SEO has become the most complicated and difficult it has ever been. Google has been changing the game for years now, and it’s only getting harder all the time.
If you want to survive and thrive in the world of using SEO then, you will need to adapt and be much smarter when implementing an SEO strategy.
If you read that title and thought that this was going to be a blog post about the dangers of SEO, then don’t worry. IN truth, Google’s agenda is nothing sinister, it just doesn’t always align with what your agendas might be.
Specifically, Google is not particularly interested in helping you to get to the top of the SERPs. In fact, Google isn’t interested in helping website owners at all! Rather, Google wants to help its users, the people who search using it in order to find the content they want quickly and easily.
Moreover, Google wants to make this interaction more natural and organic. Google now considers itself to be an ‘AI first company’, which means that Google Assistant is very much its main focus.
Google Assistant can do many things from controlling the lighting in your home to helping you order a taxi. But its coup de grace is in helping you to answer questions and finding answers which it does by using search to return answers.
Google doesn’t just want to find keyword matched websites when someone types in “how to burp baby”, rather it wants to be able to provide useful snippets of information in a conversational manner when someone asks “Hey Google, how do I burp my baby?”.
That means that traditional keywords don’t work the way they once did. And it means that Google now wants to see the more natural language on your website, not to mention useful additions such as rich snippets that it can use to more easily trawl your content.
Moreover, Google still wants you to provide great quality content for visitors to your website to read. It still wants fast-loading sites with entertaining information and news.
And of course, Google is incredibly vague about how it looks for all of those things.
One of the things that makes this hardest of all, is just how mixed this can make the different signals you get from Google.
For example, Google still wants you to use search terms in your content. Okay. So, you diligently do your keyword research, pick your term, and then insert it into your text in a subtle manner.
But you chose a keyword that doesn’t lend itself well to LSI (natural language terms) and so it doesn’t get as much love as it could. Moreover, you find that your readers don’t particularly appreciate the use of keywords and it ends up hurting your bounce rates. That is to say that more people end up leaving your site immediately, which hurts SEO.
So, what’s the answer?
Well, as we hinted, in the beginning, the solution is to be smart and data-driven when implementing an SEO strategy and we would love to be able to help you with this.