Understanding Google’s March 2024 Update:
Google’s March 2024 update aimed to prioritise high-quality, credible content while penalising low-quality, spammy content. It strongly emphasised factors such as expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) to ensure that users are presented with accurate and reliable information in search results.
Considering this new set of rules, there are some key strategies for ranking articles:
- E-A-T Optimisation: Focus on optimising your content to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness within your niche. This involves showcasing credentials, knowledge and relevant experience in the content and author bio. Including an author, bio creates authority and credibility, while adding sources at the bottom of the content improves trustworthiness. We should consider articles online as serious as articles in any specialised magazine.
- Content Quality: Prioritise creating high-quality, valuable content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience. Conduct thorough research, provide comprehensive information, and ensure accuracy and relevance in your articles. We need to be able to provide usable content, not just create texts to fill a certain quota. The content should include answers to specific questions in the area or topic discussed to enrich the message by creating a profound and broad knowledge base for the user.
- User Experience (UX): Enhance the user experience of your article by improving your website page load times, mobile responsiveness, and overall usability. A seamless and intuitive browsing experience contributes to higher user engagement and satisfaction. Also, a table of contents is a great way to improve your article score and make internal navigation easier.
- Semantic SEO: Adopt semantic SEO strategies to align with Google’s evolving understanding of search queries and user intent. Use natural language, semantic markup, and contextual relevance to optimise your content for semantic search. Google is becoming increasingly case-sensitive, and by taking a human approach to the topic discussed in the article, we can improve our chances of generating impressions and clicks.
- Backlink Profile: Build a diverse and authoritative backlink profile by earning links from reputable and relevant websites. Focus on acquiring natural, editorially earned links through content quality and outreach efforts. When using external sources in your article, ensure to include links and contact the source owners to secure backlinks. According to Google Directives, the most crucial thing regarding backlinks is to have a natural source and avoid using link farms, as these practices can be penalised. For example, if you are writing an article about pottery, you can create a segment of this article dedicated to a particular brand, type or technique, then reach out to a business or artist related to this topic and try to gain a backlink from their site. Suppose your article creates a positive image for the receiver; gaining a positive and organic link from their site is entirely possible, which is much more valued than 100 backlinks from a link farm in another country.
- Engagement Signals: Increase user engagement signals such as click-through rate (CTR), dwell time, and social shares by crafting compelling titles, meta descriptions, and content. Encourage reader interaction through thought-provoking questions, polls, and comments. Improve the integration with social media and the possibility to share and engage from different platforms.
- Multimedia Integration: Incorporate multimedia elements such as images, videos, and infographics to enhance your content’s visual appeal and comprehensibility. Multimedia content enriches the user experience and encourages longer dwell times, defined as the time the user spends in the search result before returning to the search engine. These resources also help with effort indicators, defined as how much “love” you put into your content. Also, diverse-adaptive content will be increasingly important in the coming months as platforms like TikTok become their search engine, and Gen Z uses a different approach to the classic purchase funnel.
- AI-Generated Content: Do not rely solely on self-generated content. You can still use AI, but the information must be factually correct and have the required sources. Your content needs to be original, accurate, and helpful. Utilise AI for guidance rather than producing copy to copy and paste. If you use ChatGPT to write content without auditing it, you can first publish content emanating from AI hallucination, and this content will be penalised, as we have seen in many examples during the last weeks.
Implementing a Holistic SEO Strategy:
To effectively rank articles following Google’s March 2024 update, adopting a holistic SEO strategy that encompasses on-page optimisation, technical SEO, and off-page factors is crucial. Conducted comprehensive keyword research, optimised on-page elements such as titles, headings, and meta descriptions, and optimised technical aspects such as site speed and mobile-friendliness.
Additionally, prioritise creating authoritative and comprehensive content that fulfils user intent and addresses relevant topics within your niche. Leverage structured data markup to enhance search engine visibility and improve the presentation of your content in search results.
All this must be supported by high-authority backlinks generated by the quality of our content, whether spontaneously or through outreach campaigns.
Navigating Google’s algorithm updates requires a proactive approach and a commitment to delivering high-quality, user-centric content. By implementing the strategies outlined in this guide and staying abreast of future updates and industry trends, you can position your articles for success in search engine rankings. Remember to prioritise E-A-T, content quality, user experience, and holistic SEO practices to achieve sustainable and long-term results in the ever-evolving landscape of SEO.
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Most Common questions about the Google’s March 2024 Core Update
E.E.A.T. is an acronym used to define how Google locates a site depending on its score according to several metrics.
These four letters apply in the following form:
Experience:
As the content of the site contains information that is produced by someone in control of the topic presented. This can be done with study cases and examples applied to the menu.
Expertise:
This metric requires that the content of our content be given real and proven data, with constraints from external studies that can validate the content. Furthermore, this message must be thought of in a holistic manner, taking into account the different ramifications that bring greater value to the content of our article.
Authority:
This term requires demonstrating that the person writing has the knowledge and ability to demonstrate that you can get a valid message. To do this, we use the author's personal links to additional knowledge sources, tables, external articles, portfolios, social records that demonstrate professionalism, curriculum or pages specific to the author.
Trust:
To achieve points based on trust, we must try a secure platform, without links to low-quality content or pop-ups to external sources, but also, it is important to obtain backlinks from high-reputation sources, to give validity to the message It is important to receive peer validation, increasing the solidity of the message.
The response to this request will cover the entirety of this update. Google will penalize content that does not serve the purpose of providing value, to the point of being spam, with the sole aim of obtaining a better ranking position. This means that Google penalizes low-quality content, whether generated humanly or by artificial intelligence.
The procession is finished, but the ramifications are not. Many sites that lost positions in the SERP are recovering, and every SEO specialist on the planet is trying to find a fresh wind of new content in the brand, this means that it is a moment to turn to repairing the content of our site and improving the results of the site effort, to include different content, such as better images, understand that once the content or better internal and external connections with relevant content that apoye the message.