Come light some sparklers with us for a great 2024!

Moz’s Marketing Scientist, Dr. Peter J. Meyers, SEO Scientist, Tom Capper, Local Search Scientist, Miriam Ellis, Senior Content Marketing Manager, Chima Mmeje, and Director of Brand Marketing, Joelle Irvine bring you their predictions for what to expect in the year ahead in SEO and marketing.

We’re talking search, AI, sustainability, economics, SERP features, and more in this insight-packed post to prepare you for success in the year ahead!

Generative AI arms race

The fate of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is top of mind for many SEOs, but there's a broader impact of generative AI in search that we're already feeling, and this will likely hit critical mass in 2024.

Generative AI has made large-scale content generation more accessible than ever, and companies are already exploiting it to churn out massive amounts of long-tail content. Unfortunately, much of this content has quality issues, prompting (no pun intended) Google to take action. I believe we've already seen some of this response in Google's recent Helpful Content Updates and back-to-back October and November Core Updates.

Of course, this has led to tools to make machine-generated content look less machine-generated, and now we're well on our way to an arms race, with machines generating content, machines trying to detect generated content, and machines trying to thwart the machines trying to detect the content, ad absurdum.

Google has already pivoted to treating this as a quality issue — in other words, it's not machine-generated content that's the problem, but the low-quality mass content it tends to produce. The upshot is that Google will be forced to raise the quality bar, but measuring "quality" algorithmically isn't easy, and so the higher they raise the bar, the more collateral damage there's likely to be.

When spammers were confined to the limits of human productivity, this balance was imperfect but at least theoretically attainable. Now that any human with a browser can generate dozens of pieces of content per day and a human with a bit of API knowledge can generate hundreds of pieces, the arms race is accelerating dramatically.

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter whether you choose to use generative AI or not — all of us will be caught up in this conflict in 2024.

UGC = User-Generated Chaos

One solution Google seems to be contemplating is relying more on direct human feedback, including the recent launch (in Google Labs) of Notes in search results. So, any result might end up with dozens or hundreds of user-generated comments.

While I understand the motivation, it's hard to see how this will ultimately create anything but noise, especially as these systems are gamed and have to be regulated, and we have an entirely new layer of Google algorithm updates.

People will undoubtedly begin to apply machine-generated content to the comments layer as well, until we've gone full Inception with our nonsense. This is a road to chaos, and we'll be driving along it or straight off of it next year.

Personalization & Discovery

Google is also looking to make results more personalized in a way that sounds reminiscent of Google Discover. Essentially, we'll be able to subscribe to topics, and those topics, plus our own preferences for particular sites (and brands), will begin to shape our search results.

This is clearly a direction people are already heading and reveals Google's concerns over an explosion in queries like "Reddit + [topic]." Unfortunately, especially given the seemingly lower quality bar on Google Discover — an arguably natural trade-off of trying to reveal more targeted and timely content — I’m very skeptical that large-scale personalization will improve the quality of search results. Naturally, for us SEOs, this will also make tracking what people are seeing harder.

I suspect that Google will approach this problem gradually, but we should all be more aware of Discover-style content in 2024 and how it creeps into search results.

The biggest source of SEO uncertainty for me going into 2023 is what happens with Google’s “Search Generative Experience” — the new AI-written snippets are currently only shown to “lab” accounts in a handful of countries. As these currently stand in their test version, they dominate the SERPs, and many businesses are concerned about the traffic impact of a wider rollout.

The US test is scheduled to end at the end of 2023, so we’ll find out soon whether Google will extend the test, launch a live feature, or pretend this never happened. My prediction, though, is that whatever does eventually get rolled out will be less aggressive than the version currently being tested.

Bing has already been on a similar journey — they rolled out their generative AI snippets to the masses early this year, initially dominating the top of many or even most SERPs, much like Google’s SGE SERP. But, if you go and look at a Bing SERP now, these snippets are relegated far down the SERP and often not present at all. Bing has figured out that these snippets — which in terms of quality are at least as good as Google’s — were not serving their user's goals, or perhaps Bing’s own.

The fact is that generative AI is not the right answer to every question, and I expect Google’s final answer to reflect that reality. That said, just as you’d no longer bother to try to make a page to rank for queries like “weather” or “what is the capital of Germany?” because you know a Google SERP feature would quickly answer that, SEOs should expect that another layer of low-effort, low-intent keywords will become a waste of time to rank for.

Adapt your strategy accordingly!

