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2023 was a whirlwind year for marketers; we had the launch of Chat-GPT at the end of 2022, which started to take off in 2023 with more and more advanced models (including becoming multi-model) and competitors entering the field with varying degrees of success (*cough cough* Google Bard), as well as various Chat-GPT and other generative AI-based tools hitting the market. We also had other major changes in our analytics platforms, with Google finally killing off UA in favour of pushing GA4 into the forefront (which can safely be said to not have been the most popular move among marketers and business owners). These were just a few of the big changes that scratch the surface of all the things that occurred in 2023, which you can read more about in our 2023 Marketing Year in Review post.
So, what does 2024 hold for us? Should we continue to expect big changes and volatility in the search and marketing realm? Or can we expect a little more stability, letting us marketers catch our breath? Find out below our predictions on how search engine marketing will evolve in the coming year.
Here’s our Take on How We See the Marketing Realm Changing (Or Not Changing) in 2024:
1) AI Evolving the Search Landscape
2) Alternative AI and Platform Integration
3) Changes in How People Search
4) Content Marketing is Dead? Long Live the King?
5) AI Takes Even More Control in Ads
6) Social Media Stands Strong as AI Reshapes the Marketing Landscape
7) SEO Finally Dies in 2024…
8) The Rise of Zero Click Searches
9) Personalization Becomes Even More Important
10) Blog Traffic Will Start to Decline Across Industries
11) The Continued Rise of EEAT
12) Schema becomes Less Impactful
13) The Increase in Video SEO + Short Form Video
14) Reputation Management Becomes Even More Important
15) Virtual Advertising – Apple Vision + The Metaverse
16) Email Marketing Becomes an Even More Important Tool
17) The Death of Cookies
1) AI Evolving the Search Landscape
Let’s start with the elephant in the room and one of the less bold predictions for 2024: AI will become even more integrated into search. We know Google is going to integrate their Google Gemini platform which is currently beta-tested around the world. We believe that in 2024 we will be looking at multi-modal generative AI models that will not only interpret text but also voice, videos, and images right on Google and Bing Search. We think we will see Google create images as well as ‘how-to videos’ through search.
2) Alternative AI and Platform Integration
While we aren’t an AI company at Snaptech, we do understand the value and importance AI can bring as far as efficiencies are concerned. What we expect as it relates to marketing is the advancement of these generative AI systems for which there are many popping up, such as X (formerly Twitter) Grok, Chat-GPT, and Google Gemini, to name a few. These alternatives will potentially increase and provide more choices for how we work, and be integrated even further into our platforms than ever before, which may provide us with some unique and interesting insights and use cases.
We anticipate seeing CMS platforms such as WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and more integrate these generative AI tools into their platform, making it simpler than ever for business owners to optimize their title tags and meta descriptions. Although, we know it won’t be perfect, as these systems likely won’t fully understand your business, your audience, search volume, etc, so proceed with caution.
3) Changes in How People Search
How search will evolve in 2024 and beyond is the way people search will change considerably. Currently, we’ve been taught to search a certain way i.e., using the location in your search, such as pizzeria New York, sushi Vancouver, cars for sale near me, etc, but with generative AI being built into search, expect more conversational searches to happen.
What do we mean by conversational search? We can expect people to provide more detailed answers for exactly what they are looking for. Instead of cars for sale near me, someone searched for a blue Ford Mustang that is a v8, manual, has less than 30,000 km, is the model year of 2018-2020, has leather seats, and is for sale in Vancouver for $40,000 or less. So in the latter example, we see a much more detailed search than the basic search query of “find a car near me.”
4) Content Marketing is Dead? Long Live the King?
Our next prediction is that content marketing will see a large upheaval in 2024. We’ve all heard the mantra that content is king, and while that may remain true, we think we’ll discover that the emperor has no clothes, and the way content is designed and presented will change. While AI-based content will continue to be prevalent, the type of content we can expect to see may look a little different. We’ll still have opinion pieces and original content pieces from content marketers, we anticipate those content pieces to be more passion-related vs marketing-related.
We see the industry moving towards a pillar-based marketing strategy where you can answer the who, where, what, and how of a topic. Not only will this help users better get the answer they like, but the AI-based search engines will likely value those types of content pieces more.
