but it’s important because it differs a lot from the SEO trends of the past. Hiding text, keyword stuffing, copying others’ content—those won’t work anymore. If you want to rank higher on Google, you have to put some work into it.
And despite all the hullabaloo about AI tools writing content for you, it’s not there yet. They can’t create original content, only scraping what it can find on the internet. Most can’t even dive deep enough to get a high enough word count for some content. Often, too, the information they pull is a few years old, so the content it generates could be outdated and irrelevant. Relying on these tools for content creation won’t improve your rankings in search engines.
If you want to boost your SEO, try these practices instead:
Google makes it their mission to put helpful content in front of their users. DemandJump aims to help businesses create that helpful content. When you put a topic you want to rank for in our Topic Insights search bar, we will provide you with the top keywords and questions surrounding that topic that you can then turn into a pillar strategy. We will provide you with a breakdown of every part of a Pillar-Based Marketing strategy, from titles to keywords for each title, so you can more easily create the helpful content that both search engines and readers are looking for.
What’s more, DemandJump has a podcast and webinars to keep you up to date with marketing trends and all there is to know about SEO. To learn more and to discover an easier way to keep up with SEO trends while writing helpful content, give our platform a whirl.