Deciding whether or not to invest time, effort, and money into something that doesn’t seem like a sure thing is not easy. As soon as you Google the word SEO, you’re just inundated with guides, tips, best practices, and lots of other information. Looks like you either need to hire an expert (whose opinion you can’t trust if they can benefit from the result of said opinion), or take the plunge yourself. The former will likely be quite expensive financially, the latter expensive in effort and time.

So this piece is for those who are on the fence – unsure whether SEO for their website would be worth it or not, but aren’t willing to spend too much time or money to find out. We’re outlining a few simple(ish) steps you can take to see whether working on SEO will bring real value.

Let’s get started

The whole point of this exercise is to see whether your particular website is primed for a boost in organic traffic with some SEO effort. To do this, we’ll be taking a look at a few pieces of existing content on your website, then spending some time lightly optimising these pages to see whether they benefit from SEO. Before we get started though, make sure you have access to:

• Google Analytics (or equivalent)
• Your website’s backend

If you don’t have these on hand, get in touch with your web admins, or speak to us and we’ll do it for you.

Look for a few pages that already have some traffic

First off, find a page on your site that already draws a little bit of traffic. Take a look at your analytics tools over the past few months, and take note of any particular pages that are already popular, have valuable content, and (if you have the data available), drive conversions.

Ideally, the pages you choose are ones with some informational content, rather than pure conversion (a blog post, for example).

Choose target keyphrase/keyword for each

Essentially, a target (or focus) keyphrase is the search term that people type into Google that you’d like your content to rank for. You’ll need to choose a keyphrase for the page you’ve chosen, so we can optimise the page for it. So how do you find the right one?

As an example, if your page provides information about interior design trends, you should start with the main subject. In this case, interior design (obviously). Then, use a free keyword research tool, such as this one from ahrefs.com. From there, you can see what search terms are most popular and relevant to the topic. You even get a difficulty score, which will tell you how much effort you’ll need to be able to rank for that keyphrase.

In this case Volume represents how many searches are happening with that keyphrase per month, and KD or Keyword Difficulty represents how difficult it will be to rank on the first page of search results for that keyphrase.

The aim here is to find a keyphrase for the page you’ve chosen that:

• Is relevant to the content you already have. Ideally, your content solves a problem or pain point that is revealed by the search term itself.
• Is not extremely competitive. The more competitive the keyphrase is, the more difficult it will be to rank. Look for a low KD (Keyword Difficulty) score.
• Has a decent amount of search volume. “Decent” depends on the potential size of the target audience and the value of a single lead.

You should spend a little bit of time on this bit of the process. Choosing the right keyphrase is probably the most vital part of the exercise – it will feature heavily in the next step.

Optimise those pages with these best practices

Get your chosen keyphrase, and make sure it features in the following places on the page:

• URL
• Page title
• Meta description
• H1 & H2 header tags
• Image alt tags
• Body content
• Image file names

Tip: Don’t flood the page too much. Spamming the keyphrase will set off alarms with the Google algorithm, and this exercise will have done more harm than good. Don’t forget, you’re writing for humans, and humans don’t like too much repetition (unless it’s from Daft Punk).

If you’re not sure what those listed things are, here’s a complete glossary of SEO-related terms. CTRL-F is your friend.

Build internal & external links

Having a healthy number of internal and a couple of external links usually make a page more useful to whoever is browsing it. If you have content on other pages that would be relevant to anyone who used the focus keyphrase, make sure you link to it appropriately. The same goes for external links – look for content outside your website that would be genuinely useful to include in your content.

Post on social

If you already have relatively active social media pages, make sure the page you’re doing this exercise on has been shared recently on all the platforms you use. When the Google algorithm finds a valid link to a particular page, it deems that page slightly more valuable – especially if coming from a high-authority website. If you create sufficiently great content, you might be able to get other websites to link to your page.

Wait a week or two

This is the most frustrating bit – SEO takes a bit of time to start showing results because you need to wait for Google to scan your website. That typically happens once every few days, so it’s probably best to set yourself a reminder for about 10 days in the future to check the results. 

Did it work?

Take a look at the organic traffic received from search engines – has it increased? If you search the focus keyphrase yourself, did your website’s result jump up? If you answer yes to any of those two questions, you know there’s potential for more value to be gained from SEO. 

