Write naturally, write for your audience, and don’t be tempted to try and trick Google by adding the words you want to rank for multiple times (called ‘keyword stuffing’). That tactic does not work, and it makes for bad user experience. And with recent developments such as BERT, Google is becoming very good at understanding natural language. Authorship – Identify the author explicitly where appropriate.
Users need to be able to consume your content easily on a mobile device. Google evaluates your content according to its performance on a mobile device, so it is vital you get this right. Google has a tool to test your pages for mobile-friendliness.
A less popular website might be like a small town with just one or two roads leading in. A brief explanation of Search Engine Optimization and how it can affect your ability to get more business. In fact, 81% of smartphone owners turn to search first to address their immediate needs. Tune in to our podcast for marketing nerds, aficionados, and decision-makers. But it also strongly considers ratings and positive reviews from Google My Business users, plus the traditional on-page and off-page SEO used by the site. If a user searches for “all-you-can-eat pizza”, Google will only return locations with that option.
Google understands that someone is talking about you when they use your brand name. Obviously, you are looking for mentions with positive sentiment in a relevant context. Sharing on social platforms, and the general seo ranking reports social buzz around your content is a signal to Google that the content is useful and appreciated. And when recommending content as a solution to its user, useful and appreciated are high on the list of priorities.
Video – Google is including more and more video in search results. Google is including these in the SERPs more and more, especially on mobile. Long-form guides – These may involve a lot of work, but this type of content can really help your audience understand a specific or a wider topic in depth. They are easy to digest, easy to understand, and easy to engage with. So focus on bringing real value to your audience with every piece of content you create. For all content , correct grammar, proper spelling, and a clear style are essential both to Google and the user consuming it.
The big advantage of SEO traffic is that, if chosen Search Engine Optimization strategy is effective , then it is an ongoing source of free traffic. So for ads, you pay to be the top, front, and center, and with organic search results (“SEO results”, if you prefer), you are top, front, and center through merit, and it is free.
They are judging credibility or E-A-T at three levels — the page, the author, and the website. Furthermore, they are looking to see if the content is credible in the context of the solution it aims to provide. Here is a brief overview of what Google raters are looking for to identify quality content . Google has thousands of quality raters, and they are used to help improve the search experience. RankBrain and BERT are the most famous machine learning updates. Rank Brain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system Google uses to help sort through its search results.
Technical saas marketing is all about the quality of the infrastructure that delivers your content. Good technical SEO means that Google will find your content easily, and that content will be easy for it to digest and understand. When influencers in your industry talk about your brand and cite your content, they are essentially vouching for you. That peer approval from a trusted, authoritative expert will help improve the credibility of your brand, your author, and your content in Google’s eyes. Once again, we are looking for relevancy — approval from an authoritative figure within your industry. A mention of your brand is a signal to Google, even without a link.
Schema.org markup – Put simply, schema.org markup explains your content to Google in a format it can easily digest and understand. Schema.org markup is a BIG help to Google, and it can also prove invaluable in helping you rank at the top of SERPs when these include a Featured Snippet or Quick Answer. Code quality – Google needs clean, clear code to be able to digest and understand your content efficiently and effectively. It just means you need to ensure Google can access its contents efficiently in every case. Here are the main Search Engine Optimization factors you need to get right to help your content to rank higher in Google . Google claims to have “very high Page Quality standards” for such pages because low-quality YMYL content can directly affect readers’ well-being. Google uses the acronym E-A-T — Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — which could also be expressed globally as credibility.
If they have great E-A-T, this will bring credibility to the content. Writing style – Keep your writing simple, clear, and focused. Keep sentences short, break the content into logical chunks, and stay on topic. Organize your content so that the value it provides is easy to identify, understand, and engage with. An accurate meta title that describes clearly and unambiguously what the content of the page offers to the user is supremely important — it is the reason they click on your result or not. Mobile-friendliness – Every page on your site needs to be mobile-friendly.
This could be adding information about a new product or service you’re selling, a customer story or product video. It’s also important to update your web content pages at least every 6 months and remove content that is no longer relevant. When setting up your website, consider the following points to ensure your website has the best chance of ranking well. Search engines are also constantly refining their algorithms to deliver users the best results. Staying on top of these updates is a full-time job – what worked in 2019 might not work as well in 2020. A website that has many other websites linking to it would be like a city with many roads leading into it from all over the world.
But if the user searches for “Boca Raton pizza”, the SERP will display results for the region in the search, regardless of the user’s location. To display local results, Google attempts to understand the user’s local search intention. For these searches, Google created local search algorithms to prioritize results in the region the user is located or included in the search. One of Google’s priorities in recent years has been understanding the intent behind the local marketing. An SEO audit is an important step to make sure you take as part of your technical SEO strategy, especially at the start of your optimization project. It’s an open-source code project initially led by Google, which aims to develop static content pages that load faster on mobile devices.
Users don’t like to wait, and Google knows that; It wants to recommend faster pages to its users since they give a better user experience. Schema markup explains your content to Google in a manner it understands, making it easy to digest and understand. Google has a tool to test the schema.org markup on your pages. Crawlability- Google needs to be able to access your pages and digest your content. If Google cannot access your content, it cannot offer it in its results. Examples of crawlability issues are not allowing Google to crawl your pages — a file called robots.txt is where you can give or refuse permission to Google to access specific pages of your site. Another issue for crawlability is having pages behind a paywall, or login page — Google cannot access those pages and so cannot know what content they contain.
Actions such as mobile-friendliness, download speed, using videos, and text in your content all help to ensure Google considers your content deliverable. So, an intelligent digital marketing strategy will use SEO to help drive other aspects of your marketing, and vice versa. Some of your efforts will pay-off in the short term after they are implemented. Changing meta titles, headings, or improving the content on a few pages are typical examples. As we saw earlier, SEO has three main pillars — technical, content, and backlinks. For your strategy to bear fruit, all three need to be solid, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Pieces using data – Create content that includes unique and helpful analysis of data, especially original data.
Google gives preference to businesses that have provided the most information, especially those with a high number of strong reviews. Take advantage of the opportunities offered by registering and engaging your users to improve your chances of showing up in the Local Pack.
BERT is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing , and it stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is used to understand the nuances and context of words within searches, and it helps provide better matches to the queries with more relevant results. It is very helpful to approach SEO from the perspective that you are providing solutions to Google’s users, and you are asking it to recommend your solution. So, as a business with a website, your reliance on Google is pretty much a given.