I have one prediction and one tip for marketing local businesses in the year ahead. First, please take a look at this graphic summarizing the factors that are strongly believed to influence search engine rankings in general:

No surprises here for anyone who has been working to earn high organic SERP visibility for any type of business, whether local or virtual. Your off-page, on-page, and technical SEO practices all combine to support being discovered and indexed by entities like Google and found and chosen by customers online. Meanwhile, local SEO adds other factors to this list to build a strong strategy for achieving high and broad local pack rankings, such as:

• Google Business Profile factors (such as the business name, URL, and categories)

• Review factors (such as count, recency, diversity, authority, and format)

• Citation factors (such as accuracy, distribution, quality, and relevance)

• Personalization factors (notably searcher-to-business proximity)

• Managing negative factors (such as listing and review spam and guideline violations)

All of the above concepts are pretty widely accepted as forming the general picture of how you optimize and market a local business online. However, I think we’re reaching an inflection point in SEO in understanding the individuality of SERPs and searcher behavior. I’ll go so far as to claim that local SEO is the bellwether for the entire SEO industry when it comes to this because we’ve seen the most personalization in our corner of the web, with Google heavily localizing results based on user location and perceived intent.

My prediction for 2024

In the year ahead, I predict that the entire SEO industry is going to reach a strong point of maturation towards understanding that, while knowing general ranking factors, trending stats, and best practices still matters, you’ve got to see the SERPs your audience sees to build your marketing plan these days. Both the organic and local SERPs are full of so many forms of content at this point for every possible keyword variation that you’ve got to study your own SERPs to draw any real conclusion about whether to focus on specific areas of your local listings, website content, videos, images, featured snippets, tools, social media, or what have you. It doesn’t really matter what’s working for someone else. You’ve got to figure out what’s working for you and your customers in 2024.

My tip for 2024

Next up is my tip for 2024. Multiple entities are naming sustainability as a top 10 business trend for the new year while also predicting that the public will get better at spotting greenwashing as we move forward.

Is there a town or city left anywhere in the world at this point that isn’t already experiencing the floods, fires, or other disasters of Climate Change brought to us by the fossil fuel industry? You’re already seeing how this is disrupting life and business in your community, and my best advice for local brands in 2024 is to:

1. Learn about local sustainability.

2. Green your supply chain and operations as much as possible and focus on featuring as many locally-produced products as you can.

3. Go all-in on marketing what you are doing and why it matters to your community. Your vocal stance can inspire change in others. Be totally fearless in connecting the dots between fossil fuel use and local climate disasters, and promote all of the sustainability efforts your business is engaging in via your:

• Core website content

• Local business listing features like Google updates, Q&A, images, videos, and descriptions

• Social channels, including text, image, and video media

• Email marketing

• Direct conversation with customers

Local business owners typically live where they do business, and there is no better fit than showing how much you care about your own community by explaining what your company is doing to transition off fossil fuels.

Wishing you success in this and in all your local ventures in the year ahead!

More job cuts as AI adoption increases

2023 marked a turning point in the marketing industry, with notable job cuts across leading tech companies. Google laid off 12,000 employees, Salesforce trimmed its workforce by 7,000, Microsoft eliminated 10,000 jobs, and Meta followed suit with layoffs impacting around 6,000 staff members.

While it’s not the only reason, it’s interesting that these mass layoffs coincided with an accelerated adoption of AI tools.

As AI continues to evolve, I suspect we’ll see more job cuts in 2024, primarily due to two reasons:

• Increased personalization with generative AI

• Increased efficiency in automation

AI's ability to analyze vast data sets, understand consumer behavior, and automate complex tasks means it can perform many marketing functions more efficiently than humans. As these tools become more adept at tasks like content creation, customer segmentation, and predictive analytics, the need for large marketing teams may decrease, leading to further job reductions.

Scrappy marketing is back in play

With budgets tightening, marketing strategies might become more scrappy. The emphasis will be on initiatives that require minimal effort yet deliver substantial results.

What can you do?

• Focus on showing the return on investment for your campaigns. This involves understanding which strategies are most effective with the least investment.

• Evaluate current marketing practices and find more efficient ways. This could mean consolidating tools, focusing on high-impact channels, or adopting cost-effective tactics.

• Decisions should be data-backed and aligned with business goals. You need to justify your choices and demonstrate their contribution to the bottom line.

Increased AI adoption to close budget gaps

I expect AI to play a role in bridging the gaps created by budget cuts and reduced team sizes.

What can you do?

• Identify which areas of your strategy benefit most from AI, such as predictive analytics, automating routine tasks, or enhancing customer insights.

• Maintaining content quality is vital when integrating AI. It should augment human creativity, ensuring content showcases expertise and achieves your goals.

• Train your team to work more effectively with AI tools and understand their capabilities and limitations. This is very important if fewer people do more tasks due to layoffs. The more employees can work with AI to automate marketing functions, the more efficiency you’ll see.

