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Top 8 SEO Challenges of 2024

Farnaz Kia

Tuesday, 25th Jun 2024

As digital marketers and SEO professionals, we know getting our content in front of the right audience is critical for traffic growth. We also know gaining visibility in search engines, driving organic traffic, and outranking competitors present several SEO challenges. Because Google constantly changes its algorithms, finding a successful SEO tactic can feel like playing catch-up as search engine optimization consistently presents new SEO challenges.

By understanding the current SEO challenges of 2024, you can better position your brand to succeed in the constantly changing world of organic search.

Although it’s an ongoing effort that requires time, effort, and research to see results, knowing what we’re up against and planning accordingly helps us address these issues head-on.

8 SEO Challenges to Watch Out For

So what exactly are the biggest SEO problems to watch out for as we move into 2024?

Let’s take a look.

1. Keeping Up With Google’s Algorithm Changes

It’s no secret that Google makes constant changes to its algorithms. In 2022 alone, Google ran over 800,000 experiments that led to over 4,000 changes in search.

That’s a lot!

While we don’t need to panic about every small update, keeping up with the bigger algorithm changes is still one of the biggest SEO challenges we must adapt to. This will impact keyword strategies, content creation, link-building efforts, and more.

What this means for SEO specialists and content marketers is that the goalpost is constantly moving. Finding reliable industry sources for upcoming changes and best practices will be critical.

Instead of constantly rebuilding your entire SEO strategy after every update, spend time on industry websites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Search Engine Roundtable to stay on top of trends.

2. Adapting to AI While Avoiding Penalties

It can feel overwhelming trying to distinguish what is hype vs what actually works with AI. The rapid advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have changed the landscape forever. Marketers can now work faster, create more engaging content, and perform in-depth keyword research almost effortlessly.

Although AI promises to be helpful, it can be detrimental if you become reliant on it. Google even officially stated it rewards high-quality content only if it is trustworthy and offers unique value. AI-generated content must be original, well-written, factually accurate, and uniquely valuable to rank well in search engines.

Following the March 2024 Google Core update, many brands saw their SERP rankings dip — others even got deindexed — as the search engine giant continued to crack down on low-quality, spammy AI content.

Many sites got penalized for low-quality content because Google favors original, authoritative content. This highlights how crucial it is for brands to focus on user experience above all else when using AI to create content.

One of the fast-rising tools in the AI space is BrandWell, a powerful all-in-one brand growth platform that integrates keyword research, blog generation, content intelligence, SEO, and generative AI into one single app.

Built by marketers for marketers, BrandWell can write both long-form and short-form content that ranks well in Google — with the ability to adapt to any search engine update.

A look at the BrandWell dashboard:

3. Increasing Competition and Content Saturation

Because the Internet makes information so easily accessible, there will always be greater competition in just about every industry.

Did you know there are now close to 2 billion websites? That’s hundreds of thousands of competitors!

Along with keeping up with what Google considers “best practices,” SEOs and marketers are constantly analyzing SERPs (search engine results pages) to uncover competitor strategies and content gaps.

As I mentioned earlier, low-quality content is being penalized more often. Marketers might see this as one of the biggest SEO challenges because this increased competition leads to more noise and content saturation, making it even more challenging to stand out.

To combat this challenge, we must try to deliver a better experience than anyone else on a given topic while leveraging content in new ways.

Think about ways you can repurpose your existing content to get more mileage out of it. Could you create an infographic or video from a blog post or vice versa?

Repurposing content is a great way to stretch your SEO budget further.

BrandWell makes repurposing easy by creating original, long-form blog posts from your existing articles, YouTube videos, podcast episodes, and even MS Word documents.

Here are six ways to generate a long-form article with BrandWell:

4. Difficulty Getting Buy-in For SEO

Getting buy-in and budget from decision-makers in an organization can sometimes be challenging.

While 64.6% of SEO pros saw improved results from 2021 to 2022, this was still lower than other forms of marketing, such as paid advertising. So the SEO challenge becomes getting the budget to scale.

With increasing competition and new algorithms to keep track of, securing SEO budgets from marketing executives can be tricky. With any business decision, a proven track record and data-backed decisions must be a top priority when trying to get support for search engine optimization initiatives.

According to Search Engine Journal, budget cuts are the biggest challenge for SEO professionals, followed by a lack of resources.

The 2023 Forrester B2B Summit highlighted how convoluted internal tech processes have become when trying to get sign-off from higher-ups. With content marketing, video content, technical SEO, website performance, mobile optimization, keyword research, and a killer content strategy, you may only be able to secure a fraction of the overall budget you need because proving an ROI compared to paid strategies is harder.

5. Keyword Cannibalization and Poor Keyword Research

I’ll admit that sometimes, keyword cannibalization sneaks up on me, and when it does, I feel like a complete noob.

I know I need to constantly watch out for duplicate content on my site, but it’s hard.

