Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Junior SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Google’s John Mueller spoke this week about Google’s SEO best practices, how long they should take to work and in some cases why they don’t work at all.
Do SEO Best Practices Work
Mueller was asked the question by an SEO who has spent the last year implementing SEO changes to his website and wanted to know how long the changes would take to show in search rankings.
‘’I changed my website a year ago and did a lot of work on SEO. Should this be affecting my website’s traffic by now?’’
Mueller revealed that it depends on what SEO strategies were implemented on the website as some SEO best practices on their own would not be enough to improve search rankings.
‘’It’s tricky to say much here. I don’t know what specifically you did on SEO, and I don’t know if that would have resulted in significant changes. There are many best practices which have little day to day effect on the performance of a website. For example, having a clean page structure helps search engines understand the content better on a page, but it might not necessarily result in immediate search ranking or traffic changes.’’
While it is beneficial to follow all SEO best practices, as Mueller states not all of the changes will have a direct impact on how your website ranks but merely help Google to understand or read your content quicker.
What to do if your site isn’t ranking?
Content is king with SEO, if the content on the site isn’t good enough, it simply won’t rank. Google also takes other ranking factors into account including:
- User Experience
- Mobile Friendliness
- Backlinks
- Crawlability
- Site speed
- Domain authority
All of these factors are important to make sure your site is helpful for search engines and users to understand your content and make it credible, but making sure the content is informative is of utmost importance as having an optimised site that doesn’t fulfil the end users request isn’t enough for Google to rank your content.
Creating Content for your Site
There are a number of different ranking signals Google likes to see from content that makes it helpful and informative:
- Detailed Content Making sure your content goes into detail on a topic is important so that Google knows users can come to your site and get all the answers they need
- Use Bullet Points and Lists Helps to structure your content and makes it more digestible for the end user
- Use Headings and Subheadings Like bullet points headings also help to structure your content and makes it easier to read, improving the user experience
- Punctuation and grammar Make sure your spelling is on point so users can understand what your content is about
- Optimise for keywords Google users keywords to understand what your content is about, optimise your content for the correct keywords so you can rank for these terms
- Include images with alt text Including visual aids is always good and makes content richer, make sure to add alt text to images as it makes it more accessible for impaired users
- Tone of voice Making sure your tone of voice is important and consistent throughout your website will help users understand your content and brand identity clearly
Creating high quality content, alongside optimising content with SEO best practices will give SEOs the best chance of ranking high up on the SERP.
Here at Intelligency we specialise in helping clients improve their SEO performance. If you want help improving your SEO feel free to contact us at info@intelligencygroup.com.
