Evolving – how? I hear you ask! Well… Search engines are the gatekeepers of up to 70% of your web traffic as they decide who can see your website in the search listings and who can’t. They are incredibly powerful and could effectively be the difference between success and failure. You need as many customers as possible to be given your website as an option when they search. The process of achieving this is called Search engine optimization or SEO for short.
So how do websites such as Google decide which content is at the top of searches and which is left on page 4 of the listings? UNIQUE CONTENT!
They look for unique content which is regularly updated! You need the copy (the words) to be unique to you, so this is where being original really helps. There is no point copying and pasting information from Wikipedia or competitors as the search engines know it is not unique. The copy also needs to highlight keywords that people would use to search for your company or product, for example, if your company is a leisure centre you need to think about what people are likely to search for and make sure you use these words creatively in the copy i.e. swimming lessons, fitness instructor, opening times, West Sussex, yoga. Keywords should always be included in heading as these are what search engines look for first. The criteria search engines use to base their decisions are frequently changing so your website content needs to be regularly updated to tick as many boxes on their criteria as possible.
It is a digital game of cat and mouse and unfortunately, the search engines are the ones who hold the power! You may not like the rules but it’s not your game – it’s theirs!
It sounds complicated but once you grasp these basics you will fall into a routine. Updating web content is great to do anyway as customers always like to see new things and have the most up to date and relevant information –you’ll be amazed how quickly your web information gets outdated anyway. There are no set rules as to how frequently you need to create new content and unfortunately search engines don’t send out an announcement when they are changing their criteria; the best thing to do is to update as regularly as you can as the top posts are ones that are the newest and most relevant to the search.