If you’re dealing with larger websites, such as enterprise sites, keyword cannibalization will impact search rankings for some of your most valuable keywords, resulting in traffic declines and even lost revenue.

One way to prevent duplicate content, aside from regularly running your website through an SEO auditing tool, is by performing thorough keyword research. This is important not just to see what’s trending in a given space, or to niche down to target long-tail keywords, but to really focus on your customers.

Tools for social media monitoring can also help uncover conversational keywords. Remember, when conducting keyword research, always think like your audience does.

6. Slow Loading Speeds

One of the biggest SEO challenges brands experience, whether they know it or not, are site speed and core web vitals. This impacts things such as mobile-friendliness and the overall quality of your search engine rankings.

Your content has to be insanely good for someone to wait longer than 3 seconds for your page to load; otherwise, you will see an increase in search engine performance issues and bounce rates.

While content quality is critical, make sure you aren’t overlooking simple fixes, such as image compression and enabling caching. Your readers, along with Google, will thank you.

7. Mountains of Data to Analyze

Data analysis presents several challenges for SEOs due to the sheer volume of numbers to interpret.

SEO involves analyzing data from various sources such as website analytics, search engine metrics, keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and user behavior. Handling such volume and variety of data can be overwhelming, requiring SEOs to be proficient in different analytical tools and techniques.

Other challenges include:

Interpreting Correlations vs Causations: SEOs often deal with correlations in data, such as changes in rankings correlating with changes in website metrics. However, determining causation (e.g., whether a specific change led to improved rankings) requires deeper analysis and sometimes experimentation.

Real-Time Monitoring and Adaptation: SEO is dynamic, and strategies need to adapt to algorithm updates, competitor actions, and changing user behavior. SEOs must monitor data in real time and adjust strategies accordingly to maintain or improve rankings.

Quantifying ROI: Demonstrating the impact of SEO efforts in terms of ROI requires accurate data analysis to show improvements in organic traffic, conversions, and revenue.

Technical Expertise: Advanced data analysis often requires knowledge of statistical methods, programming languages (like Python or R), and familiarity with API integrations for extracting and manipulating data from various sources.

One of the common problems faced in SEO is neglecting reporting, Google Analytics data, and all the other SEO analytics.

Sure you may periodically run a sitemap through an online checker, and look at your search rankings using Semrush or Google Search Console. However, truly understanding the story behind your data should be the priority.

That’s why it’s so important to schedule a recurring block on your calendar to regularly review analytics and monitor the effects of algorithm updates after reading SEO hacks or SEO strategy trends. Keep your SEO foundation strong and prioritize this if you want to win at SEO. Because so much content is published in the digital landscape — neglecting important, foundational items will be detrimental to your SEO efforts.

8. Voice Search Optimization

The last SEO challenge that you need to watch out for this year is optimizing content for voice. If this seems unimportant, consider that, according to Google, 53% of US consumers said they use search engines to research a product before making a purchase.

With 64% of households owning a smart speaker, you’ll want to factor this trend into your SEO strategy now rather than later.

While this doesn’t necessarily mean neglecting long-form, helpful blog posts in your content plan, voice search should be viewed as an emerging market.

Consider optimizing title tags and meta descriptions for voice search, just as you would for traditional text-based searches.

Look at voice search in the same light as creating video content optimization and social media content calendars to expand your content’s reach.

FAQs: SEO Challenges

What is the biggest challenge in SEO?

While all the above SEO challenges play an integral role, staying ahead of Google’s constantly changing search algorithm will be the biggest by far because each time it changes, it could mean changes to your content. You always have to adapt and optimize your website to keep pace.

What is SEO difficulty?

SEO difficulty is a rating system from 1 to 100 that describes how hard it is to outrank the top 10 results on a search results page based on a specific keyword or query.

Ranking high on SERPs encompasses the authority of existing sites, the quality and relevance of their backlinks, and the overall strength of their optimization efforts.

Why is SEO so difficult?

Aside from adapting to constant search algorithm changes from the search engines, SEO is an ongoing, long-term process. It takes time, resources, strategy, technical skills, analytical capabilities, a robust and growing content calendar, and patience.

Just like growing any area of your business. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

What are the benefits and challenges of SEO?

With more businesses joining the Internet daily, outranking your competitors becomes more challenging. It is up to individual SEO professionals to commit to long-term consistency.

Content has always been the biggest factor, and this likely won’t change as Google regularly updates algorithms.

Conclusion

So there you have it, my list of SEO challenges I think you should really focus on for this year.

Although the digital landscape feels a bit shaky these days, one thing will always stay constant: valuable content and providing users with an excellent mobile experience will always be rewarded by search engines, making SEO challenges much easier to navigate.

Your road to helpful content starts with BrandWell. Sign up for this all-in-one brand growth engine and start producing long-form and short-form content that resonates with your audience.

Written by Farnaz Kia

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