SEO Predictions for 2024 – [rank theory]

People **** this shit!

All my favorite podcasts and Matt Diggities do it every year and I’m like

hey guys

i’m ALSO an influencer… look at my thought leadership-y confidence and my iconoclastic disregard for 583 years of punctuation and capitalization standards!

So, without further ado…

1. Here’s what I think is in store for affiliate site owners in 2024:

Figure out how to turn your affiliate site into a brand that offers something else besides affiliate shit (unless you are a huge gigantic media company, in which, hello! It’s nice to meet you. Slide into my inbox and let’s talk about how you can hire me!).

Seriously, can’t you see all your affiliate-focused SERPmates are on display in museums, just bones now–they don’t even know if you had FEATHERS, that’s how extinct you are…

(that’s a velociraptor joke, people, LFG)

The days of your DR 22 “best butter knife” rankings are numbered.

BTW–this post first appeared in my newsletter–if you’re not subscribed please take a minute to do it, it’ll make you feel 10 years younger

2. Parasites and Spammy Search Results Will Continue For Infinity Years

Google has handed off the curation of any search results in which they HAVEN’T stolen the click from you by stealing your data to display as their own to the big magazines and news sites.

These sites will continue to charge $$$$ for placements of sponsored posts, which will continue to rank.

Stupid, manipulated search results that surface UGC will continue to be low quality and help no one.

Google calling these things “helpful content updates” is a case study in amazing marketing.

It’s not even that “they can’t fix it” they’re just clearly manipulating the search results to both artificially promote news/zines + UGC from DR 90 sites like Reddit, Quora, and (lol) Google Groups, plus whatever humungous sites SEOs can find to post about the best VPN to game Google’s new pay-to-play SERPs.

3. Parasite Sites Will Finally Figure Out That You Can Make More Money Writing Your Own Stupid Affiliate Content

Many have already done this. You can no longer buy posts like you used to could cuz they are writing their own posts, internally linking them in ways they never would to your sponsored post, and ranking for lucrative keywords.

The dual play here is to charge you $x,xxx to $xx,xxx to be somewhere in the top 10, and THEN also use affiliate links.

Double dipping that chip, baby.

So I think parasite opportunities will migrate away from these big sites toward finding some Harvard subdomain or old-ass Reddit threads in order to complete your parasite play.

4. Moving Away From Organic Traffic Will Be A Trend That Picks Up Steam In 2024

He said, running an SEO newsletter…

😢

Building a brand and, specifically, building a community will be much more important goals as Google continues to **** up the SERPs and push down “the little guy” trying to rank for anything worth ranking for.

Guess I’m still an optimist…

I don’t think SEO is going away–there’s too much money there, and I still have enough self-respect left not to be a dipshit “SEO is Dead” motherfucker (unless, you know, I’m doing it ironically).

But I do think the expectations for organic traffic need to be managed going forward (unless your site has the juice) and that more and more SEO dollars will start to be invested in building a brand/building a community.

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That’s it for my own predictions!

But that’s not the end of the predictions!

I’ve searched around for all the influencers making predictions for the new year of SEO, and now I’m gonna share them with you and weigh in with my thoughts.

Talk about a god damned parasite…

Here we go!

Selected Predictions From SEO Influencers I Have Opinions About (the predictions–not the influencers)

(these first predictions are taken from SE Journal)

Kevin Indig:

If Google’s frenzied algorithm updates in 2023 have shown us one thing, it’s that the bar for content and domain quality has risen faster than we thought. In 2024, we need to find ways to scale the production of high-quality content and groom our content portfolio.
​
The most obvious way is using AI, but we need to significantly increase the output quality and add human input. In some cases, AI might be the wrong content creator, but I think we underestimate how good it can really be.

I think AI content will continue to kill it as long as you don’t brag about it on Twitter and have it go viral in pursuit of eternal glory fleeting attention for your AI tool.

I don’t personally think “high quality content” will help you rank–I think “high quality content” will help you build a name for yourself and a following independent of search results that will pay dividends for the work put in, but probably won’t help with organic traffic specifically.

Eli Schwartz:

Generative results in search mean that SEO moves from the top of the funnel to mid-funnel:

Instead of targeting keywords with the most search volume to hopefully peel off the maximum amount of clicks, SEO efforts will need to be more deliberate to target the right users with the right keywords.

Strongly agree with this–though I’d replace “generative results” with “AI-generated content in general.” In addition to SEO getting more difficult (with Google outsourcing their rankings to the big zines/news sites), SEO is shifting to the middle of the funnel. I think that’s an amazing way to frame it.

Katie Morton (SE Journal)

Helpful content is king. Google has made it clear that, when it comes to content, helpfulness is more important than ever. Users are increasingly listening to and watching content, and marketers are finding that use of video increases sales.

