CanSpace
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Since the beginning of this year, I’ve read dozens of reports and interviews from industry’s top SEO experts. The below is a high-level summary of insides I’ve learned, as far as areas of SEO to consider and focus on in 2024, optimized for web hosting companies. The talking points are in no particular order of importance, as all of them are considered important enough. I thought I’d share my notes in the interest of our industry doing the right things and doing them better.
Let’s talk content. The key takeaways:
There are a few other ideas that I classified as overly complex or applicable only if you are either a very large enterprise or have done everything else on the list, which involve generating your own statistical data and optimizing pages for schema markup (how search engines or AI understands the meaning of your content).
I hope this can be useful to some of you.
- AI will most definitely become a part of content production, but human input is critical to guarantee helpful and high-quality results. It doesn’t matter how good you are at VPS, cloud, or WordPress hosting, you are still required to craft your content/SEO effort on solving business-related problem.
- Build a more realistic expectation what you can get from search now and especially where you can fit in that equation. Google will be placing more effort on generative experience and taking the top of users attention with it, leaving traditional SEO to mid-funnel, meaning most customers will be past the awareness stage when they find you. Start focusing on more deliberate keywords to target the right users, instead of going after most searched for keywords. Study your customer super well, align your content with a buyer persona, write content that compares you to competition.
- Make it as frictionless as possible for a user to do what you want them to do, from the moment they land on your website to the point of action (be it registering a domain or ordering hosting service). Google tracks those clicks, mouse movements, scrolls and actions, and that will serve as a factor in your visibility, as the company is really good at figuring out when a user is satisfied. Think of these four variables when you work on your website: usability, conversion, technical excellence & relevant quality content. If you do all these great, Google will take notice.
- Showcasing expertise boost authority. If you are in a position to do so, consider registering with press outreach programs, in which journalists reach out to experts for a quote/comment. I cannot recommend one in particular, but there are a few of them if you search online, like Connectively, ProfNet, Dot Star Media, etc.
- Increase your chances to be the answer AI systems like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini would be looking to give people who turn to these tools for answers. These systems use structural data, which means focus on keyword research, producing material that fill content gaps. Better results will come to those who can listen to customers, understand intent and extract sentiment across all social interactions. Expand on your FAQs and add 2-3 sentence highlights to your blog posts.
Let’s talk content. The key takeaways:
- With the introduction of AI, more people are getting more skeptical about the content they read. I know I question almost everything now. So the more specific, the more refined and more targeted your content is, the more people will trust it.
- Additionally (and unfortunately to many hosting companies out there — because we know how many of us love it), you need to get more actively involved in creation of multimodal content (text, images, audio, video). With AI starting to understand audio, video and images (Google’s model Gemini was built for multimodality), some SEO experts believe knowing how to optimize this content will help you stay competitive in a big way. My company is trying to stay active on social, but frankly, we are not seeing much action from it. Recently we ran a ‘50%-off’ ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of a partnership deal (we didn’t pay for the campaign), which produced a single conversion, out of over 1,400 people who landed on the website over a 2 week period. Social is a great way to stay in touch with clients, but it’s not anywhere close to being a significant sales category.
- Firsthand knowledge is something Google is seriously looking at. Recent experimental features also show they are trying to reward that type of content. No matter how opinionated that first-hand knowledge may get, it’s authentic and genuine. One way to generate such content is reach out to your biggest fans and loyal clients and think of a way to create content based on experience. It doesn’t even matter if they are talking about your shared hosting, help you offered with their site migration or general vibe of your customer service — it adds tremendous value and you can use it across your site’s blog, product pages and social.
- Instead of focusing on keywords, try answering the questions people have about a particular topic, and answer the specific question as early as possible in a blog post or video. Get to the point. If you want to stand out, add unique content (case studies, surveys, research or unique perspective from the author), that isn’t found in a thousand of other articles on the subject.
- Some SEOs recommend using IndexNow instead of waiting for search crawlers to reach your website.
There are a few other ideas that I classified as overly complex or applicable only if you are either a very large enterprise or have done everything else on the list, which involve generating your own statistical data and optimizing pages for schema markup (how search engines or AI understands the meaning of your content).
I hope this can be useful to some of you.
I think I am going to pin this thread for a bit, as long as it makes sense to keep in 2024. Maybe we can even refine and update it with time, as it'd be nice to have a helpful web hosting SEO guide available at all times.
, we give it to Gemini and ask it:
