Andy says: “My tip for SEO in 2024 is to keep your optimization simple, not overcomplicate your strategy, and make sure you're hitting the basics in what is a very complicated SEO world.”

Why do you think SEOs don't do that? Is it because it's boring and not as exciting as using new-fangled tools?

“I think in SEO, we're suckers for new technology, new insights, new developments, everything new and shiny. And we've got to try it out. But you sometimes forget the basics of, for example, checking if your page has a keyword, checking if your internal linking is correct and if the metadata is optimized. You can skip that part quite easily by being distracted by those kinds of tools.”

Have the basics changed much over the last few years?

“Ah, no, here's the short answer. I think I've been in SEO for about 15 to 20 years. And really, nothing has changed in that regard. And those basics are still the ones that move the needle the best. And by basics, I mean keywords in your meta titles, keywords in the content, internal linking being correct, and site structure being correct and valid. I don't think that will change that much. Even with, you know, AI being a thing. Ultimately, those things still drive what this page is about. What is it about? What is it relevant towards another thing that will change that much?”

But the format of the page title and the length of the meta description may change slightly depending on what Google decides to list or what they're looking for. We're also seeing Google every so often, maybe displaying what they want to display from the page’s content, as opposed to using the meta description from the meta section. So, is there still much need for a handwritten meta description? Or is this something that can be automated?

“I think there still is a need for it. Ultimately, you can't control when Google will use its own discretion and come up with its own ideas. But if nine times out of ten, it will be using meta description that will generate a better click-through rate or grab attention in a search result. It's worth it. You can also test, retest, and go okay with that one page being tweaked. Why is that? Can we try a different description? See if that makes it stop doing that. Or, actually, is it okay? Are you wasting your time thinking that Google's decided that's fine? The click-through rate for that page is just as efficient as everything else. And we'll leave it and go on to bigger and better things. And I think that's another point about the efficiencies of your workflow. Is it okay? Are you better off going on to find bigger and better things? And just thinking that if everyone is doing the same thing, then it is fine, and you can leave it.”

In terms of meta descriptions, do you have any preferences in terms of the style of phrases that you happen to have in there to encourage maybe a click-through? And is there any minimum or maximum character count you recommend, for instance?

“I think with a meta description, in particular, you can use paid ad tactics when creating meta descriptions. So, use a metadata testing tool to see what your meta description will look like in a search result. Think about the fact that you've got two lines to play with. Can you make that more readable so that line one is your attention-grabbing statement and line two is your USP or selling point? You can quite easily do that. As long as you cater to your character count in a way, that means that you naturally make that second sentence drop onto that second line. And there are lots of good testing tools. For example, at Reflect Digital, we've got a SERP testing tool, so have a search for it. And it's a good way of just testing what your appearance is going to look like before it gets indexed.”

And in terms of testing, do you ever do any split testing on meta descriptions? For instance, maybe do one category on your site, something different? And then see if that has a noticeable or measurable difference in click-through rate.

“Yeah, for sure. We do that as well. But we also do split testing using behavioural as part of our messaging. So, if you're thinking about using different messaging, it might be that it's not just a case of split testing on two different meta descriptions. But what about using different phrases and different terminology? What makes somebody want to click through to it? So yeah, definitely, it's a piece of doing A/B testing as well. But it needs to be scalable, not just on one page to one page, because you've got a lot of influence there. But if you've got a site that sells a lot of different products and maybe 1000s of pages, well, yeah, can you put 500 pages with one type and another 500 with another type, you get a much better data sample and a much better analysis rather than doing one versus one.”

In terms of titles, are you a fan of using the brand name and all titles at the end of all titles? Or is that something you only include and appear on the homepage title?

“Yeah, that's an interesting one. Nowadays, Google is doing much more to show you what site this thing is by showing them maybe the logo in the results and the brand name above the listing. All the while that's happening, I think the need to have your brand name in the meta title is probably a little bit unnecessary. You could use the extra character count in your favour to think about what other keywords you can include in there or what else you can put in the meta titles. Can you put in a selling point like we offer free delivery or a free trial or something? Can you also start putting messages into your meta titles, rather than using your brand name, as a read-everything? It depends on what Google's doing. And if they changed their guidelines or how they display their search results? Maybe you want your brand name back again.”

You also say that a good strategy doesn't have to be complicated. So, what is incorporated into a good SEO strategy in 2024?

