What You Need to Know About Google’s March 2024 Core Algorithm

Every few years Google releases new updates to its core algorithm in an effort to make search results higher quality for users. However, Google’s March 2024 core algorithm updates have taken the marketing world by storm. We have seen websites experience drastic reductions in traffic and even de-indexed since the updates, leaving marketers unsure of how to improve their content. In this guide, we go through the key aspects of Google’s March 2024 core algorithm updates and how to improve your SEO strategy moving forward. First, let’s jump right into why these algorithm updates are important to understand.

Why Algorithm Updates Are Important to Understand

As a marketer, it’s crucial to understand the ins and outs of Google’s core algorithm. Every few years, Google releases new updates to its algorithm that improves and changes the way it crawls websites. These updates can change the ranking of websites, in an effort to improve user experience. While Google releases minor updates almost every day, core updates are more substantial and can make a huge impact on how your website and your competitor’s websites perform in search engine results pages.

Key Aspects of Google’s March 2024 Core Algorithm

Google’s March 2024 core algorithm updates are making an effort to reduce low-quality and spammy content. With this update, Google is trying to improve the overall quality of search results by penalizing websites that churn out fluffy, duplicated, or AI-generated content that lacks substance and value. With the rise in AI-generated content, this has a lot of marketers concerned about their content. 

How Does This Affect Your Website?

We have already seen a number of shocking results of the Google March 2024 core algorithm updates. This includes websites being completely de-indexed like the image below. This can be scary to see, as we work so hard to increase our brand visibility and content. Although this has been a hot topic, you don’t need to panic. 100% of the websites that have been penalized have had AI-generated content. As long as you are producing high-quality content that provides value to readers, you’ll have nothing to worry about. Google’s new algorithm changes are focusing more on reducing content that is entirely copied from AI platforms, without any additional context added. By adding your industry expertise, examples, brand voice, and other aspects to your content, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about when it comes to your content. If you’re looking for ways to improve your SEO strategy, keep reading.

How to Improve Your SEO

Now that you know what not to do when it comes to SEO, here are a few ways that you can improve your website’s search results.

Keyword Research and Optimization

Keywords are often one of the first things you hear about in regards to SEO. Identify relevant keywords and phrases related to your business, products, or services using keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs. Then, optimize your website’s meta tags, headings, and content with your targeted keywords. This will improve the visibility of your website for searchers. When you do this, ensure a natural integration of keywords into your content. You want to avoid “keyword stuffing”, or including too many keywords. This can lead to a penalty from search engines as you can appear spammy.

Create High-Quality Content

It’s important to create engaging, informative, and valuable content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience. Try to publish blog articles, guides, and landing pages to attract visitors to your website. As I mentioned earlier, creating high-quality content that is human-written can make the difference between a strong, trustworthy site, and one that could come across as untrustworthy. If you plan to use AI to help, I would recommend using it more as a brainstorming and research tool. This is instead of a direct source. It’s crucial to add in your own expertise, personality, and experience. This will show Google and your readers that you are a trustworthy source of information.

Improve Website Performance

There is a lot that goes into optimizing your website for search engines. Ensure your website loads quickly by optimizing images, browser caching, and minimizing HTTPS requests. It’s also important to optimize your website for mobile users to provide a seamless experience across all devices. Lastly, it’s important to ensure the overall structure of your website is easy for both your website visitors and search engines to find and index your content. If you’re not sure how to improve your website, Google Search Console can help you identify areas that you can improve. 

Earn Backlinks

You’ve probably had people try and reach out to you via email asking for a backlink or link exchange. But, gaining backlinks from reputable websites can be a great way to build credibility for search engines. You can do this by guest blogging, outreach, and content promotion. Focus on earning natural backlinks rather than resorting to black hat tactics like buying links. Tools like Moz can help you see where your backlinks are coming from, and how trustworthy your website is because of them. 

Properly Track Your Website Visitors

When you are trying to improve your SEO strategy, it’s important to track and improve your tactics. While Google Analytics can help you see how visitors were acquired and the pages they viewed, it pretty much stops there. You are still left in the dark about who visited your website and if they are a qualified lead. That’s where Visitor Queue comes in. Visitor Queue can help you identify every company that visits your website, how they got there, what pages they visited, and for how long. You can gain an understanding of each company with a description of what they do with in-depth firmographic information.

Plus, you can see employee contact information like email addresses, phone numbers, and personal LinkedIn pages to help you reach out. All of this information can help you discover if your SEO strategy, or any other marketing strategy, is attracting the right kind of visitors, and help you follow up. Try Visitor Queue for free today and stop losing leads.

What’s Next?

When Google releases core algorithm updates, it often sends marketers into a frenzy. This is because we try to understand what will be changing. However, if you produce high-quality content that is filled with your industry experience, examples, and best practices, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. Google releases these algorithms to prioritize high-quality content, so as long as you are doing this, you’ll be golden. As always, if you have any questions about using Visitor Queue to understand your website traffic and generate leads, do not hesitate to reach out.