What’s Google Been Up To?
According to Moz, Google changes its search algorithm around 500-600 times each year. Most of the changes made by Google are minor, but as marketers we know that there are major updates from time to time that significantly impact search results.
Hummingbird was one of the major updates of 2013, along with several updates to Panda and Penguin algorithms. The Panda and Penguin algorithms both determined Google search results using PageRank and other factors. Hummingbird introduced an entirely new algorithm to help return the best results possible for Google users as quickly and precisely as possible. Hummingbird looks at PageRank, page quality, and hundreds of other factors to determine how relevant and useful a page is in relation with a Google search.
Where is Google Heading?
Each of Google’s algorithm updates are designed to bring users more relevant results while reducing the number of spammy results. With the constant updates and increased scrutiny from Google, relying on SEO for visibility on Google is becoming more and more dangerous. Guest blogging used to be important to build Google juice; now Google is saying the days of guest blogging are over.
I believe that the changes Google is making indicate that they are trying to push users in the direction of using Google AdWords for guaranteed visibility in their SERPs, moving users away from reliance on SEO.
SEO vs. Paid Search
SEO is less reliable than paid search if you’re the marketer. This doesn’t mean that SEO is irrelevant to your business because SEO is still highly relevant to the users that are searching for your business. Take yourself out of your marketing shoes for a minute: Google isn’t building a search engine for you as a marketer; Google is building a search engine for you as a user. And as a user you want to find the most relevant content to your search, fast. Google has made it clear to marketers that the most important SEO value factor is relevance. Google has also given marketers everything they need to make their SEO strategy effective; they’ve just made it more difficult.
Considering the fact that 70% of the links search users click on are organic (Search Engine Journal), it’s worth your while to spend the time and effort it takes to make SEO work. One way to make SEO really work for your business is putting time and effort into creating high quality and relevant content tailored directly to your users and customers. Creating content that users can put to work, whether they buy from you or not, will help boost your SEO in the eyes of Google. As for creating content using the right keywords users are searching for, consider this: the death of keywords inside of Google is not the death of SEO. Marketers can still use analytics to see the pages and content that are driving relevant traffic, and from that information it is easy to infer which keywords are helping drive the right kind of traffic to your website.
SEO leads even have higher close rates than outbound leads a whopping 14.6% close rate compared to 1.7%. Another way to improve your SEO (and therefore close more leads) is by redefining the content and core product/service pages that you want Google to index highly. At DialogTech, we rebuilt our cornerstone content pages, killed irrelevant and unnecessary pages, and reordered the structure of pages that we know are relevant and useful to our customers and prospects. In doing so, we’ve been able to increase our organic position for several of our top product pages, while also increasing organic traffic to these pages from Google. In short, SEO is still relevant you just have to work harder at it than ever before. By making SEO more difficult to do well, Google pushes those users who are less apt to put the time and effort into the SEO process to use paid search.
Using paid search, marketers who have less time to put into content creation and SEO can guarantee that their website shows up in search results when (and where) they want it too. Google’s algo updates are designed to keep organic search listings truly organic and as a way to prevent users from being able to manipulate their way to the top.
What other SEO strategies have you come across that have been effective? Leave your tips and questions in the comments section below to start a discussion.