Complete guide to SEO in 2024

La SEO represents a constant challenge, subject to the constant changes of search engines, and we as Milan Web Agency we know it well.

Indeed, Search Engines progressively evolve in response to changes in users' search habits, and new technologies in the digital world.

The recent launch of the for example, represents a turning point in search results optimization and monitoring, integrating a greater range of content and requiring adaptation of strategies to meet the intentions of Internet surfers more comprehensively.

In other words, search results will no longer be limited only to web pages, but will also include other types of content, such as text snippets, direct answers, images, and videos. This will result in a more organic assessment of a website's visibility, which will analyze every aspect of it in detail.

To maintain a truly effective online presence, periodic updating of SEO strategies and rules will therefore be necessary. This will ensure that you avoid penalties from search engines and make the most of the new opportunities that SGE might offer in terms of visibility. And staying up-to-date with the latest trends therefore becomes essential to have a site that succeeds in ranking, getting adequate traffic and good .

In this article, we will look at the crucial factors for developing SEO strategies that consider these innovations in order to be truly competitive in the digital marketplace of 2024.

As a Web Agency in Milan, we explain what to do to get better SEO ranking in 2024

With beyond, there is not so much need to ask why SEO positioning is so important.

Google dominates online search by evaluating the relevance of results using sophisticated algorithms that understand context and search intent. It is not only content that determines ranking, but also other factors or, as we call them in typical digital agency jargon, “rules.”.

If you are reading this article, chances are that you have a website or wish to open one, with the goal that it will succeed in getting a good ranking.

Well, let's start by saying that if you do not consider all these “rules,” you undermine your platform's visibility, compromising its ability to receive visits and convert. Not positioning yourself properly, in other words, can be synonymous with the failure of your business.

What factors will determine the ranking of your website in 2024?

As a Web Agency in Milan that has been operating in the field for several years. SEO, we know well that in the past it was considered sufficient to “spread” a few keywords here and there to aspire to a good ranking, even on the first page.

Today the scenario is decidedly different, and a broader range of expertise is needed to assess all the factors that contribute to ranking.

Here are what they are:

• Relevance of keywords/keywords: select the right keywords for your target audience and use specific techniques to identify them.
• Technical SEO optimization: improve site speed, ensure compatibility with mobile devices, adopt the HTTPS protocol to make the site secure in the eyes of users as well, create an XML Sitemap, and use the Robots.txt file.
• User Experience (UX): User engagement has a direct impact on ranking.
• On-Page Optimization: optimize titles, headings (H2, H3, H4, etc.), meta-tags, URL structure, content quality, and ensure a match between search queries and content.
• Off-Page SEO: Develop Link Building to increase site authority.
• Local SEO: implement specific strategies to optimize ranking in geolocated searches, including Google My Business management and presence in local directories.

These are thus multiple activities, suggesting how most of the interventions can be included in main categories, which we are going to analyze.

The 3 macro areas of SEO

To position your website, you must therefore identify three main macro areas, within which focus the main optimization actions that you are required to consider:

The On-Page SEO: focuses on content and optimizations made directly on website pages.

While Off-Page SEO.: mainly involves the management of external links, known as backlinks, aimed at improving brand reputation and site authority.

Technical SEO: focuses on optimizing the website architecture and its technical components, operations that often require the support of expert consultants to check and fix the code. Some of its aspects are also covered by On-Page SEO, so the two fields may overlap. When we talk about speeding up a page, this is an operation that is both Technical SEO and On-Page SEO. However, Technical SEO is also about interventions that act on the entire site, not just a single page.

Let us analyze these 3 areas in detail.

Technical SEO

To allow your website to be indexed, you must allow Google's crawler access to pages, files and folders. In addition, you must make the results easily usable for the search engine by giving information clearly according to a certain markup.

Then having a fast platform that is also perfectly visible on mobile devices improves consideration by the search engine.

Robots.txt and Sitemap

The Robots.txt file is a “simple” text document that regulates the behavior of crawlers on your website. It should be placed in the root of the domain and contain instructions to access or exclude areas of the site via directives such as “User-agent” and “Disallow.” For example, “Disallow: /sectionX/” prevents crawlers from accessing that specific section of your platform. Robots.txt directives thus allow you to indicate which areas of your site should be inspected or not by search engines, providing targeted control over indexing.

Sitemap, on the other hand, is a file that lists all the URLs on your site that are useful for navigation. It can be in XML or txt format and is read by crawlers to ensure complete indexing coverage. Sitemap improves it because it makes it easier to understand the structure of your website, allowing search engines to discover all your pages more easily. It also reduces initial indexing time and simplifies internal navigation.

