What makes Google happy (and gets you moving up the search results)
If you are actively involved with keeping your website relevant in the search engines, then you’ll have noticed that Google’s search algorithms have changed faster than it takes to refresh a page. So just when you’ve updated your website, cleaned up the clutter and landed yourself a whole page closer to the top of the search results, Google lets you know that the guidelines have changed again.
Keywords just don’t cut it
Gone are the days where a ream of content stuffed with a grand number of keywords is enough to get you to the elusive first page of the search results. Nowadays, fresh and relevant content is at the top of Google’s inspection list – which means you can be updating your ‘News/blog’ page every day with content, but if it’s not relevant to your business and isn’t matching what people are searching for closely enough, no one will find you.
This is not ideal for any business. Hardly anyone looks past the first page, and if they do, then psychologically they’re probably giving your business a lot less credit than it deserves.
Googles favourite websites?
In 2015 Google changed the Quality Rater Guidelines again. This means that they’re using sophisticated methods to determine the worth of a website’s content, instead of relevant keywords being the number one factor to get you to the top, Google is now focussing heavily on user experience, in particular how relevant your content is to the search query and how simple and user friendly the information on your website is.
For example, if you were to search for “symptoms of stress” you’ll see pages that offer only that information, appearing first – without you having to sift through hundreds of webpages that may all have the information buried in piles of other copy.
Copy and pasted “listicles” taken from other people’s pages won’t help either. The quality and originality of the content is more important than ever. A high word count that doesn’t say much isn’t going to help you, but presenting the same information in a new way will definitely reward you with an increased search ranking. This is why websites without blogs or updated information don’t perform in a search, nearly as well as sites that do.
While it may seem difficult to keep up with all the changes, it is really about creating the type of webpage that you would seek information from. Easy to find, easy to read and most importantly, that it’s exactly the information you’ve asked for in the search query.
Remember that professional content writers are here to help you create web pages that readers will love, and therefore Google will love too!
