2024 Year in Review
This year was one of big change for many agencies, and I’m thankful to still be here for the twelfth year. Many of my clients are doing bigger and better things than ever before.
The success of our clients is what I like to measure. One of my earliest clients had a record year. Another client was acquired, congratulations! Another client expanded their business and is having a record year.
This year for me was a little down, but that’s okay, the clients we’re serving are doing great, and I trust in word of mouth referrals.
I’d like to talk a little about industry trends, and what I think it means, what it says is important to clients.
Industry Trends in 2024
Here are topics that people talked a lot about that need to be addressed.
AI Content Still Sucks
I can’t ignore this one. Some companies are turning to AI content because they want to produce content faster. To be honest, there are many more downsides to AI generated content than simply writing from your own expertise. The only upside is, it’s faster. Literally, the only one. You can usually tell when a competitor is using this because they start writing an article every two days, and their organization is small.
Remember article spinning? Yeah, it reminds me a lot of that.
Google Ads Tries to Get You to Use AI Too
Google Ads will try and trick you in using “dynamically generated text” aka AI to create ads. Please don’t do this, because you will get clicks for irrelevant searches. If you have people clicking your ad because they are looking for a job, this is one reason this happens. Just disable, or better yet, delete dynamically generate ad groups in Google Ads.
Services Promising They Will Rank You Higher in the Map
Google Maps is somewhere in which most clients want to rank higher, because searchers click the first thing that looks like it will solve their problem, and the map always ranks fairly high. There are companies that promise they will rank you higher in the map in exchange for exorbitant fees.
List of things that are not important and will not make you rank higher in Google Maps: posting Google Posts ten times a day, keyword stuffing the business name, buying fake reviews, “scanning the grid”.
Google Maps is a directions app, that gets placed in the search results. It favors proximity to the searcher; it is not a sign of quality.
One thing you can do to improve your Google Maps ranking, is get positive reviews at a steady pace. Review velocity is a signal that makes sense, and will matter to real people, just like it matters to the ranking algorithm. (Again: don’t buy reviews, they will probably get tossed, and real people can tell they are fake.)
Things I Noticed
Some clients that sell expensive one-time services to homeowners experienced a downturn this year. This was in different markets, and companies that offer financing seem to do a bit better in search. The economy hurt consumers this year, and people were cautious in 2024. Customers were reluctant to drop large amounts of cash, at least all at once. Those who have it to spare still followed through with purchases. Just some food for thought.
Conclusion
Clients are always looking for results, more leads, and taking advantage of opportunities. We’ll be here for a long time, providing support and guidance for businesses that are too busy to manage it themselves. B2B leads are still valuable, and if that’s what you need help with, we can help you rank higher.