What’s next?

Do it again. Find more pages that could benefit from the entire process. At some point though, you may find yourself up against a keyphrase with too much competition. Or you might struggle to figure out how to target a very particular user intent. Or you might need someone to take on the task of writing engaging content. The structure of the website itself could also be holding you back. 

That’s where a lot more of the technical stuff comes in, and you’re probably best off getting in touch with an experienced expert. Especially if you’re seeing valuable results coming in from the effort you’ve put in.

The post Is SEO worth it for you? Here’s how to find out. appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

A noun, a verb, a culture… a way of life?
“Google is God” is what one marketing expert once said, and he may have been right.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and explore some of the milestones which made Google what it is today.

Memory lane starts here

• www.google.com was registered as a domain on September the 15th 1997 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The term google is a play on words with the word googol which is the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Larry and Sergey wanted to create a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web – and it worked!
• The first Google doodle was the image of the burning man incorporated into the logo. This was because Larry and Sergey were off to the Burning Man Festival and wanted to let people know where they were. This was in August 1998, the same time when Andy Bechtolsheim, co founder of Sun wrote a $100,000 cheque to Google Inc. – a company which didn’t exist yet.
• Google filed for incorporation on September 4th 1998 and deposited Andy Bechtolsheim’s cheque. They worked out of a garage and hired their first employee – Craig Silverstein.
• In May 2000 Google won its First Webby Awards – Technical Achievement and People’s Choice.
• In October 2000 Google AdWords was launched with 350 customers. It promised to allow keyword targeting, performance feedback, and online activation with a credit card.
• July 2001 Google Images is launched providing access to 250 million images.
• In December 2001 Google released it’s first zeitgeist – showing what terms people had searched for throughout the year.
• Google AdWords got a major overhaul in February 2002, it now included cost per click pricing.
• Google AdSense is launched in March 2003 – allowing business owners to access Google’s network of advertisers.
• Google Print was launched in December 2003. It’s now known as Google Books and is a collection of more than 20 million scanned books.
• In April 2004 Gmail was launched, offering 1 GB of storage. It now has over 425 million users.
• Google Analytics is released in November 2005 – allowing marketers to effectively analyse their campaigns.
• In 2006 Google released a variety of apps such as Google Calendar, Google Trends, Google Translate, and Google Wallet. Google also acquires YouTube.
• Android is announced in November 2007
• September 2008 – Google Chrome is announced – by 2013 Chrome boasts more than 750 million users.
• In September 2010 Google Instant is launched – showing search results as you type.
• TrueView is launched in December 2010– ads on YouTube now allow you to skip the ad after 5 seconds if you feel it’s not relevant. This helped marketers analyse their adverts and made them work harder and getting people’s attention.
• Two-step verification is launched in February 2011– providing added security to Google accounts.
• April 2012– Google Drive is launched, simplifying the lives of many by allowing users to share, store, and edit information in a cloud based system.
• Google Now makes an appearance in June 2012 – giving you information before you’ve even asked for it!
• October 2014 – Inbox for Gmail is launched allowing you to focus on the emails that really matter.

And what about 2015?

Well, with Google you never know. One thing is certain – Google has had a huge impact on most people’s lives in one way or the other, and this won’t stop any time soon.
We like to think Google has improved life for the better by connecting more people and allowing for better dissemination of information. What’s your take on this?

The post G is for Google appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Why is everybody moving more of their spend online?

The answer is simple, really. The value for money to be had with effective online marketing is stunning when compared to traditional media. No matter what your ultimate promotional goal is, you always get much more mileage from online marketing.

What are the ways I can advertise online?

There are loads of ways to grow your brand and sales efforts online, but in reality, when starting off you have five main ways of buying advertising online.

Banner (or Display) advertising

This is one of the very first forms of online advertising. It started off as the equivalent of print advertising, and it was therefore mainly priced that way. People used to just buy slots around the content of a site. Nowadays it is more common to buy banner advertising based on impressions though.
We usually recommend display advertising for one main goal – when you want to build brand recollection pretty far up in the sales funnel. Banner advertising is a great way of getting people to know and remember your brand.
Don’t try to use banner advertising to drive traffic to your site, though, because you’re usually going to be looking at a very costly exercise.

Video Advertising

A heck of a lot of video is consumed online on a daily basis. You can hijack some of these videos by inserting your video before whatever the audience you’re trying to target was going to watch.
It’s a more expensive medium than simple banner advertising, but gives you the opportunity to get a similar effect as TV advertising. Remember that on Youtube, for example, viewers can skip the ad after about 5 seconds, so you have to make sure that you start telling a compelling story immediately, otherwise viewers will just press “skip”.

Search Advertising

Most people’s buying journeys start with a search nowadays. If you can get your product or service in front of your potential customers at this phase in the buying cycle then you have a much better chance of converting them into customers.
Google understood this first (and best). Look where they are now. This tells you something – search advertising is effective, and companies are willing to pay a lot for spots at the top of search results.
You can’t buy your way to the top of search results organically, but you can buy your way to the top via search engine advertising. And how do you do this? By bidding the highest for the spot in particular. Google (and other search engines) have a “mini auction” every time somebody runs a search. This sees the highest bidder getting the first spot for that particular search result.

Social media advertising

Social media advertising works in pretty much the same way as display advertising does, but there’s an added dimension – the social aspect.
Even though the concept is pretty much the same – you’re placing an ad in front of an audience based on their media consumption (as opposed to a specific search), you have two main advantages.
The first advantage is that most social media advertising is native. It is presented in the same format as all other content, so a news feed advert on my news feed in Facebook will look exactly like the photo of my school-friend-I-haven’t-actually-seen-in-10-years’ new chubby baby. This means I’m primed to consume the content because I’m already in “reading mode” when the ad is served to me (unlike banner advertising, which usually lives outside the content on sites).
The second is that it is, yes, you guessed it: social. So if my best friend likes a restaurant and that restaurant runs an advertising campaign on Facebook, it can specify that the advert should only be served to friends of its customers. That way I see an ad in context – so I know that someone I trust has already vetted this restaurant, making it an implicit recommendation.

Retargeting

Retargeting is more complicated to set up and to achieve, but it is gathering quite a bit of momentum in recent years. But what is it?
Simple retargeting works by building up an audience of people who have visited your site and serving them ads that are relevant to your brand. This can be done by advertising platforms which have a large network of advertising partners.
Have you ever searched for a product on a site like Amazon or Booking.com? You are usually followed around with this (or similar ads) for a few weeks. The ads are not simply re-targeted (where I get served an ad simply because I visited a particular website), but programmed to my behaviour.
So booking.com will not just advertise its service in general to me, it will push a hotel in the city I had just searched for. This is an even more complicated system of retargeting, one that re-targets to individuals, not just generic audiences.

Direct deals

Direct deals can be far more flexible. These depend largely on the publisher and can be a combination of all the advertising methods above and more. Some sites sell packages that go beyond regular advertising – including deals for content, sponsoring newsletters, “reviews”, and leads.
Direct deals also allow for a wider take-over of sites. Some sites allow you to take over the site completely, with a re-skin of the site based on the advertiser’s needs. This is a far more immersive experience, and if done well can actually be pretty effective.
Buying directly from sites also allows you to implement advertising technology that would be harder to achieve through a network – such as ads that push a whole site’s content down and start playing a video when a visitor clicks on them.
As we’ll see next week, direct deals are usually more expensive than using a third party medium such as a banner network, however you usually have as close to a guarantee as possible of highly targeted traffic.

What’s next?

This week we’ve seen the different ways in which you can spend your money online. We haven’t really gone into how you buy advertising though. How will you know what to spend, and where to spend it? And more importantly, how will you measure the success (or failure) of your campaigns?

Shameless plug

Most companies don’t really know where to start with online advertising, which is why we’re here to help. We plan out your spending in a way that brings you much more value for money. If you feel you’re missing out on your business’ online potential but don’t really know where to start, then just drop us a line and we’ll help you get much more bang for your buck.

The post Introduction to online advertising – Part 1 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

First off – how will this affect you?

This depends on your answer to the next question:

Is your site mobile friendly?

If you’re not really sure, then you can check out what Google itself thinks. Just insert your website’s address here and you’ll learn soon enough.There’s no ranking, your site either passes the test or it fails it.
Passed the test? Then this is good news for you. You now have an advantage over people whose sites fail the test on mobile searches. Failed? Going forward, when people use mobile phones to search for keywords that you ranked well on previously, your site’s ranking will drop down the rankings.