It has often happened to us, as a Web Agency in Milan, to see even well-made sites that do not have a Sitemap. Because of this, they undermined better crawling and ranking.

Markup scheme to enrich search results

Markup schema, based on JSON-LD language, enriches search results by adding extra information via “rich snippets.” The latter are nothing more than snippets of additional content, which go beyond the URL and title, appearing in the results of engines such as Google.

Through the Markup schema, various types of elements can be included, including images and descriptions for items or products, opening hours and location for local businesses, reviews, prices and availability for offers or reviews, as well as author, date and thumbnail for blog articles.

This practice improves SEO ranking because it makes search results more informative and attractive by showing this information directly in SERPs.

Site Speed and User Experience

User experience is crucial for SEO optimization of your site, with particular emphasis on the page loading speed, whose positive influence on positioning is increasingly evident.

If your site is slow, struggles to load and has poor navigation, it will be penalized by Google and your visitors.

Ensuring an optimal user experience is another determining criterion for ranking, and an excellent UX even on mobile devices can make the difference between your website and that of your competitors.

Let's take a closer look at what factors determine User Experience, and which you need to prioritize: let's talk about Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vitals: what they are and why they are important

Core Web Vitals represent additional key metrics introduced by Google to evaluate the user experience on your web pages.

The three main ones are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures the time it takes to load the main content of the page. It should be optimized within 2.5 seconds.
• First Input Delay (FID): identifies delays in responding to user inputs and interactions. It should be less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): quantifies changes in the layout or position of elements during loading. A value of 0 is ideal.

As of March 2024, an additional metric was included in Core Web Vitals: Input to Next Paint (INP).
The INP goes beyond simply measuring the first interaction, considering all of them and reporting the slowest during the entire duration of the page.

Unlike First Input Delay, which measures only the initial delay, INP measures the entire period from the beginning of the interaction until the browser fails to render the next frame.

This approach makes INP a more comprehensive measure of perceived user responsiveness than FID.

What actions can you take to improve all these parameters?

• Optimize the size and number of HTTP requests.
• Reduce the size of CSS, JS, and HTML.
• Compressing images.
• Implement delayed loading (lazy loading) and prefetching.
• Managing reflows/relayouts more efficiently with JavaScript.
• Enable compression, caching and use of HTTP/2.
• Constantly monitor these parameters through tools such as e.

Through the screen of PageSpeed Insight for example, we can detect the critical issues of a large portal like Repubblica.it, which are particularly evident on mobile devices.

We see that all metrics have decidedly insufficient values to provide optimal navigation, making content more usable.

On-Page SEO optimization to improve organic search engine rankings in 2024

On-Page SEO optimization involves making improvements directly on individual web pages of your site.

These improvements include:

• Title optimization (title tags) to include. keywords And describe the content.
• Alt attribute optimization of images.
• Proper use of headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to better structure the textual parts and create a hierarchy in the information.
• Optimizing Meta Descriptions to attract user clicks on Google SERP snippets.
• Content optimization through the use of relevant keywords
• Internal page organization, including URL management, internal navigation, and loading speed.
• Validation of HTML/CSS code to improve user experience and indexing.

As Web Agency in Milan specializing in SEO, we deal with numerous customers every day, who ask us which of these activities are the most important.

We can say that all of them are relevant, and that only by considering them all is it possible to achieve the best results. Indeed, in our work as consultants, it is the organic view that allows us to consider every aspect and achieve measurable effects, demonstrating the actual increase in a brand's online visibility.

Organic search engine positioning: how to choose the best keywords to stand out on Google in 2024

Careful selection of keywords is essential for site structure and categorization, including menus, content and category pages, products and services. It is important to distinguish between the specific search intents for each section of your platform, which will guide the creation of menus, submenus, breadcrumbs and call-to-actions.

The process of keyword research involves identifying various types of search intent, from the more informative to the more strictly commercial. It is essential to conduct a thorough analysis using tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SeoZoom or Semrush (we will see them better a little later, they are widely used by Web Agencies in Milan and beyond), to identify the most relevant keywords for your industry.

Under the term “pertentatives” , we include both high-search-volume terms and long-tail keywords (so-called longtails) to attract more qualified traffic for your business.

We see in the example the screenshot of the Keyword Planner, which suggests relevant keywords related to “baby girl shoes” and “baby girl clothing.”.

On-Page SEO: creating original and valuable content

The creation of high quality content, that is, that they are relevant to your users, is essential for success in ranking.

