It's that time of the year when everybody in SEO shares their take about what's going to happen next year.
I had the chance to do a Crawling Mondays a few days ago about this topic with Lily Ray, Kevin Indig and Cindy Krum, that you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-TkJdtGnlc
Here we discuss a few areas that pretty much we all agreed will have an important impact in SEO in 2024:
Google will become human first: On one hand as a reaction to AI content -with the need to give a layer of "human" validation to their highlighted content in results and on the other, as a reaction to some people going to TikTok/Instagram to search. We already are seeing some of this with the perspectives filter, surfacing more UGC content in SERPs, giving the ability to mark up forum content and profiles with structured data, and more will come accordingly too.
EEAT principles for your content will become fundamental: How to stand out in a human first Google? Ensuring that your content is not purely automated, that if you leverage automation, you do it with care and good validation process, and that there are always human expert insights, with unique and insightful takes.
The SGE won't steal traffic for real businesses, but will shift the pages that attract it: The sites that will end up getting affected (if it's released as it's being tested at the moment) are those middlemen, affiliate websites offering very little extra value and targeting informational/broader commercial queries. Other businesses, like ecommerce, will see traffic shifting from PLPs (as this experience will be recreated by the SGE snapshot) to the PDPs, which is why is fundamental to optimize your PDPs (!). However, the SGE experience is overall less than optimal still, offering a duplicative and little added value for so many queries, I don't expect is released as it is.
What else? What are your takes on the trends for next year?