Why should I care?

These two (identical) statistics should make you care:

• Up to 80% of Internet users use smartphones to search.
• 80% of local searches that originate on mobiles result in a conversion.

With numbers like these, the only thing that remains surprising is why not more people are putting a bigger effort into making their website mobile-friendly.

What should I do?

Simple – if you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, then get in touch with your favourite web design agency (us, quite naturally) and get us working on a site immediately. If you’re not quite ready for that, the least you can do is start creating some new pages that are mobile-friendly. The ranking is based on pages, not whole sites, so this way you can start winning Google over on your new content.

The post FAQ special – Is your site ready for Google's biggest update in years? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Choosing a domain name

If you already have a domain name, this section might not be very useful to you. Then again, knowing the gist of why a domain helps SEO won’t hurt. If you’re still trying to choose the best domain name for your business or project, don’t give up.
It’s becoming very difficult to find the URL you want that is not registered yet. I’ve found that the best domain ends with a .com but there are successful websites nowadays that end with every possibility you might think of.
Contrary to popular belief, the keywords that you’re aiming for don’t really have to be in the domain name, so you can feel free to choose a name which is not directly related to your subject matter.
After all, it’s all about the way you run your site, and in terms of SEO it doesn’t make much of a difference if the content of your website is relevant to the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
It is also good to know that some sources say that having your website registered for at least a year helps. As your domain ages it gets more attention from Google.
The length of your URL is another factor that should be given some attention, as it is suggested that the length of the URL will be better if it’s 8 letters or less.

Choosing the best keywords

Now that you have chosen a domain name, you can start researching the best keywords for your website. By best I mean the ideal set of words to use in your site’s content to make it more appealing to search engines.
This helps search engines get to know your website better, and consequently show it as in results which match your target users’ searches.
Start off by finding what keywords your competitors use and what people are more likely to search for when looking for sites like yours.
Next, gather the top 10 keywords and start including them in the text of your website. Remember to add some of your main keywords to some article headlines to make them more prominent.
But don’t overdo it and duplicate a lot of content just to stuff different keywords in. Google will realise that you’re trying to cheat and won’t be very willing to show your content to those searching for it.

Get your content to work for you

Now that you know what keywords are best to use on your website, it’s time to getting them to work for you. The best way to start is to add them to title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions and in H1 tags.
Contrary to popular perception, content length doesn’t really matter as long as it’s original content. So don’t lose sleep over whether the text on your pages is is 500, 1000 or 2000 words long, even though quite a few sources say that the ideal is to have around 1500 words per page. It’s better to have less content that makes sense in the context of your site than to have a lot of content that’s rubbish just for the sake of it.
Other factors that might need some attention include page speed and image optimisation, finding and fixing broken links, grammar and spelling, HTML errors, W3C validation, and designing a user-friendly layout.

Bringing your website to life

User experience is another vital factor that determines how much traffic you can get to your website. You cannot just have a website designed and leave it there doing nothing. It’s best to update it regularly to show Google that it’s still active and might be useful to users. It’s also important to have a contact us page that is clear and easy to understand and use, maybe with a form and a map so users can easily find you and get in touch if they need to.
Google also promotes mobile-friendly websites on searches originating from mobile devices. Having a mobile version of your site (or a responsive website that adapts itself automatically to mobile devices) will therefore increase your chances of winning traffic from mobile searches.
Other relevant technical factors include the presence of a sitemap, using Google Analytics & Webmaster tools to improve performance, easy navigation, and including terms of use and privacy policy pages.
The presence of reviews, testimonials and comments on your website help perception too, but this all depends on the nature of your business.nIf you’re working on a link building (and/or guest posting) exercise to improve your chances of being ranked higher on search engines you have to ensure that you’re only getting links from high quality sites that are relevant to your industry.

