The most important SEO factors in 2024

Search engine optimisation is an ever-changing game, and search ranking factors change over time with Google’s algorithm. There are over 200 Google search ranking factors and also other search engines but due to Google’s authority, we’ll just be focusing on Google in this blog.

1. High-quality, helpful content

It’s no secret that “content is king”. Google loves original, unique, valuable, up-to-date, helpful content.

But what exactly is good content and how does Google measure it?

Original and valuable content

Original content is crucial for your SEO success. Google prioritises unique content that meets your audience's needs and offers value. Duplicate or overly similar content can harm your SEO efforts and may result in Google penalising your website, and you don’t want that!

You should strive to produce content that stands out from your competitors. Content that provides better information and is easy to read will capture browsers on your site. If you focus on creating more helpful content than competitors' pages, you can improve your website’s visibility and search ranking results.

2. Keyword optimisation

Keywords play a critical role in SEO success. We know that keywords should either match or be closely related to your users' search terms. You must also understand search intent and how to do keyword research and monitoring. 

Here are some tips on how we perform keyword optimisation at BA:

• Title tags - Include your target or relevant keyword in your title tags 
• Meta description - The same goes here, ensure that you have used relevant keywords
• Image alt text - Don’t forget to add keywords in the image alt text. This gives Google more context on your content and contributes to search rankings. 
• Do not keyword stuff - keyword stuff refers to stuffing keywords for the sake of it. Make sure that your content is written and created as human-centric as possible. 

Keyword optimisation heavily relates to creating good highly content and is an important step you must not ignore. 

3. Backlinks & domain authority

There are three pillars of SEO: on-page, off-page and technical SEO. Each of these 3 pillars contains areas that they cover. Backlinks is one of them!

Backlinks are links on other websites that point to yours. This gives you sweet, sweet site authority. Google loves authoritative, trustworthy websites.

Brand-new businesses typically don’t have a lot of backlinks. This is why it’s typical for your site not to show up as the first result for brand search immediately. You’ll need to build your backlinks over time.

4. Website speed

The speed of your website remains more important than ever. Unsure how fast your site is? Get a free check using Google’s Page Speed Insights feature. A lot of our SEO work goes into optimising new sites for mobile speed because that’s what Google cares about these days.

If you’re a web client of ours and you’ve noticed a slow mobile speed on your Page Speed report, you may be thinking “What gives, BA?”

Before you panic - check your website for the three main factors that drag down our clients’ site speed after launch:

Apps

Shopify has gazillions of easy-to-install apps that make your website amazing. The downside is that these can easily add tons of script to your site, weighing down its speed and damaging your search rankings (not to mention your landing page quality for any Google ads you might have running). We recommend keeping the bare minimum amount of apps and removing those you don’t use regularly. WordPress and BigCommerce clients, the same goes for you - check your apps and plugins!

Videos

They look cool, but they’re huge. By compressing and embedding videos, you can preserve your site speed. Those options are more user friendly but there are options you can have your web development team support you with, like lazy-loading the videos.

PNG images

A lot of our clients love using PNG images on their homepage heroes and their blogs. PNGs are super high-quality images, primarily because they are truly massive files.

We’ve coded most of our sites to convert PNG images into the more web-friendly WebP format, but this only compresses image sizes down a little. If you want to upload beautiful imagery without impacting your site performance, we highly recommend uploading pre-compressed JPG images instead. Use sites like ImageCompressor.com for easy compressing ahead of upload.

5. Mobile Friendliness

So you have a great, fast and responsive website but does it perform as intended when used on mobile devices? According to DataReportal, there was a total of 33.59 million active mobile connections in early 2024, an equivalent of 126.4% of the total population. This data not only emphasises the vast usage of mobile devices but also supports the requirement to adopt mobile-first thinking and design. 

Mobile friendliness and mobile-first design mean that you emphasise mobile over desktop. To ensure SEO success, your mobile websites must be as good as your desktop. This includes other devices such as iPads, tablets as well as smaller laptops.

6. Overall (on-page) user experience

Your website’s user experience (UX) is a large factor that can be what will make or break you making a sale. 

• Site speed (obviously!)
• Your organic click-through rate
• Your bounce rate measures if your customers are clicking away after only looking at one page. Don’t freak out if your bounce rate is 50% - that’s a pretty normal figure. Something over 75% is something to worry about.
• The time spent on your site. If your customers are engaged by your content on a page, Google will see this as an incentive to rank you higher in the SERPs.

Anything you can do to keep a browser engaged with your website, the higher the conversion rate. Check out our blog on 5 key elements of good UX here.

7. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a wide term used to categorise the technical and development side of SEO.

Tech SEO includes but is not limited to: 

• Headings and subheadings. Are you using H1s, H2s and H3s in the proper silo format?
• Ensuring your title tags and meta descriptions contain your target keywords
• Ensuring your images have alt tags to ensure accessibility for people using screen readers
• Make sure your pages don’t have duplicate content
• Resolving 404 errors
• Fixing orphan pages (pages that aren’t linked to anywhere else on your site)

These are just some of the factors within technical SEO. Technical SEO, like SEO in general, can be a deep rabbit hole. Addressing technical SEO issues can be quite complicated if you aren’t familiar with basic HTML, CSS or even just working in the admin dashboard of a website. 

This begs the question, “When does technical SEO become development and when does development become technical SEO”. With that being said, effective collaboration between SEO specialists and developers is required to confidently and efficiently tackle technical SEO issues. 

What now?

SEO is a beast of its own and there’s no denying it. If you’re interested check out our blog on optimising your product page for SEO here. 

But if you’re still having trouble with your SEO efforts, BA can help. Reach out to enquire about our SEO services!