SEO Experiments 2024: 3 Tests You Can Try to Boost Your Rankings

Transcript: New year, new SEO strategy! 2024 is the year of SEO experiments.  There have been a lot of changes regarding SEO and Google over the last few years, heck even in the last year. And it’s important for your business to keep up with them.  In this video, I’ll lay out some SEO updates from the past year and give you examples of SEO experiments you can try for 2024. 

Google BERT

The big Google update of the year was Google’s BERT algorithm update.

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.  A simple explanation is that BERT helps Google better understand the intent behind whatever you search. This means you should write content for people, not search engines—which you really should have been doing anyway. So here’s what you can try if you weren’t already writing content for people. 

SEO Experiment 1: 

1. Go through the content on your website and find anything that doesn’t read naturally or conversationally. Or even content that doesn’t make a lot of sense if it appears in the search results for the keyword you’re targeting.
2. Change the language to be more conversational and less focused on your main keyword. Try using LSI keywords, which are keywords related to your topic that help Google understand what your content is about. 
3. Measure the page’s performance over a month.
4. If you notice a boost in rankings, try to do this with other pages that need help. 

Video Marketing

If you thought 2022 was all about video, you’re about to be surprised. 2024 is EVEN MORE focused on video in your marketing strategy.  Here’s a fact: YouTube is a big purchase driver. A platform dedicated entirely to video is helping people make buying decisions.

People want to watch videos and be led down the buying funnel.  Here’s another fact: Video can help drive traffic to your website.  This is a page’s traffic without video.  This is that same page’s traffic after a video was added.  Video can also increase the time people spend on your site’s pages, helping give you that coveted boost in the search engine results. 

SEO Experiment 2:  

1. Find a page on your website that gets a moderate amount of traffic. 
2. Write up a quick script or talking points highlighting the important ideas on the page. 
3. Record a video with your phone or a camera using the script you wrote. It doesn’t have to be the greatest piece of cinema ever created, but just make sure the video is in focus, your points are cohesive, and there’s not a lot of distracting background noise. Check out some more video production tips on our blog. 
4. Embed your video on the page. You can use hosting platforms like YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo when you upload the video so your video doesn’t slow down your site. 
5. Wait a few months and see if your rankings and traffic have increased. 
   1. You can also run an A/B test so you can compare the traffic with and without the video in the same time period.

If you see an increase in traffic, try implementing this strategy on other pages. You can play with different elements like the video length, the script, the talent, the thumbnail and more if you continue to use video.

Voice Search

How many times have you asked your Siri, Alexa, or Google to answer a question for you? Voice search is a tool that isn’t going away anytime soon, so it’s important that your website is optimized for it.  About three-quarters of the answers you get from voice search come from the first three results of that search, so being at the top matters a lot to your business.  Getting your page in a featured snippet is a great tactic when optimizing for voice search (and also when trying to get more traffic to your site). One way to do this is to focus on answering a question. 

SEO Experiment 3:

1. Choose an informational page on your website that would benefit from a question and answer format.
2. Separate it into sections featuring a heading with your question, followed by an answer to the question. 
3. Measure your site’s traffic a few months after making the changes to see if it increases.
4. Repeat this for other pages if you notice an increase. 

There are other factors that matter when optimizing for a featured snippet, like keywords and the difficulty of ranking for those keywords. Check out our list on our website.  Are there any SEO experiments you’re excited to try in 2024? We’d love to hear about them. If you need help trying any SEO experiments, our experts are happy to jump in.  And we’d also be so happy if you’d subscribe to our YouTube channel and read our blog for even more digital marketing content.  We’ll see you soon!