This is an excerpt from SEJ’s SEO Trends 2024 ebook, our annual roundup of expert opinions on what you can expect over the course of the next 12 months. 

Seeing troubled waters ahead comes with apprehension, but it’s also a gift.

As much as disruption is inevitable in 2024, calls to the death of SEO are premature.

People still need to find things, and in this editor’s opinion, the momentum behind how people have searched for information since search engines first appeared isn’t easily redirected.

The models you currently use to drive business goals with SEO may change.

Some queries never needed a click-through in the first place. This is where in-platform search experiences will hit hardest.

Many low-hanging fruit queries will turn rotten, and basic informational queries will stop performing.

But if you weren’t serving the true user intent in the first place, this would happen eventually anyway.

You need to pivot, but you have time to do it.

The key will be educating your clients or in-house stakeholders and preparing them for disruption.

You will likely see unusual performance interruptions as you turn toward new strategies. You may need to reassess which metrics are important to you and what outcomes you expect from SEO.

Just remember: It isn’t the hype where you’ll find a sound strategy. It’s your understanding of your audience and how their journeys manifest.

If I had to summarize the insights of this article in three sentences, they would be:

• Understanding a user’s true intent must guide you – spam and thin results are dying.
• Don’t forget about technical SEO – keeping a tidy site can also help insulate you from ruthless core updates.
• Use AI strategically to give yourself more time for big-picture thinking.

AI Will Change The Types Of Content We Invest In

Aleyda Solis, Founder & International SEO Consultant, Orainti

I expect the following to be key SEO trends in 2024:

Trend 1: Time-Consuming SEO Tasks Get Easier

There will be further automation of key SEO tasks thanks to AI/chatbots/generative search.

From internal linking to structured data implementation, some otherwise resource-consuming SEO execution will be facilitated further thanks to more powerful automation.

Trend 2: Investment In Expert-Lead Content

After the disruption of AI content generation, online businesses should invest in expert-led content to differentiate themselves, increase their trustworthiness, and establish their authority.

An expert-based strategy can also minimize the chances of getting hit by Google quality updates.

Trend 3: Changing Click Behavior Will Necessitate Different Content

The release of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) could shift users’ click behavior in search results.

For example, rather than clicking on reviews, articles, or product landing pages, they might go directly to product description pages through SGE snapshots.

We may need to start diversifying and changing the type of content we invest in to maximize our visibility and improve user experience across the search journey.

Don’t Overlook Update Impacts On Technical SEO

Dan Taylor, Partner & Head of Technical SEO, SALT.agency

Crawling & Indexing Disruption

With all the focus on AI and the most recent fallout from the sequential Google updates (namely the helpful content update), a big focus has been on the impact on ranking.

We know that the idea of quality affects all of Google’s “SEO” processes.

Google reaffirmed this at Search Central Live in Zurich in October 2023. Right now, the SEO community focuses on “quality content,” but you should also focus on quality in terms of maintaining desired crawling and indexing rates. I think trends will shift more in this direction in 2024.

Many of Google’s systems use URL patterns to make judgments of all the URLs that follow this pattern.

This way, it can preserve resources and make judgments without crawling hundreds or thousands of URLs on a single large website. It does this for both judging quality and SafeSearch.

Crawling and indexing are expensive components of Google’s organic search.

I feel these more “ruthless” updates in recent months indicate things to come, as Google doesn’t need or want to crawl and store every piece of content on the internet. We also saw some indication of “index pruning” in 2022 in the August core update.

Effective log file analysis and understanding the Google Search Console (GSC) crawl stats report will be vital.

Prepare your clients for this, and educate your team members about it. Otherwise, brands will be blindsided by performance and ranking drops, with possible signs of crawl and indexing slowdown happening in advance.

Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Breakages

As well as considering the impact on reporting (for showing the value of SEO) to the broader business, with Chrome moving towards the “deprecation” of third-party cookies, we also need to be activists and stewards for our clients in helping them understand the impact and potential site breakages for Chrome users.

While this isn’t strictly SEO, there’s no point driving users from organic search to a website if it doesn’t work or function as expected, and the users don’t convert.

From Q1 2024, this will be tested on 1% of Chrome users, with rollout fully anticipated before the end of the year. Test websites and highlight issues for clients now, and keep it on your radar in 2024.

In addition, help your clients set up analytics to report (and show value) to their stakeholders.

Specialized AI Tools Can Free Significant Time For Strategy

Kevin Indig, Growth Advisor To Fast-Growing Startups

The most significant trend I see for 2024 is using AI to make workflows like data analysis, keyword research, content creation, and communication magnitudes faster.

We’re facing more AI in search (even more than before), but we also get more powerful tools to strike back.

General large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Bard, or Claude are one part of the toolset, but we’ll also see a lot more specialized tools for specific workflows.

