Major changes to Google’s algorithm will impact up to 40% of sites, and many will never recover. So, how can you avoid the fate of billions on the second page of Google search results? Unfortunately, not all the answers are in Google’s documentation.
Winning the next era of SEO means that we need to follow the blueprint that Google gives you, but as usual, make a few educated guesses. We know that Google updated its spam policies, but what exactly does that mean for our websites, and what direction is Google moving in general? Well, here are three takeaways you can start implementing on your site today.
Start Implementing Passive Link Building Strategies
Since we’re optimizing for search, it makes sense we’d build our content strategies and our websites around the keywords guaranteed to drive traffic that converts. We want to rank at the top for keywords with high purchase intent. That’s just common sense. Right?
Wrong. The reality is that sometimes, optimizing solely toward one goal can negatively impact other critical variables. This is the essence of Goodhart’s law, which states that when we set one specific goal, people will tend to optimize for that objective regardless of the consequences.
The reality is that links are a necessary evil, but we can’t use just any strategy to earn them. If this March update truly impacts 40% of websites, the value of many links across the web is going to plummet.
Luckily, there is a simple solution for your business. Start looking at how you can make your content strategy about more than high-converting keywords. Instead, you must incorporate passive link building strategies by including research intent keywords into your content calendar. These keywords are likely to be searched whenever someone is researching a topic and creating an article.
Some examples of passive link building articles include original research or roundups,but really the type of article isn’t important. The most important thing is that you know what keywords you’re going after, and these should be research intent keywords.
For example, this article by The Zebra has built links over time and is focused on stats.
This particular webpage has seen increasing links, and that’s without any outreach. It also ranks for keywords like likelihood of home invasion and others, which are a perfect example of research intent keywords.
The idea works with all kinds of original research, like this piece about zombie preparedness.
Unlike the previously mentioned piece by The Zebra, this article went viral. There is no exact science to identifying popular topics, but if it is going to go viral, it needs to appeal to a larger audience. This can pose a challenge for websites in highly-specific niches, but one that you can overcome with some keyword science.
Take Reputation Management Seriously
One of the other updates concerned site reputation abuse, and while this update will limit the number of qualified sites we want links from, it also confirmed to me that reputation is becoming increasingly important.
That’s why data regarding brand queries, social media engagement, and net promoter score are becoming more meaningful leading indicators for your E-E-A-T.
It’s not just the new spam policy that mentioned reputation, though. The idea is used in the search quality rater guidelines to help raters decide whether a site is trustworthy.
Quality raters, when they review your site will be searching for reviews about your company, evidence of your expertise, and proof of your legitimacy. Then whatever decision they make helps to train the algorithm and influence your rankings, but possibly not for the better.
That’s why you should set up Google alerts for your brand and also Google your own company. What is your presence like outside of your website, and do you have good reviews? It’s essential to look at both the good and the bad, so don’t be afraid to dig up a little dirt.
Your brand is going to become a determinative factor in the future of search. Recognition and trust will be what separates the winners from the losers, so start optimizing for that.
Finally, one of the clearest takeaways from the algorithm update was more about links. They have been saying it forever, but finally, they seemed to start enforcing it more aggressively.
Quit Buying Links (If You’re Buying Links)
It’s clear that Google is cracking down on low-quality sites selling links. The addition of site reputation abuse as a spam policy and the explanation that someone is in violation if they publish random content outside of their niche was a red flag.
We need to become much more scrupulous when it comes to how measure the success of our link building efforts. You might as well get good at white-hat methods now..
We obviously can’t control every site that links to ours, but you can identify quality links by asking yourself a few different questions.
1. Does the website have a strong focus, and does it seem to publish every sort of topic under the sun?
2. Does the website have a modest outgoing/incoming links ratio?
3. Does the site have a strong brand presence?
4. Does site gets a decent amount of traffic?
Some things you can stop looking at are DA/AS/DR. Because it’s a metric you can only use to compare similar sites, it was never intended to help us understand the value of a link.
One Final Takeaway
In a way, Google seems to have been training us for years to optimize for certain variables like keyword rankings and DA, but the reality is that Google doesn’t want that.
Google wants us to understand the whole picture from the customer’s perspective.
We need to get better at understanding what factors impact a business’s trustworthiness and figure out how to evolve our content strategies. SEO will always be a challenge for people because there never seem to be clear-cut answers, but I’m excited to see how these updates improve our approaches to SEO.