Google Changes in SEO – What Should I Do?
Peter Brissette • February 28, 2018
Hey, everybody. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and I want to talk to you a little bit today about SEO. Yeah. I try not to talk about this topic too often, because it’s a very huge topic. There are a lot of key factors with SEO. First of all, what is SEO? It stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is something that you do to your website to help your website rank better to get found in what we call organic search, meaning when someone types into Google a keyword phrase, that your site will have a chance to come up in the search results.
There’s a lot of things surrounding that, and I want to share my screen here and just talk a little bit about an article that just came out here in March that talks about this. A couple of things that I want you to know about. First of all, Google makes a lot of changes. Second of all, there’s key things that you should always focus on as the foundation. Then, finally, what do you do about it going forward? Depending on when you’re looking at this, this is, came out here on March 17th, this article, and in March, Google made a big update. The result of that big update was that some sites improved in the search results, and some sites actually lost traction, meaning they’re … They lost traffic. Their traffic decreased after this big change that Google made in their search algorithm.
What does that mean for you? Well the first thing that you want to focus on is something called EAT. In this article, and I’ll put this link in the blog post in the video that we’re watching so that you can read all the details of this and all the changes that were made and some of the different expert opinions on it, but the one thing that you want to always focus on with your website is something called EAT. EAT is an acronym for expert, authority, and trust. When you’re putting together content for your website, this is what you need to remember. You need to remember how can you express that content from the standpoint of being an expert and from being an authority on that topic, which is your business. That should be natural for every business owner and for your website, that you are an expert and you are an authority about your business. Then, the final one is trust. You can go back through a lot of our blog posts. We talk about trust a lot and how important that factor is.
All of those things need to be thought about as you develop any content for your website. EAT, expert, authority, and trust. Those are really, really important factors. As long as you are focused on that on your website, in the long term, you’re going to be okay, because that’s what Google wants. Google wants you to show your expertise, to show your authority so that the visitors to your website have a degree of trust. Some of those elements vary, so in this article, I want you to go through and look at it. He does some case studies on some different websites, on what they did in order to fix their website in order for it to improve and rank better.
Most of my clients don’t do a lot of ads and advertising on their websites. That was a big factor that impacted people. If you don’t run ads on your website, then you don’t have to worry about that one, but things related to the usability of the website, how easy was it to navigate, the general trust factor of the website, those things were all important things into whether this last update helped the website improve or made the website decrease in the search engine results.
The big key to take away from this going forward is remember that Google is going to make changes. They are going to make updates to their search algorithm, and it probably is going to have some impact on your site one way or another. Remember to always focus on your website as one of the properties that you own and you control, and focus on that EAT. Are you demonstrating that you’re an expert, that you’re an authority, and are you demonstrating trust? One of the best ways to do that is to show your testimonials and reviews on your website, as well, which we talk about all the time.
That’s a quick SEO update on what’s happening with Google and the changes that they’re making. If you’ve seen some significant changes in your websites, it’s something we could take a look at for you and try to diagnose what happened with that. We have a service where we can do a complete competitive analysis on your site and your top three competitors to find out where you stand and what it’s going to take in order to get your site to rank better. We’ll put a link to our calendar if you want to talk about that further. That’s a little monthly marketing message for you. Hope you got some good out of that. Please do us a favor. Like, comment, and share this, and let other people know about this, as well. Thank you very much, and we’ll talk to you next month.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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