Search engine optimisation has and will continue to be a huge priority for marketers. According to HubSpot, SEO is the main source of traffic for most organisations.
And that makes sense, because SEO is the only always-on channel you can measure; you don’t have to be spending on ad budget for it to generate traffic.
SEO has changed over the years, and we still see a lot of brands come to us expecting SEO to be a kind of magic or technical trickery, when in fact it’s just plain marketing.
So what are the core components of modern SEO in 2024, and how have these changed over the years?
Technical SEO
One area that’s remained pretty similar over the years in its function and importance is technical SEO.
When referring to technical SEO, we’re talking about Google’s ability to find the pages on your website and understand how it’s structured so that it can better serve results to users.
Google is still the number one search engine worldwide, and they provide a lot of guidance to developers for technical SEO.
Generally when we run campaigns, technical SEO will be the first place we look. If Google can’t find all of your important pages then it doesn’t matter how much great content is on them.
The key things that impact technical SEO are:
Internal linking — ensuring that your menu structure and links within pages let Google find all of your great content, products and service pages etc.
Information architecture — does the structure of your website make sense for users and search engines?
Site speed — faster sites are prioritised by Google. This won’t make or break your rankings, but users love faster sites and loading quicker than the competition might help push you up results pages.
In 2024 we mostly refer to site speed as “core web vitals” and there are many useful tools to check this.
Your brand is your expertise
As a brand engagement agency, clients are often surprised when we talk about how this will positively impact SEO.
A key component of effective brand engagement is potential customers knowing what you are experts at. In reality this is the core of most brands: what do we do really well?
SEO is directly related to this through guidelines known as Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-E-A-T).
This is a great framework to understand how SEO is different in 2024.
We can no longer just build links or change page copy to include keywords and rank more highly. We must create valuable experiences for customers, and Google is looking for the signals that show that.
Experience
How long have you been in business? Do you have content demonstrating that you have solutions to problems that your customers want you to solve? If you’re a professional services company, is there content on your website that helps users understand how you’ve overcome past hurdles for customers?
Experience can also be demonstrated externally from your own site, such as product reviews, so it’s key to understand if there are any issues reviewers are having and then address them.
Expertise
How are you showing your expertise as a brand? Do you have a page showcasing your team and their credentials? There’ a lot to unpack here, but most modern content strategies should lead by delving into the subjects that you as a brand are best at, and these usually align with what you want to be remembered for.
We’ve written about brand recognition and brand recall previously, and clearly demonstrating expertise through your content means that when you attract new visitors — and answer their questions, solve their problems — you’re aiming to influence recall and bring them back at a later point in their buying process.
Of course, Google likes to see there are experts behind the content it ranks too. This is especially the case with subjects like finance and healthcare, where advice given can have lasting impact.
Authority
At Woven, we try to avoid the term ‘link building’, which you may have heard. We prefer the more encompassing term ‘building authority’. Your authority is essentially how much you’re being talked about externally, and how relevant that chatter is.
This could include social media, news sources and other types of media. And, yes, it does get influenced positively when someone relevant links to you.
But setting out to build links is a bad strategy in 2024. It’s far more valuable to customers when a brand aims to communicate important information with its audiences, often in a more digestible way.
This is where PR comes in — and SEO teams can and should help advise PR teams to do the best job. For example, if you land an important piece of PR in regional press, where are users going to hit first on your website? Is that landing page going to give them further information? Is it reinforcing your brand values?
The days of building as many links as possible are gone. Instead, aim to create external information that provides value.
Trust
Trust is a metric that everyone, consciously or not, understands. If we see lots of positive reviews for a brand, that’s a good thing. You should think of trust in SEO in the same way.
Do you have an external review platform such as TrustPilot or a Google Business Profile? What’s the mechanism for asking previous customers for reviews? Having lots of positive reviews can be beneficial for SEO.
But it also goes deeper than this: think about your customer service teams, how well you’re dealing with customer issues and how good your support documentation is on your website. This can all have a big impact.
It also doesn’t hurt to have some social proof on your web pages, such as positive customer quotes or highlighting influential people who have used your products or services.
What about keywords?
Any SEO campaign will still need to measure important metrics such as traffic, impressions and conversions. And a big part of that is measuring which keywords you’re ranking for and where.
But generally this isn’t a great metric in 2024 to start with.
If your goal is to ‘rank position 1-3 for X keyword’ then you’re not likely to be considering the wider subjects mentioned above. Sure, you can and should include a keyword list when building out content, but the purpose of that content is to add something of value to your visitors, not to rank more highly for the purposes of SEO.
It just so happens that when we build epic and valuable content that demonstrates experience, expertise and trust, we also see higher search engine rankings.
SEO in 2024
SEO is a huge topic, but hopefully we’ve given you an overview of how the subject of search engine optimisation has become much broader than just keyword stuffing and backlinking. The best SEO campaigns are the ones that improve your overall brand and aren’t just looking at SEO in a silo.
If you’re looking to include SEO in your marketing mix and want it to integrate into brand strategy, get in touch today.