Search marketing changes all of the time and you need to stay on top of the latest changes for any chance of digital success.
The Searchmetrics Ranking Factors study 2015 has arrived and I wanted to share with you some of the most important changes that will help you rank more successfully in Google over the next few months.
Before we cover the actionable insights from this report, a quick thanks to the people who spent a lot of time authoring this research:
There’s a lot of information in this report (45 pages of useful data in fact) so a few highlights will help you to digest it and get then most from it.
The focus of the whitepaper includes:
The report covers desktop-specific search results, with a mobile version expected over the next few weeks.
The following sections are simple overviews of each of the above and some practical takeaways that you can implement today!
Healthy websites perform better in organic search!
The biggest mistake that website owners make is the failure to prioritise the technical health of their website; from site speed and the ability to crawl and index pages, to technical on page optimisation and website architecture.
Many site owners fail to remove the technical barriers to success, but this doesn’t have to be the case.
One of the biggest oversights in this area is the failure to identify key technical metrics.
This leads to lack on focus on improvement and, in the longer term, gaps within the technical performance of a website’s performance in search.
Deeper content delivers more ranking gains!
A successful search strategy must include the user, and although we are moving into the realms of design and usability, you will not want to overlook the end user in any website updates.
User experiences can directly impact SEO and search performance, so understanding what your audience needs from your website is important.
Its less about keywords and more about ALL of the words!
The amount of content that people have access to has never been greater.
We digest information in more ways than ever before and the expectations placed on that content is exponentially higher than at any other time.
From speed of content delivery and depth of information relayed, content is at the fore in most areas of digital marketing success.
Here are some actions to start improving the value derived from your website content today:
Loved writing for SEJ. Hope you all enjoyed my tips for making blogs convert more. https://t.co/eI6LTT4vzX — Lee Wilson (@LWilson1980) July 25, 2015
Loved writing for SEJ. Hope you all enjoyed my tips for making blogs convert more. https://t.co/eI6LTT4vzX
— Lee Wilson (@LWilson1980) July 25, 2015
The correlation between social performance and search success is ever more prominent. Although not a direct causation, there is enough weight behind social success and search gains that it must be included within your online strategy.
Take a look at some of the social signals that you need to think about for your website’s success online:
Backlinks matter. They matter a lot. Top performing websites have more links!
Google cannot function effectively without backlinks.
No search engine can provide accurate information at this point in time without using backlinks.
Backlinks have earned a pretty bad reputation in SEO, mainly due to the importance of them for ranking success and the associated misuse of them to game the system for artificial wins.
As you might expect from the above, backlinks are still very important and this is visible in the top performing websites in Google.
Lee is Head of Services at Vertical Leap.
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Categories: SEO