Engaging users through social media

Your presence on different social media is considered to be as important as having a website. There are a lot of platforms to choose from to engage users, but you have to decide on which are the best ones for your business.
For example, it doesn’t make sense to use LinkedIn if your target audience aren’t business people. Google gives a lot of attention to businesses that have a significant amount of tweets, number of Facebook likes and shares on Facebook, Pinterest pins and other mentions and interactions.
A lot of hype was made about whether or not Google+ ultimately makes any difference or not for SEO. Lately, Google released an announcement saying they are going to split Google+ into different sections so that it will make much more sense to get some SEO relevance from it.
As you may have noticed this topic is broader than expected and might be quite a lot to handle. If you decide that you need some extra advice, we’ll be glad to help you along with the process.
As you go along be careful you don’t opt for shortcuts to optimise your website as Google will penalise your website and it might be difficult to earn its trust back.
Remember that SEO might take a lot of time to eventually work and get you to the top of results, so roll your sleeves and start working on it now.

The post What's all this fuss about SEO? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Aligning the customer buying cycle with SEO

In everything you do, whether it’s SEO, content marketing or any other type of web marketing, make sure that you understand how the customer’s buying cycle fits in. Just to refresh your memory a little bit, the buying cycle is split up into 4 different stages; attention, interest, desire and action. You can use the acronym AIDA to help you remember the sequence. There are other variations that incorporate other stages, such as the loyalty stage at the end of the cycle. Below is a diagram that shows the different stages:

 

The attention stage

This is the initial step that every consumer makes before buying a product or service. Usually at this stage the consumer searches for a product by using a generic keyword such as ‘black car’. The consumer is quite unsure about the different models and prices available. At this stage the consumer is made aware of the different options available.
Keywords that fall under this category are quite high in terms of search engine traffic and since the consumer is not yet ready to buy, it won’t be worth focusing your SEO strategy on these keywords. This is because it is quite difficult to rank for these keywords due to high competition, and if you had to rank for these keywords there’s a very slim chance that you’ll get a return.

The interest and desire stages

The consumer is now searching for keywords such as “black car reviews” or “compare black cars”. At these stages the consumer is still not ready to buy, however he might be susceptible to marketing messages related to the benefits of a particular model. By now, he has gathered enough information and has a clear picture on what he really wants to buy. It is important to include some of these keywords in your SEO campaign so that when the consumer is looking for different alternatives, your product will be one of the available options. However it is important to understand that it will take more time to rank for these keywords since a lot of your competitors might also target them.

The action stage

The last stage of the buying cycle is when the consumer is ready to take an action and is finally interested to make the actual purchase.  The consumer is now searching for keywords that are specific, such as “Ford Fiesta 2012 model” or “mini cooper 2013”. You definitely have to include these types of keywords since there is a better chance that you will get a return. This is because at this stage your website visitors already know what they want to purchase. So now it’s a question of whether your product is better than your competitor’s, and whether it is at the right price that the consumer is willing to pay for.

Keyword Research

If you want to get a return out of SEO, you need to make sure that you’re focusing on highly targeted keywords. What I mean by this is that you need to focus on keywords that will attract customers that are at the final stages of the buying cycle discussed above. In terms of potential traffic, it will be much lower than if you had to target generic keywords and you might think that it won’t be worth all the effort. However, since we’re interested in increasing our sales figures by using SEO, our best bet would be to attract customers that are ready to buy.
You will find these types of keywords by using tools such as the Google Keyword Planner. This is a tool that you can find in your Google Adwords account. If you don’t have one yet, you can go here to create one for yourself. As soon as you log into your account you will see something like the screenshot below:

 
Now go to Tools and click on Keyword Planner as shown below:

When you’re in the Keyword Planner section choose “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas,” it is found under “What would you like to do?” Now start entering some keywords related to your product. Let’s say that we sell Ford Fiesta cars, the form will look something like this:

For this purpose leave the other fields empty. Your next step would be to choose the countries and languages that you’d like to target; all found under ‘Targeting’. When you’re ready with the form click on ‘Get Ideas’. Now choose the ‘Keyword Ideas’ so that the tool will give you a list of keywords with the average monthly search traffic next to each one of them. In other words, this is the number of times that visitors have searched for that particular keyword in Google. As you can see from the list, the more specific the keyword is, the less traffic it generates. Now the question would be, which keywords should you choose? The next section will explain how you will find those keywords that will give you a bigger return.

