Here are my predictions for the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), affiliate marketing, digital marketing, digital PR, blogs and AI in 2024.
- If you are running an affiliate blog, you need to figure out how to turn your affiliate site into a brand that offers something else besides affiliate shit. The days of your DR 22 "best butter knife" rankings are numbered.
- High DR sites will continue to charge $$$$ for placements of sponsored posts, which will continue to rank.
- Google continues to mess up SERPs and push down "the little guy" trying to rank for anything worth ranking for. This will accelerate when SGE is fully rolls out.
- Many of the top-ranking sites have the same off-page signals: a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn following, Instagram and perhaps a mention on a blog post about a podcast. Perhaps these are legitimate sites all following a framework, but others could be attempts at manipulating relevance and also EEAT signals.
- SEO is not going away--there's too much money there. But expectations for organic traffic need to be managed going forward and that more and more SEO dollars will start to be invested in building a brand/building a community.
- "High quality content" might not help you rank. Think instead "high quality content" will help you build a name for yourself and a following independent of search results.
- Generative results in search mean that SEO moves from the top of the funnel to mid-funnel. Instead of targeting keywords with the most search volume to hopefully peel off the maximum amount of clicks, SEO efforts will need to be more deliberate to target the right users with the right keywords.
- Multimedia content will begin to play a bigger part in SERPs in 2024. Google will continue to feature YouTube videos in the search results, so dont neglect this channel.
- It will be more important than ever for SEO professionals to work closely with marketing, sales, product managers, and web developers to capture highly-qualified leads. User Experience (UX), content design, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) will be key to capturing the traffic SEO brings to business websites and platforms.
- SEO is becoming a more MOFU (middle of funnel) thing and less of the TOFU. Businesses need to focus more on creating content that targets customers who are already aware of their product and are looking for more information (MOFU) rather than creating content that targets customers who are not yet aware of their product (TOFU).
- SGE is a huge coming shift in Google Search. It could result in big changes in some verticals. For search marketers, many unknown unknowns remain because Google has shared no data on how it will affect organic or paid SERPS.
- Brand Mentions and Digital PR and increasingly relevant. Digital and traditional PR, content marketing techniques and combined with SEO strategy will work together to build organic search visibility and drive brand credibility and trust. This is why brand mentions are so powerful. Because the brand comes first, before the link. But the link and the mention fuel organic search. Yes, everyone likes a link, and they also make life easier for search users. But it’s the brand publicity that drives the link.
- Brands help people make decisions. There is way too much to think about in today’s society, and brands make decisions easier.Traditional PR and content marketing tactics work by helping brands improve their relationship with the public and become trusted.
- No, SEO is not dead. AI isn’t going to take your job, but an SEO who knows how to use AI to be more efficient just might.People often forget that search is a form of pull marketing, where users tell us what they want – not push marketing like a billboard or a TV ad.As digital marketers, our job is simple: Give users what they want.Smart SEO pros will focus on the type of queries where a user wants to do something – like buy Taylor Swift tickets, get reviews of her album or concerts, chat with other Swifties, etc. That’s where AI won’t be able to kill SEO or search.
- What ChatGPT Can Do Vs. What It Can’tChatGPT can accomplish a lot of things.It’s good at showing you how to write an Excel formula or MySQL query, but it will never teach you MySQL, sell you a course, or let you talk with other developers about database theory.Those are things a search engine can help you do.ChatGPT can also help answer many “common knowledge” questions, as long as the topic isn’t contested and is old and popular enough to have shown up in the training data.Even then, it’s still not 100% accurate. ChatGPT 3 can’t crawl the internet. It has no knowledge of current events and can’t cite sources because it doesn’t know or retain that information. But What About Bing, And Google’s Upcoming Bard? They Can Do All Of This, Can’t They?Yes and no. They can cite sources, but that’s based on how they’re implementing it. To vastly oversimplify, Bing isn’t asking for a pure chatbot.Bing is searching for your query/keyword. It then feeds in all the webpages that it would normally return for that search and asks the AI to summarize those webpages.
What are your predictions for SEO and digital marketing this year?
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Hi there! I am a seasoned digital marketer with a wealth of experience across a range of marketing activities, from SEO, digital marketing, GPT prompting, social media to email automation and ecommerce, with a love for oil painting, reading and mountain biking.