With the helpfulness of multimodal content, along with Google’s increasing ability to understand video, audio, and images, it stands to reason that multimedia content will begin to play a bigger part in SERPs in 2024.

Wow, I do not agree with this AT ALL. Maybe it’s my own bias against creating mult-media content cuz I get an A+ in writing and a “can we recast this guy for someone better looking and who is about 89% less awkward on camera?” when it comes to audio/video content.

I don’t think helpful content is king, you only have to look at Lily Ray’s twitter feed from, like two weeks ago to see the utter garbage in the SERPs even now, after approximately 800 million Google updates in the past few months.

However, I do very much agree with this:

It will be more important than ever for SEO pros to work closely with marketing, sales, product managers, and web developers to capture highly-qualified leads. User Experience (UX), content design, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) will be key to capturing the traffic SEO pros bring to business websites and platforms.

This has long been a problem.

“Okay, bud, you got this fire hose of organic traffic coming to your site but your site looks like shit and you’ve put 0 hours into optimizing for UX, CRO, and the customer journey.”

It will be EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER if you think I’m right (via Eli’s above prediction) that SEO is becoming a more MOFU (middle of funnel) thing and less of the TOFU (you can figure it out, come on context clues!).

Cyrus Shepard

Google can’t likely read your logo, but users can, and Google can read users. Likewise, if you label your blog “Blog” in your navigation, how about labeling it something to show your expertise, such as “Protein Research,” “Tennis News,” or “Coffee Blog.”

Solid advice, IMO. Part of standing out and specializing when trying to “build a brand.”

Just don’t look at menu where it says “blog…”

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(these next predictions are selected from the LowFuits.io KW tool blog post)

First of, all: OMG, that cringey header image.

YOU GUYS. We can’t let the youtube thumbnail trend reach our blog post featured images!

We gotta band together and unionize against this. I’ve never cared about ANYTHING more than this IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.

No.

Okay, onto their predictions:

#1. Unique, first-person content backed by experience will start winning

Depends.

This is the current 3-5 spots for “best VPN.”

I feel pretty confident saying that these results won’t be replaced by super nerdy techy people talking about why this particular VPN is the best VPN (because, spoiler alert: it’s the one that pays the best affiliate rate. simple).

Maybe that’s true for some very specific instances, but for keywords that REALLY matter (aka $$$) “how to keep your data safe online” or “best CBD oil” etc., your knowledgable persona is never gonna outrank Forbes or Healthline–otherwise fucking Chong of Cheech and Chong would outrank all these corporate dickheads amirite?

Just keep checking these big searches and see how much it matters to be a big, general authority and not a “person that knows things.”

Calling it now: “first person content backed by experience” is the new voice search.

#2. Google will try figuring out a better algorithm for what ”quality content” really is

would that we all could live in the beautiful world you imagine is outside the warm, safe, comfortable walls you live in, free from monsters and the raging wind, the tricks of mean-spirited gods and the various and inventive horrors of your fellow man.

It will ALWAYS be shit and/or huge authority sites.

#3. Google will try to battle Parasite SEO

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(these next predictions are selected from the Moz post on 2024 predictions)

All right, so. Look–I was gonna pick several predictions from this list like I did from the places I covered in the lists above, but…. damn, they’re like the same three predictions over and over, so I’ll just summarize them + my responses to make it quick:

1. Google is going to rely on personal expertise to wildly transform the SERPs to be actually useful
2. People will increasingly look for their information in other places, like TikTok, Youtube, Pinterest, etc
3. SGE is gonna show up and **** shit up for SEOs

To which I will respond:

1. No, the DR 90 sites will just be given the top spots in most searches and still be pay to play.
2. No doy
3. No, they’re going to play around with it for a bit and kill it (see below)

Okay Sean, your response to most of these predictions–especially MOZ smacks of a deeply-embedded bitterness at once again being overlooked by the wider SEO industry, as if your use of memes and constant all-caps rants eclipses your actual SEO knowledge and will NEVER be enough to rise above the general but persistent background noise of the SEO speaker circuit and the publicity the chosen few generate .

N… nuh-uh.

(here’s Christoph Cemper on the REAL SGE prediction)

My SEO prediction for 2024:

Google will not continue with SGE beyond their test operation.

All speculations will be worthless,
because once again Google let a project die off.

Google is already summarizing content,
and many users do not appreciate that already.

— Christoph C. Cemper 🧡 AIPRM (@cemper) December 18, 2023

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All righty. That’s the end of the 2024 SEO prediction game.

What do you think? Agree or disagree, it doesn’t matter because comments are disabled due to shit SEOs trying to build links with comment spam, so you can feel free to call me out on twitter.

If you take away one single thing from this post it’s this:

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