“I think ultimately, just sticking to the basics has a lot of value, and ask yourself what can you do that's going to be easy to implement, or your client makes easy for your client to implement, that will have a high impact. You wouldn't want to be moving away from those tasks until you've done all of them. So, once you've completed all of those easy-to-achieve, medium to high level of impact tasks, only then would you move onto page-specific optimization or on no backlink building or internal linking analysis or something a bit more structured and complicated, which goes back to my point of keeping SEO simple. The basics that worked 10 to 15 years ago still work today. And if you haven't applied those, don't go and make your life more complicated. Tick the boxes first, and then go and have a look at the details afterwards.”

So, how do you determine if the impact level is likely high?

“I think there are a few key indicators in terms of meta titles. One where I'd go is this page is short and has a meta title. Does it have the key wording in place? One case study we had was a client who hadn't optimized meta titles. And it was a very clear opportunity to do that. By making that change or creating keyworded template meta titles across their whole site, it was very simple to change a five-minute job to a template they had. But it meant every page, product, and category had key wording in the meta titles, for example. And year after year, that change made 62 million pounds, which is mad from a five-minute job. And I think that kind of optimization would have been missed if it went down a route of trying to do things in a more detailed manner.”

And you also mentioned internal linking towards the beginning of the episode. Do you have any preferred internal linking strategies, tactics, or structures?

“I think the first and foremost one is looking for ways to do internal linking across your whole site. So, let's say you've got a key page. Well, first of all, is it in the navigation? Is it in the footer? That should be a given. But if it's beyond that, how else can I improve internal linking to that page? Is it by adding things like breadcrumbs? Or is there a widget that exists on lots of pages where you can add a link to it, or even just doing fairly basics of searching for content on your site where you mentioned the words that are related to that page, getting links in content to that page with that resulting keyword? It happens repeatedly that sites have a lot of good content that hasn't thought about that internal linking structure. And if you compare your site to something like Wikipedia, can you apply the same sort of internal linking structure that they do every time? Well, not every time, but the first time you mentioned that topic, page, or keyword? Do you have a page for it? Can you link to it? And applying that kind of logic across your whole site is something that we see that scales well.”

And talking about scaling. If you oversee a site with 10s of 1000s of pages, is it a quick win to automate internal link building to identify where certain keyword phrases occur and automate those links? Or can that be a bit dicey in terms of usability and perhaps not selecting the right places for those links?

“Yeah, I think that's a good point. If you were to apply automation to your internal linking, it could be a quick win. You can get a lot of traction there with that. But ultimately, is that right for your users? Because it depends on the keyword as well. If your internal link for a broad match keyword, you might find that word or that phrase comes up where you didn't expect it to all, where it doesn't quite make sense contextually. I think internal linking needs to be valid to your users as much as it is to a search engine. So, does it make sense for there to be a link? There's another thing. I think in terms of scaling it, I would probably look at how you can apply internal linking sidewise and then maybe come back with the human element of does it make sense on this page, as it makes sense on that page, at least then you're getting the links in place. If you went down and were more of a human element, you might find that your progress in getting into links on the site would be quite slow. So, it’s a bit of a balancing act, I think.”

But if you're automating it, ideally, you'd identify a certain page type and a certain section within that page where to automate the link building.

“Yeah, I think the more data you've got in your hands, the more you can automate that process without having to go back and effectively troubleshoot your errors. So, the more data you can have, the better whether it's internal linking from a particular category or particular section of the site, then for sure you have, you know, you're going to be in safer ground there.”

You're focusing on the SEO basics and are concerned about too many complicated tricks and tools being used. Are there any examples of complicated tricks or tools you'd like to emphasize as something that SEOs shouldn't be focusing on now?

“I think AI and ChatGPT is for sure one where there's, for a good reason, a lot of excitement around those particular tools. They can be very powerful and strong in providing more efficient workflows, giving you ideas for content generation. But there are also many people demonstrating getting direct results from AI content. And it's not always the way. Google is very much on top of expertise, authority, and trust. These days, their algorithm updates have been around trust and helpful content updates. It can be very exciting to get into all this, ChatGPT is quite good at generating this content on the fly. It can save me my content production time. But actually, does it demonstrate the expertise, the authority, the trust that Google is looking for? And if the answer to you is maybe, it's probably not good enough. AI is something that's coming. And it's becoming better over time. But it's quite easy to use your time unwisely by getting stuck into these tools. And we might have better things to do than testing out these kinds of tools.”