The second trend is the launch of Search Generative Experience (SGE) out of beta, which I expect at the end of 2023. At the time of writing (October 2023), we don’t yet know the implications of SGE, but understanding and reverse engineering it is the second big trend of 2024.

SEO Is Not Dead – SEO Got Better

Ryan Jones, SVP, SEO, Razorfish

Be prepared for SEO to be declared dead multiple times, only to be replaced with something that looks a lot like SEO.

As generative AI develops, search engines will pivot more toward something that behaves like a Star Trek computer than providing a list of websites, giving answers on demand.

Many will struggle to accept that the user never wanted a website for some searches – they just wanted an answer.

On-demand answers may harm affiliate or niche sites, but plenty of people will still be searching to solve problems, find products, get advice, or generally “do something.” 

Marketers will still work to influence the new “search experiences,” just as we work to influence search results. We may try to call it something other than SEO, but it will still be SEO at its core.

We will continue growing away from some of our old metrics and treat SEO more like traditional marketing. 2024 will be the year the entire industry takes another step forward.

SEO professionals familiar with coding, AI, Information Retrieval, and traditional marketing will continue evolving, and I’m excited to see what awesome new ideas and tools we come up with.

Don’t Get Lost In Panic Or Hype, Stay Focused On What Matters

Motoko Hunt, President/International SEO, AJPR

Is it just me, or have the updates and changes with the search engines become more frequent and drastic?

In addition to the search engine side of AI adoptions, AI tools such as ChatGPT became available to the general public.

You see mixed information about the future impact on search; it can get confusing and frustrating no matter the size of your company.

These fast-paced changes will create a massive divide among competing websites depending on how well teams can stay on top of the changes and use them to benefit.

In 2024, I recommend you keep the following three points in mind to grow your business:

Know The Facts

You must stay on top of what’s happening, but changes can come quickly. What you don’t want to do is to overreact, especially based on misinformation or one person’s opinions.

Read what the search engines and trusted industry news sources say, and don’t focus on every comment and rumor on social media.

Allocate sufficient budget for the SEO team’s education through seminars/webinars, conferences, and certification courses. Sharing knowledge with internal training programs for in-house teams or clients is also great practice.

It’s essential to know how the search results look to your target audiences, especially now that the search engines are changing the results page layout and content more frequently and drastically.

Check the search results with highly relevant queries to your business to see how the changes impact the results.

Analytics data informs the site performance, but looking at the search results also tells you much about why people do or don’t click links.

Understanding how these systems gather, and present information will enable you to pivot activities to respond to these changes as they go live.

Benefit From New Technology

Do an internal audit on tasks that take a long time and could benefit from automation.

For example, you can use AI tools, including AI-powered software services and ChatGPT, to help you check for any irregularities in your ecommerce database that feeds into the website. Or you could audit your site for duplicate and similar content.

These tools can also help cut down some of your coding and tagging work and immediately reduce your manual workload.

It is nice to see that some agencies are already creating tools with AI technology and offering them to clients. It doesn’t need to be a tool suite.

Sometimes, a tool that helps a niche area could make a big difference. Often, many websites simply need that niche challenge to be solved.

Stay Focused

If you are an in-house SEO, you know your business and its target audience very well.

This knowledge and your existing relationships are your best tools.

Improve your content by highlighting your products and services. The key is keeping sight of your business goals and not panicking with every Google update.

Agencies have two priorities: Your clients and your bottom line. Incorporate the AI tools to make the SEO work and related processes more efficient.

Leveraging AI should reduce your operational costs while helping to bring more success for the clients.

The best way to get buy-in from clients is to work closely with them by educating them.

Gaining their trust and confidence that you understand and have adapted to these changes will be the key to winning and retaining the businesses.

SEO Will Become More Expensive, Increasing The Risk Of Low-Quality Activities

Roger Montti, News Writer, Search Engine Journal

Rising Cost Of SEO And SaaS Tools

I expect the cost of tools to increase, and we may see additional users on shared plans lose access in greater numbers.

• Ahrefs recently announced it is cutting 15% of legacy users due to overuse.
• Resource usage for AI is high, which might cause providers to raise prices. For example, comparing 2021 to 2022, Microsoft used 34% more water, and Google’s water use is up 20%, both attributed to AI.
• Data center demand is at an all-time high, with some geographic areas experiencing as much as 300% data center growth.
• Google’s investment in tensor processing units (chips for AI) is estimated to cost $3 billion in 2023.

Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm that backed companies like Apple, Airbnb, and more, recently published an article stating that 2024 is when AI will go into what it calls Act Two.

Act Two of AI expands monetization opportunities beyond content and image generation into more high-stakes businesses like medicine. Act Two goes beyond the simple text and image generation for which people currently use it.

OpenAI recently promised lower-priced plans for developers, but these plans are for technologies related to medicine and entertainment. Those new planned offerings are a part of OpenAI’s goal to expand its footprint…