Finding the Right Keywords for your SEO Campaign

The most common method of choosing keywords for your SEO campaign is by selecting those keywords from the list that you’ve managed to compile in the keyword research phase. Usually you’d choose those keywords that are highly specific to your product.
However there’s a much better way to do it. You can allocate a small budget, not more than $1000, and spend it on Google Adwords. The idea here would be to choose a couple of highly targeted keywords that you’ve found in the research phase and test them on a PPC (pay per click) campaign. Run the campaign for a couple of months let’s say 2 to 3 months. Then spot those keywords that converted, and use them in your SEO campaign. With this method, you’ll save a lot of money on SEO because you will only focus on keywords that are going to get you the money.

Conclusion

As a CMO, make sure that you share your ideas and intentions with your web marketing agency. You have to show them that you know all about the whole process of how SEO works, and that you’re not only interested in getting traffic, you also want to get a return out of it. I’m mentioning this because a lot of agencies out there will simply focus on getting you ranked highly in Google for particular keywords, and that’s it. They will tell you that they are going to get you massive traffic, and of course you’d think that traffic implies money. Although this might sound good to you, it will never get you the desired return. This is mainly because the visitors that you’re attracting are either not interested enough, or not ready to buy your products yet!

The post Maximising your revenue with SEO appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Quality vs Quantity Search Engine Traffic

There was a time when getting your site to rank in Google was pretty easy. All you needed was a bunch of links from other sites pointing to your website, alone with the time it took to stuff your web content with keywords that you wanted to rank for. One of the quickest ways to get links to your site was to create multitudes of articles (which would usually be copied from other sites) that would include a number of keywords in them. You would then submit these articles to article directories.
A common procedure was to use an article, submit it to a site and then slightly modify a few sentences here and there and resubmit it to another site. This process was repeated over and over again, such that by the end of it, the article won’t make much sense anymore. Why was it done? Essentially, everyone tried to cheat Google and other search engines into thinking that the articles posted were unique. An alternative quick-fix for getting links to your site was to spam blogs and forums with a link back to your site. A high traffic keyword would be used to attach the link to your site, also known as anchor text. Check the example below:

This was the norm, done by thousands in order to rank highly in Google for that specific keyword. To outrank competitors a lot of companies enrolled in cheap link building services that were getting them the results they wanted in the short run.
Is this all sounding familiar? If you’ve ever done some or most of the above, that’s probably the reason behind your fall in Google rankings. The downside is that in order to repair all the damages it is going to cost you quite a lot of time and money. But don’t fret, this is probably the best investment you’ll ever make for your business. Why will it take time? Simple – you will need to remove each and every link that you have in these types of sites. Then, together with your web marketing team, you will have to start attracting good quality links to your site. The longer you take to do this, the more it will cost you in the long run. Keep in mind the online sales that you would be losing on a daily basis.
Remember this: unfortunately a lot of companies focus their web marketing strategies on quick wins. The longer it takes you to understand that there are no quick wins with search engine optimisation, the more money it’s going to cost your business.  But enough about that. The underlying lesson here is to shift your strategy and focus more on quality rather than quantity. This is the basic principle to understand all Google updates which primarily focus on web spam. You have to relate this to both content and link-building since they are the two main issues that directly affect your Google rankings.

Fighting Web Spam

Google is quite clear on this: Any and all spammy websites are banned from ranking in their search engine. Google’s main focus is on the user experience. This means that if a website doesn’t offer value to the reader it will simply fall in the rankings. As mentioned before, you have to see this from two different perspectives: from the content side and from the link-building side. In terms of content these are the main issues that will negatively affect your rankings:

Keyword Stuffing

When you make excessive use of the same keyword in the website’s content or meta tags (the top part of the html code of a web page that includes the page’s title and description) with the intention to attract more traffic to your website. This will lose the flow of the content and adds no value to the reader. Below is an obvious keyword stuffing example just to give you a better idea:
“Yes, we do have white cups and our cups are white and they are cups and the other white cups are not as good as our white cups because cups in general are white and our cups are white too”.
This sentence will get your site to rank for the keyword “white cups” and potential customers landed on your website. Once they read the above sentence, however, they will most definitely go and buy from another site. Which makes one very valid point: there is no point of attracting visitors to your site if you’re not managing to sell your products. From now on, before uploading content to your site, make sure that it adds value to the reader. Just for a moment, forget about ranking in Google and focus on producing amazing content that your readers will find useful.