Talking about tools, is there any tool you can use to automate the crawling of a website to identify where you're doing or how you're doing in terms of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust? Is there some score that you can get to identify what you can do to improve these things?

“I don't think there's necessarily a score, but there's certainly sort of a checklist of things you could have in place, depending on the page or the type of content you're producing. So, for example, if you're a publisher, do you have valid author pages? Do you demonstrate that it's written by so and so? Who also writes for various other publications? Have you got things like your schema data in place for that author to show where else this person publishes content that they are relevant, factual, experienced authors? Things like published date, when was it last modified? How can you demonstrate trust on that page? I think it is a difficult thing to give a score for because it varies depending on the topic. Suppose you're giving a review of the latest iPhone. In that case, your credentials are very different from somebody reviewing a car, for example, and maybe the things that you would want to demonstrate as part of your review process for that product might be very different and depend on the niche and by a competitor. I think it depends. But I think there's a checklist you can put in place. You could also look at e-commerce websites. That would be a very different thing altogether. Your trust factors might not be about authorship. It might be about the review count for your website. Demonstrate an active phone number and address, proper contact data, etc. So, I think trust depends on the market as to what's most relevant for the industry.”

In terms of identifying the pages that have the biggest opportunities, just simply looking at the pages that perhaps are ranking second page in the SERP that maybe have a good traffic driving opportunity, if you did get onto the first page and seeing what you can do to optimize that for it.

“I think, to an extent, there are always opportunities with those. When keywords are on the second page or towards the bottom of the first page, some of those things might be trusted. It also could be simple things like metadata content internal linking your basics. I think it's important in any industry to keep on top of what your competitors are doing well. Google drives towards expertise, authority, trust, helpful content, etc. All the time. So what can you be doing to demonstrate your authoritativeness? Is putting together user guides, helpful guides, and videos and just displaying your contact details and your reviews better? What can you be doing that gives you a leg up on your competition? Because ultimately, Google is moving more in favour of that. The more you can do, the better. And if you can apply something, that means you're improving your trustworthiness across your entire site, not just on that one product, but across all your product templates or category templates. So, you're going to see your blog article templates again across the whole site. I think it's a case of keeping on top of the competition and staying ahead.”

And in terms of staying ahead, there are so many new tools and tactics that you could be trying. How do you know who to listen to, what to listen to, and what you should be doing versus what you should be scrubbing and ignoring?

“I think the easiest way is to do some Google searches yourself, see what comes up as a lot of tools out there that will aggregate data and give you an idea of roughly who's competitive in your market. So, for example, a Semrush or Ahrefs competitor tool is very good for giving that idea of who is in your market and who's doing well. But sometimes, just getting down and dirty, searching the terms you're trying to compete with. What content is displayed there, and why? What are they doing differently to you? What do they answer that you don't? Sometimes, the simplest way is to look at that and analyze out of those ten listings on that first result. Why is that there? Why aren't we there? What are we doing differently? Or rather, what are we not doing that prevents us from being displayed on the first page?”

You've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. So, what's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I think we've touched on it a little bit already. But we'll be getting stuck into AI content too much now. I have been trying to get AI content and scalability in place for some particular clients where there may be 100s of category pages needing content or 1000s of contributors needing content. Getting AI to write all that category copy for you can be very enticing. But you'll often find those limitations there, where it's using the same sort of terminology, the same descriptions, the same adjectives, and so on in the same sort of structure. As an SEO, I’d be very wary of whether that content is similar and easy to replicate from my competitors. What's the benefit for my site and my users? And is it easy to detect? Ultimately, if it's obvious to me that it's AI-produced content, people will know the same thing. And at that point, if your competitor can do the same job as you, you're not doing anything better than they are doing. For me, it's a case of if you're going to use AI content, use it properly. What prompts can you put in place to ensure your content is unique? And if you're going to scale it across 100s of categories, pages, or whatever you're looking to do, it helps ensure that your prompts are varied enough. That means that your content is different enough across different pages. But it's just a little bit not quite there yet. For me, AI content generation is exciting. And people, I'm sure, are spending a lot of time digging into it. But that a lot of time digging into it could be good at being better used in terms of, like we're saying, talking about demonstrating your trust page on your website, what can you do actually to help your end users? And I don't think AI content is necessarily the way to do that just yet.”

Andy Mollison is head of SEO at Reflect Digital. You can find him at reflectdigital.co.uk.