Three SEO Trends for 2024

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) equips your small business website with tools that work hard to attract customers. But optimizing your site is not a one and done task. SEO rules are always changing. As Google’s algorithms evolve, it’s a good idea to keep monitoring and evolving your own SEO strategy. If you’re looking to step up your SEO efforts for 2024, consider these three options in addition to your regular SEO activities. They will help get you noticed by bringing users the best answers to their queries.

  1. The Featured Snippet

    This relatively new concept is quickly becoming an expected search result. A featured snippet is text that appears just above the first result in a search engine query. Search engines look for text that answers a query clearly, concisely, and accurately, and shows that text as a featured snippet. It includes a link to the content website. The presence of featured snippets is a great motivator to include high quality content on your website. Websites who score a featured snippet can have higher click-through rates, getting more traffic to their sites. Getting a featured snippet may be aspirational, but your chances increase if your website includes quality content targeted at answering the needs of your target customers. Ways to increase content quality include using:

  • Keywords – Business owners can use a “trial and error” method, or a keyword research tool to discover winning keywords.
  • Structured Data – Structured data is information in the form of a database, table, or bullet list. It includes specific, quantitative data. It provides clear answers to the search query, making it easier for search engines to find and recognize your content.
  • Videos – A video with easy-to-follow content will often be a featured snippet, especially on sites such as YouTube.

Featured snippets are desirable since they include a link to the website they’re quoting. But they can also change quickly, depending on the search engine algorithm.

  1. People-first content

    When thinking about optimizing your website to improve search results, it can be tempting to write content geared toward improving results, instead of writing content that appeals to your customers. High-quality content will always be more valuable to a search engine algorithm and will draw target customers to your website. Consider these to keep you focused on your target customers:

  • Stick to your primary topic. Focus on your primary topic and visitors will know they’ve come to the right place. Getting off track by adding non-relevant content dilutes your message and confuses visitors.
  • Build credibility by demonstrating expertise and experience. Answer anticipated questions by showing examples and documenting results. Let visitors know your credentials and include customer testimonials for social proof.
  • Provide a great user experience. Website design should be simple, easy to navigate and informative. Allow visitors to click through to the specific information they want rather than jamming everything on the home page. Make a purchase experience easy by including information about guarantees, returns or questions after the sale. While design trends change often, a simple, elegant design will be timeless.

  1. Fast loading websites

    A tried and tested method for improving SEO ranking. How important are fast-loading websites? Hubspot quotes that “The average website load time in 2023 is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile.” However, “Load times between 0 and 4 seconds are best for optimum conversion rates.”  Further, “An ecommerce site that loads within a second converts 2.5x more visitors than a site that loads in 5 seconds.”

Load speeds can change as you make additions to your site, so be sure to check for load time changes when you add videos, graphics, or major design changes. Your website designer can check headers and other elements that will affect load speeds, and you can monitor image sizes to make sure they aren’t slowing things down. Make sure to monitor your website’s load speed regularly to keep it quick and responsive to visitors.

Wheaton Website Services creates beautiful and engaging websites for small and medium sized businesses. We provide website hosting, website design and website development to hundreds of clients across the globe. Contact us to find out more.