Keywords are important, but they rely on context more than ever before. The practice of keyword stuffing—using a keyword and synonyms as much as possible to rise on a SERP—will actually hurt your SEO. There are now more searches conducted on mobile devices than on laptops.

What factors affect your Google rankings?

As SEO has evolved, so have the ideas and practices (and at times, misconceptions) related to it. What was considered best practice or top priority in the SEO Anomaly past may no longer be relevant or effective due to the way search engines (and the internet) have developed over time. If your site is particularly video-focused, then continue reading about more things you can do to optimize your videos for search engines.

Build Trust with Customers

After identifying some low-hanging fruit, update the content, adding new images or videos, or changing the title and meta description. Also, try promoting the refreshed content on social media or in your email newsletter. WordStream is a versatile SEO tool designed to simplify keyword research and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. It’s an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes, offering valuable insights into keyword performance and competition to help you optimize your search marketing strategies.

Special Google Algorithm Rules

A website owner needs to develop an effective and long-term approach to link building rather than earning links through non-authoritative websites. Add high-resolution photos that showcase your products, services, and location. Visual content increases engagement and provides a glimpse into your business. Choose accurate business categories to help Google understand your services and match you with relevant searches. Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a unified code that provides additional context to search engines about the content on your website.

Danny Sullivan recommends basing decisions on whether a change is good for the site visitors because that will align it with the kinds of sites Google wants to rank. Recognize that the web has an element of randomness that make some site visitors wary about visiting a site for the first time. Some high-quality sites fail to stand out because they do what they think they do what everyone else is doing. Site visitors may appreciate more effort to make it clearer who is behind the site. An example of something to consider avoiding are things like rote generic bios in favor of providing a real sense of why the site is important or matters.

Now it’s time to optimize each piece page on your site around a single keyword. If you’re first starting out, this keyword should be a long tail keyword. If your site is overly confusing and causing users to click back to the search engine result page, your bounce rate increases and your user session time drops.

We can’t say which tip is the most important because all of them combined are necessary to produce the best results. Now, the question is how to avoid and prevent keyword cannibalization. Well, you can use Google Search Console to analyze your website and see if multiple URLs rank for the same search query.

• However, if your business is a combination book store and coffeeshop, this increases its relevancy to the search, and it most likely will show up in the search results.
• Google uses algorithmic processes that consider many different factors to evaluate the quality, relevancy, and utility of an answer to a search query.
• Social signals refer to the number of shares, likes, and overall social media attention a piece of content gets online.
• As mentioned above, quality content is a critical ranking factor, and there is no better blueprint to tell you how to achieve that than the E-E-A-T guidelines.

You can also add a table of contents to your blog posts so that visitors can go directly to the section that’s relevant to their query. Plus, to make your content overall easier to read, it’s important that you add visual elements like photos, videos, and infographics. In addition to embedding videos on your web pages, it can also help to create your own YouTube channel where you upload these videos.