ICYMI: Possible Google update kicking off – we will continue to watch it https://t.co/meRwp8Q5oe pic.twitter.com/B5dQGlPPfB
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 3, 2019
How Can an SEO Expert Navigate a Google Update?
Google is constantly changing their algorithm. If you believe what Google says, they update their search algo hundreds of times a year.
There is a whole industry now that just reports, or talks about Google updates. It is all pretty ridiculous.
If you were to follow Google’s advice you’d be completely changing around your website every few days or weeks. Then you would be glued to Twitter, waiting to hear everyone say how the sky was falling and there may have been a “potential Google update.”
Heck, sometimes, although it is rare, Google will actually per-announce that they are going to do an update. This is not to say that every update is b.s. and nothing ever changes, but it doesn’t change nearly as much as you might think it does.
Now, the really big changes do matter, they are important. Take for example, the upgrade to mobile friendly websites and the mobile first index. More searches were taking place on mobile devices, so it only made sense that Google would give priority to mobile friendly sites.
This is not rocket science. Google let everyone know at least two years before they made any changes.
An SEO Consultant Can Help Your Business
If you have no idea what you are doing but you realize your website is important and needs to bring customers to your business, then you need to hire a consultant that has been successful for years in search like DeterminedSolutions.com. They have been navigating websites through tumultuous Google updates successfully for years.
The way that you get through Google updates is to ignore them in the first place. Search engine optimization is about building your business online, not some tip or trick or hack to get you to the top of a search result.
When you have been building your business properly, you can get traffic from search (of course) through folks searching for your goods and services or just your brand name search. You also get searches, not just from Google, but from different search engines like Yahoo, and Bing.
Your website will also get referral traffic. You can get referral traffic from all over the internet. Some important areas to get referral traffic from are business listings like Yelp, BBB, Foursquare, etc.
One of the biggest drivers of traffic on the internet is the giant known as social media. A website can get traffic from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Pinterest.
Another source of referral traffic is from other websites on the internet that have linked to your website because you have an interesting blog post or some other form of content worth mentioning, so they link to you. When readers on one site, click a backlink and go to your website, this is known as another form of referral traffic.
And referral traffic from other relevant websites is some of the best traffic to have because these visitors tend to stay the longest on your website, which is a great signal to show Google, and they also tend to convert the highest, because they are coming from a similar type of website.
You can even get visitors to your website from traditional media sources like direct response, T.V., and even radio ads, but for the purpose of this discussion, we will stick to just digital marketing.
Get Traffic To Your Website By Building a Business
If you view your website as a business and you take it seriously, then you will invest the resources in to making sure your website functions properly. This is also known as On Page SEO.
If you have an simple content management system like WordPress, then this is easy to do. First you will want to make sure that your URL’s (unique resource locator) are easy for a search engine, and in this case, also a human, to understand. Go in to your setting and change the Permalinks to Post Name.
This creating simple and clean URL’s.
You will also want to extend this idea to your images. The way you do this is by naming your image files something relevant to the content on the page, before you upload the file to your website.
Next up is page titles. Your page titles are a great place to put information about what the page is. This is super important and you want to make sure you take full advantage of your page title and fill them out properly.
You also want to go to your images, and fill out the Alt Text. You can think of Alt Text on images the same way you think of page titles in that they are both forms of meta-data. You can enter the Alt Text by going to the Media section in WordPress, simply select the image and then you will see the area to fill in the Alt Text. Of course you want to make the Alt Text of relevant to the image as well as the page the image is going on.
This is not meant to be a step by step guide to search engine optimization, but rather to give you a different perspective. You see, Google updates come and they go. What you need to focus on is to build your business to web standards and norms. You want to build to HTML standards, which is the language of the internet, which is bigger than just Google.
If you approach your website this way, by making your information easily discoverable, and by having relevant content, then you will fare pretty well in search, no matter what Google updates decide.