You probably know by now that when it comes to being found online, keeping Google happy is the way to go. Businesses have invested millions in staying on Google’s good side, while others try all sorts of tricks to try and increase their rankings without spending any money at all. But both will find themselves stuck at some point, and then they will be asking the same question
What does Google actually look for on your website?
Well, that one is pretty difficult to answer in one post, mainly because there are so many things they look for! Google sends out its ‘spiders’ (bots) to crawl your website every single day, and they rank it on over 200 factors. Some of those things, like site speed and structure, will have been down to your web developer, while others, like keyword density, will be down to your content. But rather than go through all 200 + things Google looks for, we want to focus on a few of the easy, content-based changes you can make to improve your websites Google ranking, fast.
Make Sure Your Pages Are High Quality
Google values honesty over deception, and so it is always on the lookout for honest and useful websites to promote. It ranks this by something called Page Quality (or PQ) and measures your success by how well each webpage achieves its purpose, and whether that purpose is positive. Granted, most web pages are meant to be helpful, but there are some out there that are only meant to make money, with no attempt to help the visitors, and others still that are just malicious. Google weeds these out and sends them to the bottom of the rankings.
So how do you get a good PQ ranking? By making sure the purpose of your page is clear, and that it meets that purpose without misleading visitors. Generally, as long as the page helps users, Google won’t judge the quality of one page as any higher or lower than another. But if you are running a ‘higher stakes’ business (for example medical, financial, or legal), then you might be expected to meet a higher standard of quality. Which, if you’re an honest business, won’t be a problem.
Create More Content
If there’s one thing we know, it’s that Google loves content. In general, the more content you produce for your website, the better. But be warned – Google can spot lazy creators. Plagiarised or duplicated content will be flagged by Google, and it will significantly harm your rankings. So instead, you should focus on creating unique, sharable, and genuinely useful content for your website.
This could be anything from new landing pages to blog posts, videos, case studies and more. And then share it! The more you create, and the more that your creations get shared, the more positively Google will view your site. Keeping your website updated with fresh content is a sure-fire way to get Google’s attention. It may take a little bit of time before you see a change, but if you keep at it, you will see your website shoot up the page rankings.
Get Your Title Tags Right
When looking at your website, one of the first things the spiders will look at is your page title. This is a meta tag, and if you go into your page’s HTML code you will find it by looking for the <title> tag. The text contained in this title tag has been called ‘the single most important on-page SEO element’. It’s the first thing visitors will see in search results, and it’s the main success factor for a lot of the other ranking criteria, like browser tags, social sharing and so on. So, getting this right is pretty important. A good rule is to keep your title tags under 60 characters long, give every page a unique title and don’t overdo the keywords. Instead, be descriptive be concise and make it attractive to your customers. The rest will follow.
While there are a lot of different elements to SEO, content is something that runs through all of them. You need a good amount of content, and it needs to be high quality to get Google’s attention, and then keep it. Now, at Eleven Eight we don’t claim to be full SEO experts, but we do know content, and we know how to make it work hard for you and the search engines. So if you need a little help with these elements, or general content for SEO, drop us an email and we’ll be happy to help.