Transcription of “What does it really take to rank well on Google today?”:
Shama: This stuff has been going on for a long time. People have been keyword stuffing, wrong link building techniques. A lot of the times sadly people don’t know any better. What’s changed now that Google is all of a sudden catching these things a lot better?
Idan: Over the years a lot of people said, content is the king, content is the king, content is the king.
Shama: Right.
Idan: People said, all right, I’ll just create a bunch of content, stuff some keywords in there, if it’s a good content that people can actually read or not, it doesn’t really matter.
Shama: There’s words.
Idan: Yes, it’s a bunch of words cramped together, does it make sense or not, whatever, it really doesn’t matter. That’s not what Google wants. They start penalizing websites that threw a bunch of content out there with their links back or threw a bunch of content in their blog posts that doesn’t really make any sense and has no added value to the reader.
Shama: Context matters now a lot more.
Idan: Right.
Shama: In terms of it’s not just the words, it’s how you use them and is it user friendly. I know they’ve also talked about some design issues, where they don’t like it if you just have banners up top. They want to see more actual information.
Idan: Exactly. If you put a bunch of ads up top and you have like an ad here, an ad here, an ad here and all the rest of the important information at the bottom. It looks like clearly that you are trying to just make money off the website, you have no concern for visitors, and that’s not something that Google actually cares about.
Shama: Right. They are just getting tougher and tougher.
Idan: Tougher. It’s all about user interaction with the website.
Shama: I like that. The more user friendly you can make your website, it actually helps you from a search engine standpoint.
Idan: Absolutely.
Shama: What else are we seeing? What else are we seeing even with our client end marketing? What kind of stuff is working for us, things that your team is seeing?
Idan: Again, some of the things that are really working for us is building a strategy that visitors actually enjoy on the website. If you have content that reflects what you do and you provide it to the end user, not only will they stay on your website and try to get more information about your services and products, but you have to allow them to browse different areas onto the website, that will give them a little bit more information. Just having a picture about something, really doesn’t work anymore. Try to sell that picture. Try to share it with other places.
Shama: Do you find it that people now when we surf the web, because we’re consumers and the producers, do you find that we are really picky? We want good websites and if we don’t we are out of there.
Idan: Absolutely. We see that all the time with Google analytics. We look at data to ensure that the content that we are providing to people actually is relevant.
Shama: Is good content.
Idan: Yes, is good content, relevant and actually speaks to the visitor.
Shama: It used to be like a couple of years ago even, you write for search engines or you write for people, but now you have to write for people to be able to please search engines.
Idan: You must. If you read a newspaper, let’s just say that has a bunch of words all scrambled in together, you’re not going to buy that newspaper anymore. Same thing with the website.
Shama: Some of the newspapers still don’t understand this.
Idan: Exactly. That’s really what it is. It’s about, and Google has said this for many years, it’s all about the user interaction with your website. If they don’t like it, they’ll go somewhere else and then you are not going to be on the first page of Google.
Shama: Does Google look at these things? Do you think they have a sense to say, how quickly are people leaving this website?
Idan: Absolutely.
Shama: They do.
Idan: It reflects bounce rate, average time on the Website, on the page itself.
Shama: Their algorithm is getting more and more complex to be able to incorporate all of this.
