While most businesses have websites, many have set them up and not given them much thought. To succeed, businesses will have to re-evaluate their websites and marketing materials.
Your website SEO is crucial to how well your website ranks on Google when a customer searches for products or services like yours. As much as 53% of users click on the organic search results, so ranking high on the search results page is critical.
Google’s algorithm assesses the value of a website against a search term. They measure you against your competitors using a range of factors. As Google’s algorithm continues to evolve older methods of SEO are becoming less effective. In fact, some are now detrimental.
How Can Your Website Do Better?
You need to take a hard look at your website to establish how it can be optimized. Robust SEO begins with understanding your business goals, identifying key opportunities and establishing a digital strategy.
Once you set your goals you can begin building a strategy to achieve them. Your unique goals will guide your decisions on the content you create, the platforms you use, and give you something objective to measure.
You can now beg to create content, whether for your web pages or blog that will help you meet your goals. The key to good content is “ART” – Authority, Relevance, Trust. While there is lots of science that enables us to manage and measure SEO ranking, the true skill of SEO is in the art of content creation.
Google Smarter, Your Content Needs To Be Too
Google’s algorithm does a pretty good job of assessing the wealth of data they gather and ranking websites based on how well they match a search query. Their most recent update is known as BERT. This very complicated piece of code is a natural language processing pre-training approach that can be applied to bodies of text. The goal is to not only recognize keywords but understand their context and tag parts of speech such as questions and answers.
To put it simply, Google is learning to not just identify key phrases but understand the concepts on a page. That means value-added content is more important than ever. The new algorithm attempts to understand the context of the content. Keywords are no longer enough.
Pro Tip: It also favours content that answers questions users are asking. One strategy to consider is to what questions your customers are asking and creating content to answer them.
The Big Picture
Your website is only the beginning of your SEO strategy. Social media platforms, Google reviews, local search, Google My Business, and many others are all being weighed every time Google loads a search result.
If it becomes overwhelming, remember to go back to the basics. What is your goal? How is this tool going to help?
We Can Help
If you’re currently paying for SEO services but are unsure of how your budget is being spent, chances are you’re not getting much value for your buck. Stop paying for SEO trickery and start investing in the ART of SEO. If you’re ready to begin leveraging the real power of SEO and grow your business using the web, fill in the form below to see if you qualify for a Free Marketing Coaching Session.
Whether you are looking to redesign your website or simply need an SEO overhaul, we can help. We take SEO seriously and can guide you through a proven process that will enable your business to grow by leveraging the power of Google using tested tactics.
