How Your Business Can Win Over its Harshest Critic: Google’s SERPs
Ever feel like your website’s being judged? It is and not just by customers, your harshest critic is Google SERPs, find out how to win Google over.
Image Source: Vecteezy
Your website could regularly churn out some of the most exciting content in the world, it may still be insufficient for Google’s fickle crawlers. This is because many search engines rely on their bots to study your content and identify what it’s about and how relevant it is to its intended audience. This post is going to take a look at some key factors that Google’s SERPs use to judge you.
Although it can be difficult for websites to adapt to the whims of search engine crawler bots, it’s possible for us to gain a strong impression of how content can be adapted to become more effective and better appreciated in terms of search engine ranking positions (SERPs).
Luckily, the task of catering to these bots doesn’t have to involve rebuilding your content strategy from the ground up, and many websites can see great improvements on the results pages of Google simply by making a number of small tweaks.
What are Crawlers?
Before we move on, let’s take a moment to consider what these ‘crawlers’ actually are. Search engines like Google crawl websites to better understand all of its content and analyze the finer details of its pages. These discreet robot crawlers can help search engines to index pages and identify whether content is strong enough to rank highly within its results pages.
Although Google has been accused of moving the goalposts in terms of what it deems to be good enough to rank high on its SERPs, the factors that the search engine takes into account are generally good ways to ensure that users find what they’re looking for more efficiently.
So, what are these crawlers looking for when it comes to learning whether your content is strong enough to rank highly? Let’s take a look at some factors to keep in mind when boosting your on-page SEO:
Long-Form Content Ranks Higher
One key recurring trend when it comes to Google’s SERPs is that long-form content generally ranks higher.
(Image: Neil Patel)
As the data above illustrates, Google’s top 10 ranking positions are occupied, on average, by content that spans more than 2,000 words, with the top three places taken by content that exceeds 2,400 words.
Although the more intricate reasons behind why Google likes to categorize longer content higher is disputed, it’s certainly worth seeking to create long-form, high-quality content as a priority for your pages.
This doesn’t mean getting rid of any existing 500 word articles, however. Simply look to expand your content strategy and add fresh perspectives to the content you’ve already created.
Adapt your SEO Strategy Accordingly
The question is: how long does it take to learn SEO?
Well, the process of understanding and learning SEO can be long, and there’s always new approaches emerging alongside evolving technology and trends. Despite this, there are a few easy tactics that you can implement on your website to improve your on-page SEO.
Take a look at your pages and work on some approaches to make your website easier to understand and categorize for Google’s crawler bots. These approaches can involve exploring your title tags to ensure that your page title is relevant when it’s displayed on Google, altering your meta descriptions to make them as informative and original as possible, and refreshing your internal links to improve crawlability and to keep visitors engaged with your site for longer.
Here, it’s worth remembering that your priority should remain your audience. Make your on-page SEO as informative and helpful as possible for prospective visitors, and it’s more likely that Google’s crawlers will position your page more prominently for relevant searches.
Content Can Take Many Forms
Here, it’s important to acknowledge that content is about more than just text. Images, video, audio, and just about any other multimedia elements can be essential components for your SEO strategy.
When it comes to catering to crawlers, it’s worth recognizing that Google’s bots can’t understand and interpret images in the same way as humans, and as a result, it’s vital that alt tags and descriptions are used to categorize image content to appear higher in visual query results.
The internet is becoming an increasingly multimedia-oriented entity, and more users are choosing to seek out video-based content to answer their queries. Because video is rarer than text-based content, this can be advantageous to websites–though it’s important to add the right alt tags and descriptions to your videos to help users to discover them.
If you’re seeking to refresh your existing content strategy, consider which of your articles, topics, and pages could transfer well to video content and work on adapting it for YouTube and other video platforms. Many websites successfully receive a strong flow of monthly visitors by anticipating audience queries and creating ‘how to’ videos designed to provide visual answers.
Befriending Google’s SERPs
Dedicating time to optimize on-page SEO can act as an ace up the sleeve of small businesses, and although it may feel like a time-consuming process for smaller teams, content backed by great SEO can deliver a vast level of exposure–even in the most competitive industries.