Hyper-personalization will save the day

Hyper-personalization will emerge as a key trend in content marketing. AI's capability to analyze big data will enable marketers to create highly personalized content that resonates with niche audiences. I anticipate this approach will yield greater impact in an increasingly saturated market, helping brands to stand out and connect more deeply with their target audiences.

What can you do?

• Use AI to analyze data and identify unique customer preferences and behaviors for more targeted content.

• Focus on understanding and engaging niche markets for better engagement and conversion rates.

• Use AI tools that learn from interactions and feedback, allowing content and strategies to evolve based on user engagement.

Let me start by saying, WOW! What a year?! So many AI headlines in our SEO digital rags. So many tea, popcorn, and alligator emojis used over Verge articles and Board meetings gone wrong. We probably don’t even recall all the failed attempts at Twitter X replacements and Yandex leaks.

So, as we approach 2024, what do I see in my proverbial crystal ball? Many fast and lean companies that don’t have SEO/content teams creating noise with AI content, Google and Bing finding creative ways to surface things not written by a bot, and SEOs working toward adapting to the new reality.

But what does that look like? How will we, as SEOs and marketers, be able to create and optimize content in a sea of AI-generated text?

More authentic videos everywhere

There’s a growing cohort of consumers who rely on video for discovery, research, and making purchase decisions. But not any kind of video will do. Authentic stories, tips from experts, reviews/unboxing from users, and, of course, entertainment.

I see more of this being surfaced by Google in SERPs, video search, shopping, YouTube, and AI-generated results. Not only to push the AI content out of sight but also to build trust and attract a younger audience that may be more inclined to search on TikTok or Instagram.

How to get ready: Think about how to bring your video content to life with E-E-A-T. Focus on creating bite-sized videos to tell real stories and answer audience questions, encourage customers to create useful videos about products, partner with micro or nano-influencers. Provide creators with tools and guides to support them with on-brand productions. Leverage this content in blogs, on social media, and on product pages when it makes sense. The idea is to create once and share many times on multiple surfaces and platforms.

More UGC and community-style content

Google announced in November that they would be surfacing more personal insights and experiences from social media, blogs, and forums, and also adjusted their rater guidelines to provide guidance around content for these “hidden gems.”

With this in mind, I see growth-minded marketers finding nimble ways to test, learn, and optimize by surfacing content from existing communities or events.

How to get ready: Take the time to test before diving in. Look for low-effort, high-impact opportunities. To start, is there an existing community where your audience lives already? Could you leverage content from there? Could you partner with them in some way? Alternatively, if you host webinars or events, can you capture user feedback or videos there? If you run an e-commerce shop, can you incentivize customers to leave video reviews, share explainer videos, or at least a photo with their feedback? Getting customers and audience members to share their experiences is a fantastic way to build brand trust and advocacy and potentially get more exposure in search results.

Continuous shifts in SERP features

We’ve seen a lot of change over the last decade, and with SGE and Bing surfacing AI-generated results, it doesn’t appear that it will slow down anytime soon. This year, expect to see a lot of testing in the SERPs. Google and Bing will be finding ways to serve up better results and experiences to benefit searchers, brands, site owners, and advertisers.

Expect to see a higher percentage of no-click results with sources for informational searches, more experiential results like augmented reality for education and e-commerce, simplified paths to conversion by surfacing even more product information directly in the SERPs for transactional queries in both traditional and AI-generated results, and new advertising opportunities in the chat results.

If I take it a step further, I could see Google surfacing AI-generated search features directly in their Android mobile message app to help their users get answers and make purchases directly in-app.

How to get ready: Keep an eye on MozCast to see how SERP features evolve over time. As things evolve, consider where to incorporate Schema markup on your site to maximize inclusion in featured snippets, other SERP features, and potentially in AI-generated responses. For e-commerce, take advantage of the Google Merchant Center integration and make sure your feed is up-to-date. With no-click results, think about how to measure success. Site traffic may decline, but with the right strategy, structured data set up, and a smooth path to purchase, conversions directly from search have the potential to rise.

The “his” in Andy Simpson’s tweet is, of course, Google’s Danny Sullivan, who reportedly made this statement at an event in mid-November. If you’re a glass-half-empty kind of SEO or marketer, pronouncements like this can feel alarming when coupled with economic pressures. If you tend to see your glass as half full of the beverage of your choice and have developed an agility when faced with alterations, you may be the one who sees new, exciting opportunities in new circumstances.

There are two things you can definitely count on as we glide into 2024: change is to be expected, and you can expect this blog to be here to help you create strategy out of novel developments.

Everyone here at Moz is wishing you huge success in the year ahead!