In the world of SEO and internet marketing, Google updates decide whether you live or die in search engine results. Since May, there have been seven different Google updates each a varying degrees of severity. Sometimes they help you, sometimes they do nothing for you, and sometimes they bring down your ratings. This isn’t an article about how to recover from Google updates, there are plenty of those online already. Instead, here are some SEO tactics to help you stay ahead of Google updates and avoid getting harmed by those updates.
1. SEO Branding
Look up the results for any one of your favorite products. What do you see? That’s right, brands, brand names everywhere. This is the state of the modern day search engine, they’re favoring actual company names over generic keywords and links that only go one-way. You don’t have to be a national brand to achieve this level of search engine ranking. You can do things for your SEO like:
- Listen to what your customers/audience want and give them that
- Being involved in the community and helping sponsor local events and teams
- Give away your content and services for free occasionally
Yes, big, national brands have it a lot easier than your local mom and pop shop, but you can still follow in their example. Those brands were doing the right thing to gain exposure before the explosion of the internet, so you can too.
2. Keep Users Coming Back
The point of your website should be to provide your customers/audience with a good experience that keeps them coming back for more. If your website doesn’t provide a good experience then your website won’t rank well in search engine results. Basically, if your customers like your website, they will keep coming back and they will share it with their friends.
Google has increased the importance of quality with all their updates this year vs. the number of links that point to a website. Webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating a high quality site that your audience will want to come back to and share with their circles.
3. Preserve Your URLs
It’s a well known fact that the older the URL, the better that it ranks. While 301s and canonicals have been a great thing for SEO professionals, they take away from your overall equity, and every tiny amount matters. Keep your URLs the same, even when adding new features and updates to your products. Don’t create new pages for a new iteration of a product, just keep the old URL pointing to the new product page. This will keep up the equity on your URLs that you have been trying to build up with SEO.
SearchPro Systems
2024