2024 is shaping up to be a game-changer for businesses that are looking to revamp or build an all-new SEO content strategy. With more and more people using alternative forms of search (Co-Pilot, Siri, ChatGPT), it’s only natural to wonder what the implications are for older Google-centric strategies. Should your business overhaul its SEO for 2024, or is it too early to hit the panic button?
Advertisers are constantly leveling up with interactive content, are you keeping up?
We’ll give you the good news right away: the evolving search engine landscape doesn’t mean you need to overhaul your strategy, and the time-tested SEO methods that produce industry leaders are more relevant than ever (with a few tweaks!). Let’s take a look at how you can perfect your content strategy heading into 2024 and beyond.
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When In Doubt, EEAT
With all the hubbub around generative search and AI, it’s easy for people to forget that even platforms like Co-Pilot and Bard draw information from high-ranking and authoritative sources. More than ever, brands need to know how to consistently perform in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and the EEAT guidelines are a foolproof way to do it.
Use these pointers to follow EEAT for your SEO content strategy.
Experience
Use your content as a conduit for your experience. Whether it’s a long-form blog or a YouTube Short, your content should convey what you’ve achieved in your niche and how you did it. Well-produced interactive content has the power to connect instantly with audiences and often translates to an organic improvement in SERP rankings.
Expertise
The best way to demonstrate expertise is through people, not websites. Try to identify topics that your brand can speak to with a unique perspective and lived experience. Maintain a limited network of subject experts who can add value and expertise to your content. Your SEO content strategy should include these experts, if possible.
As part of your 2024 SEO strategy, make sure your articles mention the author’s name and experience, with links to other pieces they may have previously written. Doing this directly demonstrates expertise to your readers, and organically signals to Google that your website is knowledgeable on a given topic. You should have clear agreements in place that state the owner of the content and the people with permission to modify it.
Authority
Authority, expertise, and trustworthiness are deeply interlinked, you can’t just have one without the others. As a brand, you should aim to demonstrate authority through your SEO content strategy by publishing content that:
- Is to the point, devoid of fluff, and answers the reader’s question with clarity.
- Contains information that is easily verifiable.
- Mentions how the publisher can be contacted (if needed.)
The usual best practices remain invaluable for a brand building its 2024 SEO plan. Make sure you have optimized older content to stay evergreen and keep those broken links in check. Fixing broken links can be a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate your website’s authority if handled well, and it makes your content easier to index.
Once you’ve got the basics down with your SEO content strategy, it’s time to start a conversation. Get people talking about your products/content on popular forums and communities. Building a positive consensus around your product can have a snowball effect and will organically bring in new leads over time.
Trustworthiness
Over 90% of shoppers will look at a review before purchasing a product. Capitalize on this by reaching out to your customers and asking them to leave a quick testimonial or review. Similarly, you should also try to build backlinks from more authoritative websites in your niche–this signals to readers and search engines that your website is also trustworthy.
Trustworthiness follows from experience, expertise, and authority. If you’re building authoritative backlinks, and have a great SEO content strategy with genuinely engaging content, you’re on the right track. Remember that this is a cumulative process and it can take some time before you see an uptick in traffic. What matters is sticking to your plan and being consistent with the content.
Keep these pillars in mind as you chart your 2024 SEO plan; they’re an excellent guide for content creation. Successful brands will almost always target subjects they have direct expertise in, and gap analysis can help fill in the gaps. Once you have your core topics ready, you can start connecting with popular content creators and experts in your field for collaboration.
360° SEO
79% of marketers agree that interactive content improves retention more than static content (blogs, articles). This means that your SEO content strategy needs to account for more than just Google in 2024. Brands that want to make a big splash need to look ahead and strategize for a variety of different search engines and platforms, from Bing’s increasingly popular Co-Pilot to TikTok and Amazon.
Great SEO in 2024 needs to take a 360° approach–here’s what that means.
- Content Types: What type of content is best suited for your product or service? Careful keyword analysis and audience insights can help you answer this question. A brand that can monetize a popular subject or keyword on TikTok will naturally pivot to video content, while another might chase long-tail keywords through blog posts.
- Every Platform is Unique: A great SEO content strategy differentiates between platforms. TikTok’s audience is generally younger relative to Facebook, and that also calls for a shift in content. For example, Duolingo is well-known for its aggressively entertaining video content on Instagram and TikTok, while also appealing to a broader demographic on other channels through paid ads.
You want your static/interactive content to feel native to the platform it is being posted to. Brands will often achieve this by using platform-specific keywords and features like AI filters to engage and convert audiences.
- Consistency: SEO in 2024 is going to be a balancing act. As you go from video to long-form to online marketplace, you’ll need to make sure your core messaging remains intact, even if the way it’s delivered keeps changing. Maintaining a consistent brand identity through your SEO content strategy will help your brand stay popular across different platforms. No one wants all of their eggs in one SEO basket.
Be Careful With AI
The need to produce content for multiple avenues makes AI a tempting tool–do more with less, right? Not quite.
Speeding up your content creation with generative tools can cause your website/social media profile to get flagged. AI detection tech is evolving almost as quickly as AI itself, and platforms are only going to get more aggressive in the fight against botted content. For instance, Twitter/X recently stated that it removes about a million spam accounts a day. Getting your account flagged can be incredibly difficult to recover from.
Search engines aren’t the only ones getting savvy to the AI maelstrom. Everyday audiences appreciate a human touch when it comes to content, and they can be quick to perceive AI-generated work as lazy and unappealing.
Maintain a Data Practice
You won’t know if your SEO content strategy is working if you can’t quantify the results. Data might have become a bit of a buzzword now, but it’s only going to get more important for SEO in 2024. As privacy laws grow stricter around the world, brands are losing access to handy 3rd party cookie data. Looking ahead, it’s clear that zero-party (data volunteered by customers) and first-party (insight from consumer analytics) data are going to be invaluable.
Implementing a healthy data practice involving customer surveying, customer data platforms, and data warehouses can help you fine-tune your strategy throughout the year and cut down on costs.
Level Up!
Increasing connectivity and AI-driven content are fueling a ‘quantity over quality’ approach across almost every niche. Your SEO content strategy needs to enable your brand to stand apart in this competitive environment, and that means doing more.
Your content needs to be more entertaining, informative, inspiring, and sometimes even controversial if the occasion calls for it. The bottom line is that the standards have been raised, and brands need to toe that line to grow in relevance. Keep an eye out for trends on key platforms and identify opportunities where you can be bold with your content, you might just strike gold.
SEO in 2024: Seize The Opportunity
A holistic SEO content strategy can plant the seeds for multiple years of profit. Brands need to focus on the basics and identify changes in their niche to stay ahead of the competition. If you need help with your strategy, reach out to Coalition Technologies for a free review today. Year after year, we’ve had the pleasure of driving millions in sales with innovative strategies tailored to each client—we can’t wait to work on yours.
