Why SEO is more important than ever and what you can do about it
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At the end of last month, the team descended on the beautiful city of Brighton for the ever-exciting BrightonSEO. With so many brilliant talks on offer, it was hard to pick just four to attend. Armed with a notebook and pen, we were ready to learn as much as we possibly could!
In pretty much all of the sessions that we attended, the speakers were highlighting just how vital SEO is for your business, especially considering the recent social media updates.
Last year Facebook radically overhauled how it displays content on its newsfeeds to users. Facebook now prioritises your friends' posts over business posts, which can be great for the consumer, but what about brands? Brand content will still reach Facebook users, but this will be far more sparse than previously seen unless you put budget behind your posts.
With this valuable tool changing, a strong and constantly maintained SEO strategy is needed now more than ever.
Social media is a great tool to use, but Steve Rayson and Giles Palmer talked us through a report of content trends they’ve conducted and reinforced that the majority of content gets very few shares. They pushed that you should focus on getting links not shares for your content.
Whilst it’s never been easier to create content, it’s harder now more than ever to get your content recognised on social media due to content saturation. So, what can you do with your content?
There were some great takeaways from the content talks including looking at factors that Google takes into account when it ranks your website. Page speed is nothing new but Marcus Tober talked us through how pages with longer content are now being ranked higher with the average page containing 1,900 words.
Marcus also discussed the type of content Google will expect to see depending on the industry. For example, lawyer content tends to be in paragraphs and there likely won’t be videos as, let’s face it, who gets divorced by video!
You won’t need many images on a page about divorce either, however, your audience would expect to see an array of images on a website that sells furniture as they will want to see exactly what they are buying.
The key is to think about what your audience will want to see in your content, and provide them with that!
Google does not like duplicate content so now is the time to trawl through your site and revamp your content. Eleni Cashell revealed that around 29% of the internet is duplicate content!
If your content comes from third parties, for example, a press release, it’s likely that the same content, word for word, has been sent to other people. If they use it on their website(s), Google will struggle to work out which webpage to rank, and you could be penalised by losing the ranking war.
Don’t be afraid to delete old content if it’s no longer relevant, as long as your website is still fully populated. Google bots will be able to crawl your site much easier if there is less content that is more relevant. Quality over quantity!
If you can’t bear to delete anything, then consolidate what you have and bring it up to date and make it relevant. For example, based on what we’ve said, if you sell furniture and you have blogs on your website, why not add in a bunch of images to give the content a fresh lease of life.
It’s also worth making sure all your content is in the same tone of voice and isn’t too ‘sales-y’.
So, with Facebook referrals dropping due to algorithm updates, and social sharing not guaranteed for your content, SEO is more important than ever. But it’s not all doom and gloom as Google referrals are increasing; meaning it’s the right time to put the effort into your SEO strategy and cash in on those Google referrals.
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