Google rewards sites that offer value with informative and relevant text, maintaining a preference for human ones despite the advent of the’Generative AI.

What exactly is meant by “quality content”? Text that must include consistent, not haphazard, well-organized keywords with accurate information expressed in an engaging way. This will increase the time spent on the site, lowering the bounce rate-a metric that indicates the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page, without interacting further.

Also, your texts should not include duplicate parts-this is one of the most common causes of penalization by Google.

If you have an e-commerce business, then take care to write original descriptions for your products, not copying them from other platforms.

Off-Page SEO: the Backlinks

Off-Page SEO refers to all activities outside the website, such as link building and social media presence, aimed at improving the site's ranking in search engine results.

The Role of Backlinks

In search engine ranking strategy, link building plays a key role. This activity focuses on achieving backlink high quality from authoritative sites relevant to their field.

In other words, it won't benefit you much if your site sells awnings and gets a link from a site that deals with cosmetics, even if the latter is authoritative.

An effective approach to link building therefore aims to receive relevant backlinks and carefully monitor the associated anchor text, which must maintain appropriate consistency in relation to the context in which it is placed.

Social Media Marketing and SEO Positioning

I Social Media have an indirect impact on SEO optimization, but still very important. Activities such as sharing your site's content and interacting with your audience, can increase the visibility and relevance of your platform, reflexively affecting its ranking.

Although interaction signals such as likes and shares are not directly related to ranking, they can in fact be interpreted by search engines as signals of your site's authority and popularity, helping to increase its traffic and visibility.

An active social media presence then, can generate more engagement, communicate brand characteristics and lead to receiving good backlinks naturally.

All this contributes to improving overall SEO optimization.

Help for SEO optimization in 2024: the 3 best tools to use

The use of monitoring and analysis tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console is essential to optimize your SEO strategy, constantly monitor it and adapt it over time.

In fact, these tools provide detailed, real-time information about your website's search engine performance and user experience.

For more in-depth analysis of keywords and competitors, you can rely on specialized tools such as Semrush, SEOZoom and Ahrefs, which are used by many Web Agencies in Milan.

Semrush

offers a wide range of features, including searching for the most relevant keywords for your industry and analyzing the strategies adopted by your competitors.

La platform allows you to conduct in-depth keyword research using tools such as the Keyword Magic Tool and Keyword Manager, making it easier to identify and organize those relevant to your target audience. It also offers an extensive backlink database and tools to manage your link building strategy.

It also provides support for technical SEO, helping to identify and resolve issues through the Site Audit tool and improving individual page visibility with the On-Page SEO Checker. For businesses interested in local visibility, Semrush offers tools for managing listings, reviews, and monitoring local keyword positions. There are also features for market analysis and ad-specific keyword research to optimize their conversions.

Ahrefs

is a powerful online marketing tool that offers several features to improve a website's online visibility.

Its main features include evaluating the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to the site, and comparing it with those of direct competitors.

In addition to these features, Ahrefs offers tools for content analysis, to identify relevant influencers and websites in order to develop a digital public relations strategy, and to analyze competitors' SEO strategies to identify opportunities for improvement.

It then allows you to monitor mentions of your site and brand online, identify new content ideas, and obtain detailed data on website traffic and social media performance.

SEOZoom

SEOZoom is an all-Italian platform that provides a wide range of features to improve the performance and visibility of websites on search engines. These tools include in-depth keyword analysis, competition monitoring, site audits, backlink analysis, and more.

SEOZoom is aimed at industry professionals, marketing agencies and website owners who want to boost their web business by achieving measurable results in the shortest possible time. The platform stands out for its ability to provide accurate and up-to-date data, enabling users to make informed decisions and develop effective strategies to improve search engine rankings.

The interface is particularly straightforward and intuitive, making SEOZoom a great tool even for those new to SEO.

In our comprehensive guide to SEO in 2024, we reviewed every crucial aspect to consider, emphasizing the ever-evolving nature of Search Engine Optimization. As we said at the beginning, phenomena such as the introduction of generative AI in search engines will require constant refinement of strategies and careful analysis of every aspect mentioned.

To do this in the optimal way and ensure visibility for your site in 2024, consider working with a reliable and competent partner to optimize time and costs. SHM Studio, a Milan Web Agency with years of experience under its belt, can give you the support you need. With a team of highly qualified experts, we offer customized solutions to meet the specific needs of each client, providing tangible and lasting results. If you have questions about this guide, or would like a free consultation to improve your website's visibility and optimize your SEO strategy in 2024, please do not hesitate to contact us today. We are here to help you successfully achieve your online goals.