How To Prepare For Google SEO Algorithms?
Many companies are starting to grow their digital presence and are utilizing SEO to achieve success. While many choose to do this in-house, others may utilize SEO agencies such as ReachLocal, Boostability, or Peaks Digital Marketing. Before you decide on what to do next with your SEO, it’s important to understand how Google’s SEO algorithms work and how they can affect your digital marketing strategies.
Google is best known as an internet search engine that allows users to input keywords and locate relevant websites based on those parameters. It is a powerful beast, holding an incredible search engine market share of approximately 90%, and hungry.
If you do not play by its rules, your website will disappear into the infinite void, filled with endless websites that failed to rank properly according to its ever-changing SEO Algorithms (the criteria that Google uses to decide which gets priority in a given search).
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” which is the growing art of tweaking website pages, blog articles, and other features to satisfy the way that Google organizes results that appear when a search is initiated.
Since the top three sites that appear for a given search absorb a whopping 75% of all clicks, website owners scramble to understand Google’s formula for determining those highest search results in an attempt to bolster their own websites showing up to avoid disappearing into the void.
Everyone wants their website to perform well and earn visitors. So, understandably, SEO optimization has begun somewhat of an art. With a proper understanding of these algorithms, anyone can climb that ladder, and with enough work, break into the top ten, or maybe even that coveted top three.
Someone has to fill that spot – why not you?
Table of Contents
How to Use SEO to Earn Views & Prepare for Google SEO
Algorithms?
The logistics behind Google’s methodology are fairly complicated, so it’s easier to focus on what you can do to rank higher. Ranking higher is a big deal because bringing people to your site through search engine links is free, as opposed to shelling out money for advertising.
1. Research SEO Keywords
If you want to reach the greatest number of people possible, it’s important to know exactly what people are searching for. The more of these high-traffic keywords that you have on your website, the more likely you are to show up on a search.
Keep in mind, you still have to entice the searchers to click on the link to your website, but they can’t do that if they don’t see you at all.
There are several ways to find the most popular keywords and searches that people are performing. One really simple way is to start typing something related to the main content of your website and look at the suggested options that pop up while you are typing.
For example, if you live in Colorado and have your location settings enabled, you could search up “SEO marketing” and expect to see queries based on what others in your area have been searching up such as “SEO marketing Denver” or “SEO marketing Colorado.”
Those algorithms are designed to offer the most common options to save you time when typing in the search bar. If they are the most common options, that means a lot of people have been using those searches, which is why they appeared in the first place.
Take advantage of that to find good phrases and keywords to weave expertly into your website content.
You can also come up with keywords that are commonly used to refer to your major website topic or business and sprinkle those about liberally, too.
This has a second use, as well. If you type those keywords in, as if you were trying to find your own website, look at the earliest options that show up. If these are your competitors, they’re clearly doing something right, so research their page to try to understand what they are doing that earned them that spot.
As this SEO thing is such a big deal, there are also a lot of free and commercial tools that can do the heavy lifting for you, spitting out well-researched SEO keywords on your behalf.
2. Write Content Using SEO Keywords
Once you know which keywords are hot, the next step is to generate written content about topics that are related to your website or business.
The idea behind this is that the more articles you have out there, on related topics, using keywords that people use regularly to find things, the more likely something from your website will pop up on the search engine and draw the visitor to your site.
You still need to provide quality content, as Google takes this into account using their magical algorithms to make sure that you’re not just spamming the internet with the internet equivalent of junk mail.
Keep in mind, popular keywords change over time, and if your articles stay the same over time, Google’s algorithms may begin to reduce their priority level. That means that you should update your articles, web pages, and other relevant writings periodically, and try to include whatever new keywords are popular.
3. Build a Link Network
Once you’ve mastered the art of using keywords and regular content to draw visits, there is another approach you should take. You want to take advantage of other websites’ traffic.
Try to build a relationship with other websites and establish a partnership with the intent of convincing them to share links to your website on theirs or in the content they generate. This is, of course, a form of advertising. If necessary, you can do the same for them, too.
4. Working the Algorithm
One of the major keys to performing well on the search engine is to direct a lot of traffic to your site using the SEO techniques above and similar methods.
While Google refuses to reveal its top criteria for how it chooses what to display where, there do seem to be some common trends that can determine how well you rank:
- Content Relevance – Google uses a process called “crawling” to essentially sample material from websites to determine how useful and relevant the content is to different searches. This is why generating quality content can come in handy.
- Site Design – Your website should be attractive and user-friendly.
- Mobile Design – The searches for mobile devices are different, so make sure you have a user-friendly and attractive mobile version.
- Security – The algorithms prefer sites with HTTPS status, signifying that your website is secure and protected.
- User Engagement – If users not only go to your website, but they also interact with the content there, that will score you points.
- Quality links – Make sure any links you use go to relevant content or they may be ignored.
5. Core Algorithm Changes
From time to time, Google makes changes to the way the algorithm works. Minor changes do not generally affect how well your site is optimized, although you may notice some changes.
Every once in a while, they have core changes, and those can have a more dramatic effect.
Anytime Google releases a core algorithm change, you should read about it and perform research because it may require you to make modifications to your site and content to remain competitive.
Read More: SEO Checklist for Web Developers 2022
