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“Content is king” has held true in digital marketing since it was first declared over a decade ago and continues to be fundamental to any effective SEO strategy in 2024. Blog content helps retailers build incredible brand and opportunity awareness for their audiences, but more importantly, it’s a great tool for organic SEO. Short articles stuffed with keywords no longer rank in search engines — Google’s new algorithm penalizes poor content.
Now, Google has introduced a new search generative experience (SGE), using generative AI to improve search results. The framework allows users to ask more complex and descriptive questions and refine searches with conversational, follow up queries.
During the pandemic, online shopping became the norm, a trend that continues to persist. Shoppers tunneled through record numbers of website pages to absorb content, and Google launched core updates to its search engine accordingly to help ensure users found higher quality content. As a result, the websites that saw the best organic SEO boosts created high-quality, long form content for their visitors, not the search engines.
People-first content strategies are focused first on the reader. Quality, language, and engagement are all vital components of a people-first content strategy. This longer content keeps a reader engaged and helps your website’s performance. The best way to create people-first content is to use headings to break up sections, keep each section 300 words or less, and add multimedia where relevant.
People-centered content is also more helpful to Google’s SGE learning model, which will help it rank higher under their new algorithm.
Although Google’s new algorithm can help users find relevant content without typing exact keywords, your content still needs a purpose. Make a desirable keyword central to your content creation process.
Identify a target keyword and include it at the top of the introduction to let Google know what this article is about. However, don’t stuff the keyword into the first sentence if it doesn’t flow naturally. Remember that Google wants to find content that readers would gravitate to naturally.
One prominent retail SEO trend in 2024 involves enhancing content and search results by prioritizing semantic keywords closely related to your target keyword(s). For example, if you write about coffee tables, a target keyword for your article may be “how to choose the right coffee table,” while some semantic keywords might be “wood coffee table,” “glass coffee table,” and “coffee table books.” These supporting actors to your main keywords give search engines more context around what your article or page is about.
Using semantic phrases in your content and around your target keyword will give Google and the companies who want to link to your article, related content, or queries. The more information you can give Google about your content through these SEO best practices, the more likely you will get listed higher in the search results than someone who skips the semantic keywords.
Remember that Google aims to provide users with the most relevant content on the search results page. The more you focus on clearly defining your content’s purpose and gauging its popularity among users, the better your overall performance will be.
Local search continues to increase in value for retail in 2024. Almost one-third of daily searches on Google are local. The pandemic only increased the importance of local search because of its stay-at-home restrictions, and many shoppers maintain their digital-first habits even after restrictions have been lifted.
Local search will be critical for many players in 2024, especially for retailers expecting to launch or improve their ecommerce channels. This new extended aisle online showroom needs to target the local shoppers who need the product on that digital aisle. Here are a few points you should cover in your digital marketing plan:
Website content is more than just the products on your pages; it’s about every page on your website that a user could find in searching Google or browsing the internet. The more optimized your website is for local shoppers, the better your chances are of appearing in those local search results.
Local website content means tailoring your content to the local shoppers and what is important to the community around you, including local events or features. Write about the products that match what they’re interested in. The more you write local content, the better your business looks to Google.
A Google Business Profile is a critical element of your local SEO strategy for 2024. SEO trends for retail show local business profiles like Google’s will be top drivers of search traffic and customers. Retailers with a brick-and-mortar showroom need to optimize for their local shoppers by claiming and updating their Google Business Profile and its many features to get more attention. Some of the key features you need to employ in 2024 are adding:
The Google Local Pack is a feature on the search engine results page (SERP) that displays a map and highlights a curated selection of nearby businesses related to the search query. For example, if a shopper searches for a furniture store, one of the top sections will feature a map and three organic Google Business Profiles.
When shoppers search on mobile or desktop using Google, the top three businesses in this section receive nearly 50% of all clicks in local searches. Conversions increase dramatically if these companies have an updated Google Business Profile with a brief description, physical address, average prices, business hours, ratings, and more.
The best way to improve local SEO for furniture retailer rankings in 2024 is to target locally relevant keywords. This goes beyond merely tagging on the name of your town or city onto a keyword — it’s about finding products and services that shoppers in your area are searching for. Tools like SEMRush, Moz, and Google Keyword Planner can help you find trending keywords in your region and analyze their search volume, competition, and keyword variations. Another way to find locally relevant SEO keywords is to explore competitor websites and Google’s autocomplete suggestions for insights into what shoppers are searching for. Remember to incorporate the keywords you discover into your website copy and Google Business Profile.
According to Google, mobile-first indexing means “Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content in your website for indexing and ranking your website.”
After seven years, Google announced at the end of 2023 that their mobile-first indexing effort was complete — making mobile website optimization a top priority and SEO trend for 2024.
A responsive website means the same content is available on a mobile device as the desktop. But for the many retail websites that have essentially two versions of their website for different devices, this could be catastrophic. Google’s mobile-first indexing will only focus on the mobile version of your website.
Many mobile-first websites are trimmed down versions of the desktop site, with fewer images and less text. But in this new update by Google, all of the great optimizations you’ve done on the desktop website will be useless in the search results. This is because Google now exclusively considers the text, images, and pages present on the mobile version of your website. For many websites, that could be a dramatic decrease in ranking opportunities.
If your website is not mobile-friendly in 2024, check with Google’s free tools to see what could be missing. You can also reach out to MicroD to assess your furniture retail website’s mobile-friendliness. This SEO trend for 2024 is more technical than most but a few of the features in our next trend will help you achieve better mobile-first indexing results.
A top SEO trend in 2024 isn’t just the increased use of mobile search — but how shoppers use their mobile devices to search. Voice search allows shoppers to search for products simply by speaking rather than typing their queries. The technology utilizes voice recognition software to understand and respond to spoken commands or questions and then immediately provides spoken or text-based responses, depending on the device being used.
In 2022, half of all U.S. consumers said they used voice search every day — and experts think these numbers have only grown since the last study, particularly as smart speakers have become more popular. It’s critical for retailers to optimize for voice search by tailoring their digital content to match the conversational, natural language queries that users typically employ with voice-activated tech. This will help enhance visibility and stay relevant in a world where voice search is becoming a primary means of accessing information and shopping.
Google’s search generative experience extends beyond web browsers; it is seamlessly integrated into mobile and voice search as well. Keep the new AI SEO best practices outlined above in mind as you optimize your content for these two search channels. Generative AI has the potential to improve user search experience even more than just voice and mobile capabilities, so retailers that really optimize for this landscape have the chance to gain considerable digital market share.
Google’s Core Web Vitals will look at different points of page speed performance, breaking it down into both mobile and desktop results, including:
One of Google’s helpful tools to measure page speed at the basic level is its Pagespeed Insights tool. It’s important to work with your website developers to review your Google Search Console to identify these reports and what you can do to resolve some of the bigger red marks. Google Web Core Vitals will be important for your website in 2024 so make the trend part of your retail strategy today.
We’ve explored a lot of SEO trends for retail in 2024. Given that best practices for these digital marketing tactics are ever-evolving, this serves as just the starting point for your retail website. Take a deep dive with your digital marketing expert to find which trends you’re already doing well and what areas you need to improve. If the pandemic taught retailers anything, it’s that agility and flexibility are important. It’s imperative to remain educated, consistently monitor your data and analytics, and stay informed about the Google trends emerging in 2024. By subscribing to our blog, we’ll continue to provide you with additional best practices in SEO for furniture retailers.
