No, we don't have a crystal ball. However, with 15 years of experience in SEO, we can correlate what we know about ranking websites and what was happening with search engines in 2023. We can also see some developments like the rise of AI-generated low content and the most likely steps search engines will have to take.
2024 SEO Ranking Factors (As predicted by BCM SEO Team)
Well-researched and useful content is essential; you should avoid generic and AI-generated content at all costs.
Content length continues to be a factor, with longer pages (1000+ words) performing on average better. However, this is not a rule. A shorter, quality, well-researched piece of content, or content written from a position of real (E-E-A-T) experience and expertise, like the one you are reading now, will perform better than a much longer, generic piece.
It's no different from a school essay where some of the verbiage is added purely to reach the required threshold; it's never a good read. The same goes for AI content. It may sound okay, but as soon as someone with actual expertise (like the actual E-E-A-T) reads it, they can certainly tell. Search engines are also quite good at assessing content quality and expertise.
Knowing how to find and optimise your pages for keywords remains a top factor. This, of course, goes hand in hand with what we just said about content. A generic or artificial content may include keywords, but these will not be what we call well-researched keywords.
A tale as old as the hills. On one hand, everything changed; on the other hand, nothing has changed. While we had multiple algorithmic updates to fine-tune how the search engines understand link signals (starting with the now legendary Penguin updates), the basic principle remains. Pages with more links tend to rank better. Of course, what type of links, how acquired, when acquired, and so on has changed and will continue to change. As a fun fact, we may add that when prospecting a potential link, we are now looking at 60 different factors. 15 years ago, we would look at one (PageRank). TLDR: links remain a top factor 
So this is technically not a new one. It first appeared back in 2014 in the Search Quality Rater guidelines document. But from what we have observed in the last 12 months, it seems to have more weight, and we're expecting it to become even more significant SEO ranking factor in 2024. It is one of the ways search engines will be able to beat the oncoming sea of auto-generated generic content.
No changes here. Technical SEO has to be solid. Technical issues can literally break your site's SEO. Be mindful that some of these may be difficult to see and may be caused by things like your website theme. It would take a lot of time to explain in detail (that's what the first E in E-E-A-T stands for). So if you see your website performing really poorly for no apparent reason, give us a call on 01216302350 , and we should be able to help.
This will become (in our opinion) more important. If you're this far into this post, you can probably see the pattern now. Crawling isn't free, and spider bots have to prioritise. Would they rather check for one, high-quality expert article on a site they trust or waste time crawling auto-generated content?
Having a sitemap will improve your ranking - no, it won't. Good sitemaps can be helpful, but automated sitemaps can do more harm than good.
Social media has absolutely no bearing on your ranking. So just like the links from your FB 5 or 10 years ago had no impact on your ranking, so do TikTok videos today. (Fun fact: check if your TikTok profile page is indexed) The vast majority of social media activity is not even accessible to the search engines. This, of course, doesn't take away the "value" from using these channels, but they do not have any real SEO value.
