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Top SEO Strategies for 2024

The Gist

  • SEO best practices still matter. To show up in search engine results pages (SERPs), following search engine optimization (SEO) best practices is necessary.
  • Still Google's world. Google dominates the global search engine market with a near 84% market share, making it crucial to consider in an SEO strategy.
  • High-quality content. On-page SEO involves optimizing visible elements such as content, which should be relevant and high-quality, with experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) guidelines in mind.

Editor's Note: This article has been updated on January 29, 2024 to include new data and information. 

When someone wants to search for a product, look at videos or read about a topic, they go directly to their preferred search engine. And if you want to show up in said search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll need to follow search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.

As we delve into best practices as of February 2024, our primary focus will be on Google. Why? Because it has dominated the global search engine market since its inception in 1997.

As of July 2023, Google held nearly 84% of the search engine market — with runner-up Bing claiming just over 9%.

Market share of desktop search engines worldwide, with Google in lead

Google doesn't share its search volume data. But experts around the web estimate the search engine sees anywhere from 40,000 to 99,000 search queries every second. For one day, that could amount to more than 8.5 billion searches.

SEO, which companies use to maximize content marketing efforts, ultimately breaks down into three categories:

Let’s take a look at some core components of these three categories and how SEO professionals can aim to follow best practices.

On-page SEO, also called on-site SEO, refers to the optimization of elements that you can see on-page, such as:

Content

Content is at the core of on-page SEO, and it’s what many people focus on when first optimizing their SEO strategy.

Relevance and quality are more important than any other Google ranking factor.

Google actively penalizes thin content that offers little to no value to searchers. While in the past it used to consider pages as a whole, it now looks at and ranks subsections within pages to match queries.

When you're working on your content strategy or overall SEO strategy, consider these questions to determine if you’re headed in the right direction:

  • Do you have a target audience in mind that will find your content useful if they come directly to you?
  • Does your content demonstrate expertise that comes from firsthand experience?
  • After reading your content, will someone feel they’ve learned enough about the topic?

If you’ve answered yes to these three questions, you’re on the right track.

Some content worst practices to stay away from include:

  • Creating content specifically to attract people from search engines
  • Utilizing extensive automation to produce lots of content on a variety of topics
  • Summarizing what other content creators have said without adding additional value
  • Writing to meet a particular word count or because you’ve heard Google’s algorithm prefers a specific word count (it doesn’t)
  • Creating content that promises to answer a question that has no answer (for example, suggesting you know the release date of a movie that has no confirmed release date)

E-E-A-T Guidelines

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google first adopted the concept as part of its algorithm in August of 2019, though back then it was simply E-A-T. Then, more than three years later, they expanded the idea to add the additional E for Experience. 

Google's E-E-A-T Guidelines, which stand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

In Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, E-E-A-T specifically refers to:

  • The first-hand of life experience the content creator has with the topic. 
  • The expertise of the creator of the main content
  • The authoritativeness of the creator of the main content, the main content itself and the website
  • The trustworthiness of the creator of the main content, the main content itself and the website

E-E-A-T plays a part in websites of all types, including gossip columns, satire websites, forums and Q&A pages. How a website meets E-E-A-T guidelines will depend on the type of website. Some topics or industries will require less formal expertise than others.

For example, a news website with high E-E-A-T articles will convey journalistic integrity, contain factually accurate information and utilize robust policies and review processes with included sources.

A site containing scientific topics, on the other hand, should be created by people or organizations with the appropriate scientific knowledge or expertise and represent established scientific consensus.

When it comes to establishing E-E-A-T for your content, think about the page's topic and what expertise is needed to achieve the purpose of that page.

Search Queries

Search queries are the words and phrases people use when using search engines or smart assistants. These words and phrases shift based on the search intent — the "why" behind the action.

Types of search intent include:

  • Informational: The searcher is looking for information, wants to answer a question or learn how to do something. The best way to target an information query is to develop high-quality, SEO-focused content that provides helpful and relevant information to the user. Position yourself as a source of information people can trust.
  • Navigational: The searcher is looking for a particular website or page. For example, they might type "YouTube" or "LinkedIn." You can't typically target navigational queries unless you own the specific website or page the person is looking for. But you can make sure you claim the top results spot for your brand's own navigational query.
  • Transactional: With this search intent, the user wants to make a purchase. The query might include a brand, product or service name or a generic item, such as “coffee maker.” You can target these search queries with optimized product or service pages. You can also use pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to target these search terms.

By understanding search intent — which might include keyword research to best understand which words the target audience uses — companies can better craft content to meet needs and win more readers.

Links

You should include two types of links within your website or web page content: internal and external.

Internal links redirect to another page or piece of content on your website. For example, on an article about the latest chatbot trends, you might link to a related article about how chatbot technology works.

External links direct readers to a page that is not yours. These links should be highly relevant webpages or sites with high experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

Link building is also important — getting other websites to link back to your website or piece of content. These links signal to Google that your website is valuable enough to earn a citation, allowing content to rise in search rankings. We'll talk more on these later, in off-page SEO strategies.

Visuals

Visuals (videos, gifs, pictures, infographics, etc.) are a large part of digital content strategies.

If you plan to use visuals on your site or pages, you’ll want to ensure that they're:

  • Large and high quality (beware of large image file sizes, however, which can cause slow loading)
  • Relevant to the content
  • Shareable
  • Placed high on the page
  • Have a relevant file name
  • Have alt text, which aids visually impaired users

If you’re using video content, include a video transcript. Not only will a transcript make your content more accessible, but it will also make videos more "scrapable" by search engine bots.

Meta Title & Meta Description

Your meta title (the alternative title that shows up on Google) tells search engines and searchers what your content is about and what keywords to focus on. This title should be relevant to your content, include at least one word or phrase from your keyword research and be no longer than 60 characters.

Search engines don't factor meta descriptions into your ranking — but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

The meta description is the ideal place to let Google and searchers know what your page is about. As a result, you’ll see higher click-through rates.

URL & Slug

Including your keyword within the slug of the URL — the last part of the URL that identifies the unique page — is a small bonus to SEO. However, if you can't do so in a sensible way, it won’t be a big hit against you.