SEO and its endless progression is seeing absolutely no sign of stopping or slowing down any time soon. This is thanks to Google’s rolling algorithm updates which are a reaction to users intent and evolving landscapes for mobile and desktop systems to count just a few.
This is why, as a digital marketing agency home to our SEO department, we receive many questions about SEO on a regular basis. This blog post will be us answering your top 10 most popular SEO-related questions.
- Do keywords make much of a difference to SEO?
If you are at all clued up on SEO, you may know that a large focus of SEO will be on building backlinks, and authority, as well as increasing rankings within google. So what about the humble keyword? Does it still play an important role?
The answer is yes. Absolutely yes. SEO keywords range from single words to complex phrases that are used to inform website content that increases organic search traffic. Your audience uses these in their search in google, and therefore need to be beneficial to your brand in order to rank for.
Keywords give us, as brands and marketers, an idea as to what people are searching for and what they want, which means companies can then benefit from what meeting their customers’ needs brings. Keywords can also point a bullseye for marketers to aim their content at when it comes to writing both on page content and metadata.
- Why is user intent the cornerstone of SEO?
User intent must be understood by brands and marketers to ensure they know and have a firm understanding of what their customers search for and what they see when entering these queries. It requires going beyond one-to-one keyword matching and instead interpreting the actual meaning behind the search terms.
To properly optimise content for search intent, there are few things you need to consider;
- Make sure that queries direct users towards the page on your website that will be helpful for them
- Use available technology to track how prospects move through content
- Perform research with features to better target demand
- Optimise meta titles and descriptions on all your pages
- What are featured snippets?
Featured snippets are pieces of content and information that typically appear at the top of google’s search results. They provide answers to the search query by pulling content from top ranking websites. Featured snippets are one of the most prominent SERP features and they are constantly evolving.
If your content is ranking on the first page of the search engine for a specific search term that shows up in a featured snippet, this can help shortcut your website to the top position. It has been found that snippets come from pages that are already ranking within the top 10 results, however data has shown that the majority usually come from pages that rank within the top 5.
- How do you improve your website’s authority?
The best way to improve your website’s authority is to gain other authoritative websites to link back to your website. Google will look at the websites that link to yours and evaluate whether or not your website is trustworthy. If Google finds untrustworthy or broken links linking back to your website, it will decrease the authority of your site. Think quality over quantity when it comes to your backlinks and which type of sites you want linking back to your website. For example, one link from the Daily Mail, or New York Times if you are in America, will help your rankings significantly more than a link from 50 new blogs from unknown sources.
- To help my SEO, should I just edit existing content or create new content?
As content grows old or outdated, it may no longer be relevant, which then causes your rankings for these pages to drop. You want to ensure that your content is timely, for example, if you have a page named “top web design tips for 2015” this will only be viable and hold value in 2015 and become irrelevant after this. To improve your rankings of that type of article, you should update the content to make it more evergreen and relevant to your readers at the time they find your page. If it is feasible to publish new content on a regular basis, this indicates to Google that your website is current, relative and active.
If you would like to know more about how we could help with your business, contact us today for more information.