5) AI Takes Even More Control in Ads
2023, as we’ve discussed, was a big year in AI, even on the ads side of the business. Performance Max was a big step towards that, and we expect that to continue even further, with Google and Facebook (Meta) refining their Advertising tools, further integrating generative AI into their ad platforms, and taking away more control from advertisers in the process.
Expect the launch of Demand Gen—a new campaign looking to replace Google Discover Ads. The channels these ads would show up on are YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. While we aren’t sure how effective they will be at generating conversions, the whole purpose of it is to generate demand for your products or services. With this platform, Google can grab images and videos to generate these ads. While we don’t wholly recommend that, best practice will continue to be that advertisers provide these assets and then the let machine learning algorithm determine how best to use them.
What does this all mean? We expect advertisers in general to have less control over how ads are displayed as both Meta (Facebook) and Google want to relinquish control to their own AIs, thus giving advertisers less control over how these ads are displayed than ever before.
Find out more about Demand Gen Ads here.
6) Social Media Stands Strong as AI Reshapes the Marketing Landscape
We believe social media will continue to be a healthy marketing channel moving forward and will be less impacted by AI from a non-ads perspective. While some people may use it for images or content blurbs, social media is all about connecting with your audience, and it doesn’t get more human than that.
If your brand has a built audience and it’s something you can continue to grow with original, interesting content, we see this as one of the safest spaces in the year 2024. With that said, we expect the ads themselves to continue to become more automated through these tools, and as previously mentioned there will likely be even less control of your ads, the same way we’ve lost some control of our Google Ads through Performance Max campaigns. With social media being able to target consumers at a more targeted level expect these highly targeted ads to continue to perform and engage with the right target audience.
7) SEO Finally Dies in 2024—or Perhaps Rumours of SEO’s Death Were Greatly Exaggerated
Well, we can’t have a prediction blog without the death of SEO, at this point, it’s tradition. So no, we aren’t predicting the end of SEO (although there are plenty out there waving the white flag).
What we are predicting is a volatile year for SEO in 2024.
We expect some major changes beyond just algorithm updates. Search Generative Experience (SGE), i.e., Search and AI platforms melded together, will be integrated within all searches, we anticipate AI becoming better, and we also expect this to impact blog traffic, after all, how could it not when you can go to a single platform and have it answer your question without having to go through waves of SEO content that has caused some journalists to label SEOs as ruining the internet (oops, guilty as charged…err…well, maybe we’ll have to plead the 5th on this one).
8) The Rise of Zero-Click Searches
Zero-click searches sometimes referred to as zero-volume searches, will become even more prominent in the coming year with the change in how we predict people will search, which is that search will become more conversational. Google has confirmed that 15% of searches are new, and never been searched before, and we expect that number to grow considerably over the next year and beyond. This likely means we can’t ignore low-volume keywords, and perhaps targeting low-volume, low-competition keywords will be more valuable than ever before.
9) Personalization Becomes Even More Important
You hear about personalization a lot in digital marketing, and while personalization has and will always be an aspect of it, we expect it to become even more prominent in the year ahead. Google at one time did try to make the SERPs more personalized but then reverted the changes as it was not as effective. We don’t expect that to be the case this time around, as search engines will continue to better understand who you are, what you like, where you are from, and how they can better serve you and your requests.
10) Blog Traffic Will Start to Decline Across Industries
Our next prediction is that blog traffic will start to see declines across multiple industries. We believe people will start to change how they search for information about products, services, or general inquiries, which will ultimately lead to a lot of companies seeing big drops in their blog traffic.
Why do we believe this? It’s not because we believe blogs will stop answering questions, but we believe this will occur due to people getting their answers directly from these search platforms such as Google Gemini (when it launches next year), Bing search, or a 3rd party platform such as Chat-GPT and any competitors. Here people can ask these AI platforms directly and get the answer they need which is faster than searching through the SERPs to find the best relevant information.
This ultimately aligns with Google’s goal as well, as they would prefer to keep people on the SERPs rather than leaving the SERPs so they can serve even more ads to users. There are instances where people have seen it throughout 2023, but we expect that to take another step forward.
11) The Continued Rise of EEAT
EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) will continue to play a large impact on search and ranking performance. We’ve seen Google keep pushing this in your money, your life (YMYL) businesses and websites, and we expect the importance of EEAT to continue and become even more valuable, especially with the rise of AI content.