Duplicate Content

This refers to the content on a website that is used more than once repeatedly, or else is copied directly from other sites. The main intention here was previously meant to increase the kind of content that helped in improving the rankings in Google. Not anymore though. If you really want to rank in Google the content on your website has to be unique. If you have any duplicate content, either that which is stolen from other sites or that which is repeated over and over again throughout your website, Google will penalise your site.  To solve this problem your web marketing team should remove any duplicate content from your website and publish fresh new content in it’s place.
The way forward in terms of SEO is to focus on one basic principle in everything that you do. Make sure that all the content that you produce as a company will be valuable to the reader.  Whether it is a feature list or a blog post, ask yourself: does this help my readers? If not, you’ll be better off not posting it at all. After all, you will only be damaging your brand. This also relates to link building – Make sure that you know what techniques your web marketing agency is using. If they’re trying to get links the easy way, you’re probably getting low quality links which will only harm your rankings.

The post Why doesn’t Google like your site anymore? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

I was set thinking about this while I was having a conversation with a friend recently who was complaining about the quality of search results and the way search engine optimisation works. Her point (which is a valid one, to be fair) was that the giants in the industry (for example eBay and Amazon) always get first places in search results for products they carry.

In order to learn how to search better you need to understand how search engines work and how people try to find ways of gaming the system in order to get better results.
The first and most obvious issue to keep in mind is that search engines only have one aim in mind: Delivering the most relevant results to whoever is searching. They might make all their money from advertisers, but at the end of the day the only reason people keep coming back to the Googles of this world is because they find what they need most of the times they search.
This means that something like Google will do all it can to sort out relevant content and to use a massively complex set of criteria in order to choose which content should be rated higher.
It was all simple enough when Google sorted its search results based on an internet which was not geared towards its sorting methods. However, once people realised that Google’s ranking meant a lot to the traffic you were receiving, people started analysing them in order to find ways to boost their placing in searches. From then on, it’s been a constant cat and mouse chase with Google improving their algorithms in order to filter out cheaters and keep on delivering the most relevant content on a regular basis.

There are thousands of factors that affect search engine rankings, but I’ve picked on one for the intents and purposes of this article: linking.

Links & SEO

Traditional SEO companies found ways to trip the system in their favour. Website publishers caught on to this and started cashing in on it. At first, Google used to determine your relevance based on the number of links to your site. This made sense at the time, because it was assumed that people linking to your site are a “vote of confidence”. This tactic was discovered and people started putting up links left, right and centre to boost their search engine rankings.

Google tweaked this to check the text in the hyperlink to try improving the system, but this was not enough. Next, it started checking the number of outgoing links on the page and splitting scoring based on that (so a site with 2 outgoing links only gave 50% weight to each of the sites linked from it). It then started checking the quality of the sites linking in to your site and giving you more scoring based on that. Finally, and in its most drastic clampdown yet, it decided to start penalising all low quality links pointing into a site. This meant that the “old” method of submitting links was basically not only not helping your rankings, but getting you penalised.

When traditional SEO companies tell you that they are working on submitting your site to build links, they will lead you to believe that they can bring your score up by simply increasing the number of links into your site. But the truth is simple: You do not want to game the system because you do not want to be in a system that can be gamed.

Search engines should improve, search engines should be doing their job better in the future, and history has shown that any time the large search engines have found someone trying to “cheat” their way up to the top, the fall was long and fast. Just ask RapGenius. Google caught them cheating and they lost around 80% of their traffic overnight. OK, they did get their traffic back after apologising publicly and rectifying their errors, but they were super quick to react and had enough clout to carry it off. Not everyone has major VC backup.

The bottom line

If you want to be found in search engines, there are things that you can do. It is not a lost cause, on the contrary, it is a very exciting time to be in the game. The equation is very simple, the more likeable your site is, the more chances you have of being noticed by search engines. There are thousands of technical factors to work on, and we do encourage you to make sure that all of them are bang on. Once you’ve sorted this out, work on a two-pronged strategy that will see you winning search engines over:

• Build a site with content, resources and tools that people want to link to, talk about, refer to and rave about.
• Work on a guest posting strategy that sees you building a slow and steady stream of natural inbound and outbound links.

At Switch we specialize in doing this as one of our services, learn more about this here: https://switch.com.mt/seo-malta/

But that’s enough for now. We’ll stop at the what. We’ll go into how to do these in future blog posts.

The post Search engines: The background, and why traditional SEO should die. appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.