Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or you’re just not that up to date with Google policy and updates, you might not know that Google updates itself. A lot. And, when it does, it spells trouble for your business’ SEO.
Why? Because however successful your SEO is, every time Google issues an update, it effectively resets the clock to zero, and what was working for your business before won’t necessarily work again. And that’s where the wheat and the chaff separate, with in-the-know SEO services coming into play.
Google Updates and You
PageRank (PR) – Google’s algorithm – looks for several things when crawling and ranking a website. These include:
Quality links and backlinks present,
- Content quality
- The sites authority
- The relevance of the search term which generated it
- Page load time
- Number of broken and functioning links
It almost sounds like all you need is some good, top-quality content and a few backlinks here and there, right?
Wrong. People have tried (and mainly failed) to beat Google’s algorithm, and it hasn’t ended well for them. Search engines – Google in particular – are incredibly smart and on the lookout, and this is where using SEO services who know what they’re doing is a good idea.
Black Hat SEO – and Why to Avoid It
Making sure your SEO is in tip-top condition and working for you is one thing; trying to force it (especially if you don’t know what you’re doing) is quite another.
‘Black Hat’ SEO refers to the tactics you need to avoid like the plague, and can include keyword stuffing, duplicate content, unrelated content, spam posts and much, much more. You should always be focusing on implementing quality techniques (how proper SEO services like this one would), rather than rushing anything – risking being penalised by Google in the process.
Future SEO Tips for Your Business
All SEO services worth their salt will tell you that there is no way to ‘beat’ Google – there are only ways to adapt and stay ahead of the curve.
Here are just a few tips and tricks to implement, to ensure that your business does just that:
Produce quality content. As mentioned above, quality content is unlikely to go out of fashion any time soon or ever. Having content which is related to its title (so not clickbait), explains or informs your users of its purpose and is interesting will stand the test of time – and pretty much every Google update. Plus, PageRank really loves refreshed or updated content – so keep producing it as you see necessary.
Make your site user-friendly. Your site is built for users. If they can’t navigate around it, then it is unlikely they will become customers, or will return, for that matter. Make sure all links are working, and remove any broken ones; make it easy to get around, with information clearly laid out and make sure it loads quickly – within 2-3 seconds is optimal.
Think mobile. Mobile is the future, if you hadn’t noticed – and Google released an update (because of course they did) to reflect this. Now, any website which is not mobile friendly will not rank as well as it might have done, back in the days when desktop was number one. Having a responsive web design for your site is a very low-key way to make sure your site looks great on each and every device.