Google’s search engine updates have been the cornerstone behind delivering a seamless, accurate, and secure search experience for users. And this year-around, with Google’s release of new updates, it could get challenging for businesses, marketers, and SEO specialists alike.
No matter what your domain, it’s therefore crucial to understand these updates and optimize your website for greater search visibility.
Here’s my take on how you can best orient your website to gain the maximum leverage on Google updates.
Pay Attention to Content Quality and Structure
With the release of Google’s Passage Ranking update it has become a priority for website owners to optimize not just web pages but also individual passages including paragraphs and sentences. Doing so will elevate chances of showing up your content as a featured snippet.
To do so, make sure you appropriately structure your website content to make it easier for the Googlebot to index it. Write high-quality, in-depth content and don’t forget to include long-tail keywords across.
Ensure that Your Website is Secured
The latest Link Spam update is Google’s effort to minimize spam through unauthorized link-building tactics. It mainly focuses on affiliate links, paid links, and sponsored guest posts.
Since there’s always the risk of spam impacting your overall website performance, it’s essential to keep it secured. For starters make sure you enhance your SSL certificate and look for unauthorized spam requests. Also, utilize Google’s Search Console for managing security issues.
Another good idea is to use the CAPTCHA engine for your website forms and logins. You can even keep track of backlink profiles to detect any suspicious activity to your website.
Revamp Your Website for Mobile Friendliness
While Mobile-first Indexing first became default for new websites back in 2019, it’s with the latest June 2021 update that it has become default for websites both new and old.
What does this mean? That you have to make your website mobile-ready to elevate traffic and growth. This ensures making your website mobile responsive and easier to load for users on any device. Other aspects include using rich images and offering a supported format for media as well as using lazy loading and image compression.
Also don’t forget to measure your website’s performance using Google’s Mobile-Friendly test tool.
Leverage UX Optimization
Along with mobile friendliness, optimizing website UX has also become important due to Google’s latest update.
In its Page Experience update, Google has released new metrics dubbed Core Web Vitals namely Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) which basically test the overall experience of a webpage.
Since they impact page load time, response, and layout stability, not optimizing them could affect your rankings. So ensure you remove any unwanted pop-ups, banners, or ads on your webpage, reduce execution of JavaScript, and offer right dimensions for images and layouts.
Optimize for About This Result Box
The ‘About this result’ update is a feature that lets you determine whether a particular search result is helpful or not by offering further information about it. It tells you if your site is secured, which search terms are present in the page, when the page was first indexed by Google, and other relevant information.
Since some of the facts displayed are ranking factors, optimizing for them can strengthen your SEO efforts further.
See whether your site has secured hypertext protocol (https) and whether it gets high-quality backlinks from relevant sources. Aligning the intent of keywords across your website is another thing you should consider. Tweaking such aspects of your website will definitely help you optimize for the About this result box.
It goes without saying that SEO is a long-term process and is in constant flux of changes. That’s why as a business owner or marketer it’s important to keep an eye on such updates. Our team at Rank My Business is always atop rising trends in SEO which help us unravel things that are crucial for Google.
Doing so can pave the way for more ranking opportunities and growth for your business.