Phil Kelsey

During 2013, Google continued to make strong steps in the fight against spam and taking shortcuts with content in order to maintain their commitment to delivering the best results.

They’re continually becoming more in tune with the type of information the reader wants, as well as what they expect from websites.

Moving forward, business websites (whether brochure or e-commerce style) must be aware of the changes and thus adequately serve the need of the end-user and the search engine.

The constant fight against spam

Google’s Penguin and Panda developments continue to broaden the search engine’s definition of what constitutes as ‘spam’. They look deeper and more critically at your content as well as the quality and natural behaviour of links coming into pages.

The Hummingbird update was, in part, Google’s response to the increasing shift towards mobile and tablet use. Google now has better recognition and understanding of conversational search types (e.g. voice activated) so they can provide a more accurate set of results.

To do:

1. Are you including all the detail necessary within your content, or are you holding back to a specific word count or lack of time?
2. Content is crucial to your online success; so you be creative with much more insightful and engaging information.

Stop getting caught up on rankings for keywords

Keywords and rankings can quite easily be a distraction from what really matters, the content. Focussing on short and popular keywords gets in the way of creating extremely insightful content and end-user driven pages.

In short, if you want to be positioned well for “[industry] in Lincoln” then make sure you have the best website in regards to content, usability and popularity.

To do:

1. On a Monday, write down the 5 most common questions you get asked within your business and start writing; don’t hold back! Just make sure you regularly make reference to the question so it can be matched to the user driven searches.
2. Use something like Google Analytics to get an understanding of user behaviour on how they navigate through your website. Once they have read your articles, are they subscribing to newsletters, going to your social accounts or making an enquiry?

So stop focussing on keywords, and start focussing on the user.

To help you get started, I’ve published an article about how to create a content strategy that you might find useful.

Make mobile users your priority

Since the introduction of the Hummingbird update, the need to service and take the mobile user into consideration has never been greater.

With features like Siri, users make searches using their voice. When people use their voice, their questions tend to be longer, detailed and more specific.  This means that your content should cover all angles and should contain structured data.

From a usability point of view, mobile users want their information fast, make their purchases quickly and not have to pinch and zoom to read the text.  If you’re not giving the users what they expect, they will go elsewhere.

With the mobile search market already extremely large and growing quickly, if your website isn’t friendly for the mobile user, then you are way behind what is happening now.

To do:

1. If you haven’t already, make 2014 the year you address the usability for the mobile user, i.e. having a mobile option of your website through responsive design or other means.

These days, success in search engines is a lot more complex. If you adopt a more strategic user-driven search strategy now before your competitors, then you are opening up a huge opportunity for yourself.

Terrible content is being replaced with intelligent content, which is everything that the search engines always wanted to put forward.

In my earlier columns, I shared some techniques on how to improve your website’s relevance and direction. The next step is to encourage people to connect with you online, which demonstrates a level of trust and authority to search engines.

A link is a referral, and referrals are golden

When someone links to your website, that’s their way of saying “I trust these guys, go and visit them to find out more about what I’m talking about,” and are willing to point their current website traffic to you.

The search engines treat a referral the same way we do, and like we do, only take advice from the qualified refers who are trusted. They measure the quality of the referrers’ website and then weight the connection accordingly.

How to determine a good referring link

In everyday life, the referrals we earn in business are triggered, such as by delivering a great service. Any referral from people who have played witness to your excellence would have more influence than that of a salesman, getting paid to generate you leads. That is exactly how you should compare earned links in relation to quick and easy links. That is the key to success: to earn your links.

Techniques used to easily acquire links that quickly influence your search positions are not taken very seriously by the search engines – to which they may remove you from their results pages. Two of the most common ways people acquire ‘easy referral links’ that have little substance or influence are:

• Uploading free content to article directories. For example, eZine articles or Go Articles
• Submitting your website into free directories that have no approval processes; for example sites named like “littlewebdirectory.com” or “greatestdirectory.com”

Earning strong referral links

One way is to quite simply put yourself out there and keep people informed with what you’re up to. Raising awareness of your business through social media, blogging and making contributions within discussion groups are a few ways to get your website and content seen. In time, you’ll start to get recognised and noticed for your work, and people may mention you or reference you within their own blogs. It’s not easy. It takes time and focus.

You could get mentioned for anything. For example, you may have recently:

• Won an award which triggers conversation and online discussion
• Been involved in a large local project that people are talking about
• Launched a new product or service that is unique to other in the market
• Recently published some great hints and tips that people find useful

By encouraging such activities and earning these referrals, you will notice your referral traffic will steadily increase with people genuinely interested to learn more, and search traffic will steadily increase as search engines continually recognise your referrals are credible and real.

With everything you do, think like Google

It’s their job to recommend the most relevant and trusted websites to us when we make a search. For relevance they look at the quality of your content and for trust, they take signals from your “referral network” and how trusted they are within their community.

In summary:

There are no quick wins or shortcuts when it comes to improving your search engines rankings. Search engines are extremely sensitive to manipulative behaviour, and won’t hesitate to remove you from the results if they notice something fishy – just like we’ll instantly stop recommending someone.

I’m going to talk more about this at the Lincolnshire Marketing Expo in October, so if you want to hear more, you can come along.