Winston Churchill once said, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” It seems like Google agrees with that statement, particularly when it comes to its search algorithm. In fact, Google changes its algorithm approximately 500 to 600 times every year, according to the marketing software as a service company Moz.
You might think it’s futile to try to keep your site optimized in line with those frequent changes, but keep in mind that most of them are minor. Additionally, it’s possible to identify broad trends in Google’s approach to organic search ranking (e.g., as more people browse the Web using mobile devices, the search engine is partial toward more mobile-friendly sites). Here are four steps you can take to “future proof” your site, ensuring it’s in line with what the Google algorithm will likely favor going forward.
1. Conduct a site audit.
A website content audit can help you pinpoint factors that work against search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Duplicate or low-quality content will have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.
To boost click-through rates, it’s also important to have meta titles and meta descriptions (the titles and descriptions that will show up in search results) for your pages. To avoid having your titles and descriptions cut off on the Google results page, limit titles to 55 characters (including your brand/company name) and descriptions to 150 characters.
2. Focus on relevance rather than keywords.
The correlations between Google ranking and keywords in internal links, external links, and the body of a page are trending downward, according to a 2015 ranking factors infographic from Searchmetrics, an enterprise platform for SEO. Oversaturating your site with keywords doesn’t work anymore if you’re looking to increase your rank.
Meanwhile, relevant terms – a new feature – have a very positive impact on how close your site gets to the top of Google. Therefore, while you shouldn’t write keywords off completely just yet, it’s best to focus more on industry trends, important concepts, and being relevant (e.g., commenting on current events) rather than simply peppering your pages with keywords. Search engines increasingly use latent semantic indexing to identify and prioritize content that’s actually relevant and valuable.
3. Optimize the user experience.
When Google ranks your site, it considers indicators of how much users like your site, such as your bounce rate and the amount of time people spend on your site. Therefore, making your site more user friendly can boost your ranking, increase traffic, and benefit your business.
Click-through rate, time on site, and bounce rate are the most important and influential user experience factors when it comes to search rankings, according to Searchmetrics. You can assess all of those factors and look at behavior flow/how users navigate and interact with your site using Google Analytics.
4. Make your site mobile friendly.
Related to user experience, implementing a responsive design can also have a positive impact on your search ranking. With the growing prevalence of mobile browsing, you can’t afford to ignore how your site renders for people who decide to view it on their phones. A responsive design is best, since maintaining a separate mobile version (e.g., m.yourwebsite.com) can be challenging and inefficient.
In order to optimize for mobile, you’ll want to test your site using Google’s Mobile Friendly Test. From there, you can install a responsive theme and take steps such as limiting images (which can make your site slow to load for mobile users), simplifying input forms, using bigger, easier-to-read fonts, and more.
If you’re looking for guidance on how to future proof your site for Google algorithm changes, the experts at Traffic Jams can help you develop and implement a solid SEO strategy. Contact us today at (855) 599-9998 or email sales@trafficjams.com.