When it comes to health and finances, Google wants to ensure it is only providing the most important and relevant information, so establishing yourself as an expert in your field will be more important than ever before.
12) Schema Becomes Less Impactful
This one might be a little on the bolder side. Schema, for those of you who aren’t in the know, is a code you add to the website to help categorize the website or aspects of the website. For example, you use schema markup to tell Google that your website is a local business located in X, this is what your product is, and here are the features, price, reviews, etc. This has been very helpful to search engines in understanding your website currently and in the past.
Still, with generative AI starting to understand content, images, and videos better, we expect it to understand all those facets of your website based on the information provided so we do anticipate the impact of schema to dwindle before it eventually rides off into the sunset.
13) The Increase in Video SEO + Short Form Video
Videos will continue to see prominence, especially short-form videos, as people look for quick answers to their queries. With rising platforms like TikTok, Reels from Instagram, or shorts from YouTube, there is a demand for more video content, and Google is not turning its back on it.
Look for videos to be further integrated into the SERPs, and we may even see AI-generated videos providing helpful tutorial guides, making the SERPs more competitive than ever.
14) Reputation Management Becomes Even More Vital
While we don’t expect to see major changes in local SEO, we do expect to see the rise and importance of reputation management continue. Ensuring your brand is shown in a good light will be more vital than ever. We expect these reviews and engagement with your customers will become a larger ranking factor for these AI-based or answer-based search engines, as providing the best answer for customers will be the ultimate goal.
For example, an AI can not determine the quality of a restaurant without actually being able to experience the venue, atmosphere, food, service, etc, but customers who have been to the restaurant can provide that data, and the more positive signals these AI platforms receive the more likely it is to provide your product or service as the answer or result when people ask questions such as ‘best restaurant in Los Angeles’.
Also, with the announcement of the Apple Vision in the coming year and other similar devices likely to pop up, we expect that users will start to wear these in the real world, and these augmented reality (AR) devices will likely overlap some of the information on top of your businesses and products in the real world. But that may be more of a 2025 prediction (spoiler alert).
15) Virtual Advertising – Apple Vision + The Metaverse
With the announcement of the Apple Vision in 2023 and the launch of this new platform in 2024, we can expect to see new ways of advertising to consumers. We will be starting the journey of a virtual overlap in the real world.
What does this mean? The way people browse may change significantly; how they interact with websites and, if walking around while wearing this peripheral, we will start to see the importance of Local SEO and reputation management, where looking at real-world products or businesses will provide instant reviews on a virtual overlay.
While it won’t take over the world, we can expect to see a foundational shift towards an augmented reality world (AR). We don’t expect this to only be limited to Apple. The Metaverse is still alive and kicking even though it lost some wind from it’s sails in 2023.
We expect Facebook/Meta to keep pushing this technology and for it to evolve into new forms, which will provide another avenue for advertisers and marketers.
16) Email Marketing Becomes an Even More Important Tool
While email marketing is already quite an important marketing strategy, especially when done correctly, we think it will become even more relevant in 2024, where capturing and holding your audience will be just as important as ever, especially as Google will be directing a lot of their audience to stay on the SERPs.
17) The Death of Cookies
Less of a prediction and more of a fact. Yes, you heard that right: cookies are being taken out to pasture, and tracking your data and key performance indicators (KPIs) will become a little more muddied and a little more challenging. Google is preparing for the death of third-party cookies in 2024. Chow down while you still can.
For those who don’t know what cookies are, cookies are little tracking codes attached to your browser that track everywhere you go, which helps advertisers better target ads that relate to your interests.
Final Thoughts for 2024
While we don’t expect all these predictions to hit, what we do ultimately expect is a major year of change in the digital marketing landscape. Marketers can expect volatility, regardless of whether they work in SEO, content marketing, or paid media. Whether they are general marketers or business owners, we can expect 2024 to bring lots of change. Having your own audience and leveraging first-party data will continue to be valuable to help limit some of that volatility.
All we can recommend is to keep on top of the changes and try to make your content valuable for users, as that’s what Google and other search engines are ultimately trying to do. Whether users get their answers from the SERPs or the AI-based answering machines, we want to make sure we are front and center in providing that content and answers or being displayed at the top of SERPs with our ads.
Get in touch with us here if you’d like to have a conversation about how these predictions may impact your business!