You can have the best business in the world, but if the right people cannot find you online, you will not be a success. Fortunately, making sure your SEO stays constantly updated can ensure your website gets in front of the very people you are trying to attract. Read on to find out what to work on to ensure your SEO is effective in 2024.
Start With An SEO Audit
If you are looking to improve your SEO in 2024 the best place to start is with an audit. An SEO audit is like a health check for the visibility of your site. An audit will consist of various checks relating to the different aspects of SEO and how well your site is doing in them.
Most SEO audits will include a mix of checks on issues such as on-page SEO, keyword research, backlink profiles, and user experience as all of these are factors that are highly valued by search engines like Google.
If you are wondering how to conduct an SEO audit yourself, it’s best to go directly to the professional and follow their advice on the subject. However, as anyone who has done even a little SEO knows, doing your SEO health check can be tricky. This is because it means getting up to speed with the constantly changing landscape of the SEO field. This is an issue that leads many to leave their SEO audit up to the professionals.
Pick The Right Keywords
Once you have your audit complete, there will be some specific things you will need to act on. One of these is likely to be perfecting your keyword selection. However, selecting the right terms can be a lot more complicated than it first appears. This is because customers will select different words and phrases according to their needs, the stage of the buying process that they are at, and how they search. Understanding and choosing the words relevant to the segment of the audience that you are looking to attract is known as search intent, and it’s a huge deal in SEO right now.
Picture found at Pixabay – License CC0
Indeed, search intent is now showing up in many of the big SEO tools including SEM, and MOZ, making it easier to identify the intent that a customer has when they search for certain tools. Remember that by better understanding this and then choosing the right keywords to match the intent of the customer you can more effectively make sure your content gets in front of the right people (the ones that you are trying to connect with).
Boost Your CTR (Click Through Rate)
A CTR or click-through rate is the number of people that see your listing in the search results and then click through to your webpage. The more people that click through to your page the greater the opportunity you have to convert them into customers, making CRT a vital metric to focus on in 2024.
The good news is that there are several effective ways to boost your CTR organically including optimizing your content to be used as a featured snippet, making sure your meta descriptions are tempting, and that you have title tags that clearly describe and match the content they are describing.
Facilitate Content Sharing
Another important element of a successful SEO strategy in 2024 is encouraging visitors to your site to share your content. The reason content sharing is so important is because it is one of the many signals that search engines like Google use to determine the validity and reputation of your website. That means the more times your site’s link is shared, the higher the rankings you will get.
Happily, social media is perfectly set up to help facilitate this type of content sharing, and that means if you do not already have a robust social media presence alongside your website you must make it a priority.
Indeed, whether you share the content yourself on your social media channels or make it easier for visitors to share by adding social sharing icons, creating content that people will want to share is crucial. To that end, content that is designed specifically for your target audience, that is both entertaining and engaging is a must.
Image sourced at Pixabay – Licence CC0
Prove Your Expertise & Experience
Recent Google updates continue to prioritize E-A-T or expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, but with one major addition – an extra E. This E stands for experience and is something you will need to be able to demonstrate on your site if you want to succeed at SEO in 2024.
For example, before you may have gotten away with being able to show you have expertise, authority and trustworthiness on a specific topic, but you can now add to this and prove to Google that your website should take the top spot in the search results by demonstrating real experience.
The funny thing is that while most of the SERP ranking is done automatically online with bots and algorithms, experience is checked manually at the moment. Yes, that’s right you can expect a Google representative to view your site and rate your experience level by what they see. Fortunately, there are some very clear indications you can make to ensure you gain the level of experience.
One such signal is pictures or videos of you doing what the content describes. For example, if your website deals with travel then a video taken by you, or featuring you in the area you are discussing gives a robust experience signal. Another option is to include content written or checked by a certified expert, an approach popular on YMYL or your money or your life sites such as financial investing sites and health sites.
Prioritize Backlinks
All types of links both to and from your site will be important in 2024 if you want to succeed at the SEO game. Again this is because search engines like Google use the information of the sites you are linking from and to, to ascertain the validity of your site. In essence, the links you use are like tiny character references, that when put together as a whole provide a profile of how trustworthy, valuable, and popular your site is.
To that end, making sure you secure the very best links is crucial, especially when it comes to backlinks which carry the most weight in this situation.
Backlinks are links that other websites make to yours, essentially they refer the reader to your site for more information on a specific topic. The higher the DA or domain authority of the referring site, the better the signal to Google, and the bigger the boost your site will get in the SERPs.
Include External Links
While not as crucial to SEO as backlinks, search engines like Google will also be looking for high authority (DA) websites that you link out to in your content. This is because links to high-DA websites show that you are properly researching your posts, and checking the facts that you include in them. It also shows that you are considering your customer’s experience in the way that you write and include links and info that will add value to them.
Complete Your Google Business Profile
To check external links, you can use special SEO tools that will help you find all external links on a website and analyze them. If you are looking for effective ways to improve your SEO in 2024 then you must complete a Google Business Profile. Indeed, whether you operate completely online, or you have an IRL business setting up your Google Business Profile can help boost your SEO a great deal, as it allows people to leave you reviews, as well as provides information vital for your business to be found via local SEO.
