This year has been a significant year for updates, as Google continues to help us all create better, more informational websites that serve our audiences rather than littering the Internet with excess pages.
Old website thinking is thinking we need to stuff the website with a bunch of keywords or create more pages so we can rank for more things, thats no longer the case.
Heres how you can focus your website design and updates for Google Search and SEO.
Create good content:
Quality over quantity: create high-quality content that would be deemed 'helpful' or 'useful' for your target audience or customer - not just stuffer content or AI-written content.
Get deeper:Â Go deeper with your content, create well-rounded and comprehensive content - not just focusing on the number of words. Consider substance, adding a point of view or validating your reasoning or references.
Keywords: Reach your audience by using their search language (which may differ from your initial thoughts) It should feel natural. Avoid keyword stuffing (overusing keywords sounding unnatural).
Keep it fresh: Current and timely content can be useful for your audience. (and remove old, irrelevant pages after their time).
Answer the public:Â Provide content that responds to the query your audience has when they landed on your page (or site) in the first place.
Relevance: Make sure your page answers the query - it ultimately answers the questions people have when they reach your page
Accuracy: Create content that delivers on what is being expected by your audience, and avoid using clickbait or ploys to drive traffic.
Be unique: Add value or your own perspective to your content, offer a viewpoint or opinion or add some additional insights.
Multimedia:Â Create additional visibility by bringing creative and integrating multi-media or creative ways of reflecting your content.
Watch your language: Your content should match the language of your target audience. If you want to reach English U.S. speakers, your primary language should not be French.
Consensus: Align content with high-quality sources.
Create Value: Each content piece you publish should have a clear focus or purpose for existing – and the primary purpose shouldn’t be to rank high in search results.
Measure what matters:
Start paying attention to
Time on page - this is just as it sounds, the time a visitor spends on a page of your website. Google measures this through timed markers that note how long a visitor remains on one page before going to the next page.
Bounce rate - do people land on your website only to leave a short time later? This generally correlates to the query (google search) giving either a result that doesnt match or the web page gives off a poor user impresion.
Social shares - Google is analizing content and actions on your social media, paying attention to whether social media is driving traffic to your website and the quality of those visits.
Master The Basics:
Page performance - how quickly does your website load? Is the spinning wheel spending too much time infront of visitors? Using the right size and quality of images will help prevent your site from slowing down and creating a bad user experience.
Mobile site - making sure your mobile site works and works well for visitors, the majority of people visit many websites from their handheld devices, your site should focus on that expeirence.
Navigation - how easy is your site to move around, how easily can information be found and accessed? Does your site structure make sense? All of this contributes to a strong user-experience (UX) a prioroty for google.
If you are building a new site or considering updates to your own, this list should help give you a great baseline to build from mindfully.
Julie
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