SEO in 2024: Insights To Outrank Your Competitors

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on January 5, 2024

This post is not about SEO predictions in 2024. Instead, I’ll dive into the insights I gathered and learned from 2023 that would still make a mark this year forward. 

We’ve been publishing heavily on link building, so we’ll have actionable tips on what we think is highly important to build the strongest backlinks in 2024. 

1. Stronger Emphasis On Experience

The “E” of experience added to EAT impacts how brands publish assets based on authenticity and real-life scenarios. Google’s ranking algorithm will better reward websites with first-hand verifiable experience that demonstrates authentic thought leadership.

Here are some things we did that helped our sites and our clients’ sites demonstrate first-hand experiences even more. 

Inviting Real Practitioners For Content Contribution 

Relationships will always be a critical factor in addressing the demands for content creation. Being surrounded by trusted leaders, authors, and personalities in your industry can help you tap into their expertise to shell out expert-driven content for your website. 

Invite them to collaborate with your brand to benefit both parties’ audiences mutually. 

With their real-life experiences, you can increase the content’s credibility (and quality). Thus making it more appealing for readers and other content creators to distribute it across their networks. 

First-Person Guest Posts 

Guest posting is still a viable link building tactic for most marketers. Still, it has become difficult to scale for the most part, given that most bloggers today demand payment for published articles or have high restrictions on who can only contribute to their blogs. 

You can use “experience” as a selling point when pitching mid to high-tier publications in your space. By writing topics that demand expertise and first-hand experiences, you’ll be more likely to turn your email pitches into guest posts.

2. Search On Social Media

A strategic approach to SEO starts by acknowledging other mainstream channels that demand optimization, including social media posts. 

We’ve seen how impactful TikTok and Youtube Shorts (Youtube being the second largest search engine) are in acquiring users and letting them stay on the platform. The search for information isn’t anymore. 

Marketers are paying attention to optimizing their social media posts as much as they do with their blog content. Seeing this as a shift requires a holistic SEO strategy to capture a wider audience for brands. 

Repurpose Assets and Distribute Them Across Social Media Platforms.

Find evergreen assets already published on your blog and think of ways to repurpose them as social media posts. That way, you send similar brand messages across different channels but in various means, content formats, and styles. 

Invite Social Media Influencers To Participate in Content Creation.

Identify new upcoming influencers in your space and incentivize them to create outstanding content based on expertise and experience. 

You may also want to repurpose it into written content you can optimize for keywords to rank for. Leverage more of this, and it’ll help you establish topical authority with several content pieces published around a single topic or content theme.

3. Link Building For Organic Rankings and EEAT. 

Links have certainly been the most significant reason we helped our clients quickly improve their site’s organic traffic. 

We’ve also tested our websites to see what link building method works best and what their effectiveness is to their target pages after Google updates.

Here are some of the things we observed to be crucial factors that make every link building campaign successful: 

Diversity of Links

You can’t rely on a single link building strategy. 

While there are scalable techniques such as high-quality guest posting, digital PR, and resource links that work well, there are advantages to diversifying your links:

• Outranking your competitors better. As you have diversified link types, you can gather link opportunities your competitors haven’t acquired before and aren’t easy to replicate. 
• Natural link profile. You’re less likely to be hit by algorithmic penalties and, therefore, avoid sudden loss in rankings and organic traffic. 
• Establish the foundation of your website from an EEAT standpoint. Natural and profile links can help bring trust signals to new websites, enabling your site to rank your pages faster. 

My top advice if you’re outsourcing link building services is to ask for their strategies and collaborate with your team so they can creatively think of ways to publish assets that attract passive links. 

Quality of Links 

It’s obvious, but I’ve seen more marketers relying on their systems on AI. That said, it’s either making the processes more practical or they are innovating ways to improve their systems to produce better quality output. 

As an SEO consultant, brands and SEO agencies now suggest to their clients that quality matters more than quantity. Yes, it would help to deliver more links, but even with a few links in today’s SERPs, you can outrank your competitors.

4. Scale The Unscalable 

More often than not, what is easily scaled is widely used by marketers, which dilutes the strategy’s effectiveness—case in point with guest posting and infographic outreach. In 2010-2013, you can achieve a 15 to 40% conversion rate with manual outreach. But not anymore.

Invest 30 to 40% of your time to execute unscalable link building strategies. These would require intensive resources and assets from your team but would make a substantial advantage in the long term.

Some of these unscalable strategies are:

• Link earning to rank for low-competition industry-specific keywords that other content creators would use and describe when they write their content.
• Partnerships to reciprocate links for both websites- mainly cross-promote relevant linkable assets.
• Publishing external comprehensive content assets with high chances of ranking for competitive keywords using other sites’ high domain authority.

You need a full year to implement these strategies on your site consistently. But this will undoubtedly result in passive link acquisition with a flywheel effect on links and skyrocket your rankings and organic traffic. 

5. Link Building Ties in SEO Integration

Most clients we’ve helped scale their link building are integrated into the overall SEO campaigns.

Whether it is a featured-centric link development campaign for SaaS or building consistent 7 to 10 links/month for a local brick-and-mortar biz, we build links with business objectives in mind.

2024 will be a year where top brands and SEO agencies no longer care about vanity metrics in links.

Some quantifiable metrics are good for assessing domains for potential backlinks initially. But in a grander view, every link must contribute not just to the rankings.

To give you practical examples, the clients we worked with aim to: 

• Maintain local and/or national rankings for top competitive keywords 
• Get a bigger market share via organic rankings from their top pages. 
• Point links to top resource guides with internal links to similar resources (which ultimately helps build the site’s topical authority).
• Acquire mentions from top niche sites that drive referral traffic from targeted audiences.
• Target NEW product feature pages and get new customers to their all-in-one tool suite (for SaaS) 

All aim to put the brand in a better position in SERPs and their industry.

6. Power of Digital PR

Most in-house SEOs now understand the power of digital PR in driving high-authority links to the website, which helps strengthen its entire domain authority. 

We worked with clients with large amounts of customer data, allowing them to effortlessly produce highly valued assets (data visuals, interactive assets, etc.).

They use digital PR to increase the reach of their assets further. 

Ultimately, these use it to capture other regions. In one case, they want new signups from South East Asian customers.

7. National Links Drive As Much Impact As Local Links

With limited opportunities to get links on a local level, most of the links can be built from a purely relevance perspective.

SEOs would have a higher chance of landing more links and doing so at scale with the national level.

At most, the impact can be much higher to drive rankings on targeted pages.

8. Organic Rankings As A Research Tool For New Products/Services 

Through keyword research and real-time rankings for the brand, terms can now give insights into new potential services/products a brand can make.

For eCommerce, it is a great way to scale operations that fit into customers’ current demands. Diving into upfront research on what types of products or services are searchable by users – and even the specific type of product names and brands – are valuable insights for any business owner and investor engaging in SEO.