Improving & Maintaining Your Google Rank

Any business owner with an email address is inevitably bombarded week in week out with emails claiming to improve or renovate their website, boost the SEO rankings, or, even get you to number 1 one Google. The latter which should always be taken with a grain of salt. Many of which look dubious enough as is, but is there any truth to the claims made in their emails? Most of them are fairly generic in nature with a mix of some seemingly alarming claims, whether they be true or not depends very much on your activity on your own website.

That's the million dollar question! There's no one specific answer but what we do know has been worked out through a mix of what Google have told us about updates, and what the specialist SEO companies have worked out through analysis of millions of websites.

Ever since 2011, the majority of major updates to the Google algorithm have been predominantly content related . That is, over time, filtering out crappy irrelevant keyword stuffed content, and encouraging knowledge over sales.

The general consensus is to inform first and sell second . Any business should take note of one of the most recent updates labelled the Medic Update where in any page (in this case medical sites) heavy in advertising and sales will be relegated over those that focus on quality content and service. A safe bet is to EAT it.

• E xpertise - Create content that highlights your knowledge of the industry, inform all people, not just sell to people,
• A uthority - By becoming the go-to resource for info in your field will be invaluable when it comes to generating backlinks to your site.
• T rustworthiness - Earn consumer confidence in your brand with quality content, sound business practices and positive digital word of mouth.

With not 1 but 2 Google ranking updates in 2018 related to ranking your website based on how quickly it loads. It's a safe bet that this is a huge and recent factor in how well your site is going to be ranked.

50% of visitors will abandon a pageif it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Many CMS sites like Wordpress will simply load all the code, CSS & Javascript all the time on every page. This is not ideal when it comes to loading website pages efficiently.

• Remove excessive code
• Compress files
• remove render-blocking Javascript
• Optimise images to load only the relevant size for the relevant device

The problem with speed is that the goal posts will and already have, continually move to inevitably make it harder to maintain. This means updating behind the scenes will be necessary to avoid getting left behind.

Whilst less than 3 seconds is preferenced now, it doesn't seem all that long ago I was loading text based sites only on my Commodore 64, going to the fridge and coming back to wait for the whole page to load. As tech continues to increase in both internet speeds and web site technologies, Google will continue to place more and more stringent requirements on your site.

Back in 2014 https became a ranking signal on Google and then 4 years later they start marking any sites not utilising SSL security as "Not Secure"
We automatically include SSL on all Irez sites as standard as a big fat 'Not Secure' in the address bar doesn't exude confidence to any potential client.

Ever since 2015, mobile friendly sites have received rankings boosts. Many companies built purpose built mobile sites as both desktop and mobile were ranked separately. Since then, the rankings have been combined to make no differences between the 2. Desktop and mobile are ranked together, meaning a standalone site is of no use to your overall rankings,

In combination with speed as above, mobile needs to load only the relevant code and images optimised for mobile sized screens.

A more recent growth field has been in the local SEO area, wherein as well as all other points above there are 3 local factors that come into play when it comes to determining your ranking.

• Distance from centre of search
• Organic rankings
• Reviews

Now the distance factor can be difficult when you work a small business from home and don't wish to publicise your home address. As part of Google My Business you can define a 'service area', however this is unlikely to be as effective as a physical address.