What does Google want? For those SEM advertisers who have been in the game since the 1990s, it’s easy to see. Google wants to be the very best. They want to find the most accurate queries based on the behavior of their search users. So, what does it take to be the very best in SEO?
It’s important to think about how your SEO strategy has evolved. You may look back and see where e-commerce link building helped your site in the past, and it will definitely continue to provide traffic and rank signals today. Is it most important for Google in 2019?
There have been several rumors and updates about Google’s algorithm in the past few months. Here are a few SEO trends that we’ve spotted so far for 2019:
Mobile-First Matters
Google values mobile versions of your website for indexing and ranking signals. Since last year, Google has been migrating sites to a mobile-first index strategy. If you watch your Search Console alerts from Google, then you probably already know this.
However, you shouldn’t take this as a mobile-only strategy. Google still values mobile and desktop friendly websites. What it does mean is that Google will be looking at mobile versions first in its ranking strategy.
If you are not sure about your website and how it looks on mobile, then you should do a quick audit and check out how responsible your site is. Your site should load fast and be readable with no elements blocked. You can use PageSpeed Insights by Google to get a score on how mobile-friendly your site.
With sites that have text-to-size responsiveness and smaller paragraphs, your SEO content will have a higher chance of helping your site rank in search.
Page Speed
Site optimization is important to make your site load quickly. User experience is one of the top signals for Google’s rank factors. The data for a speed score comes from a Chrome User Experience report, which is created by the Google crawler. This shows your site loads for multiple visitors, measuring how fast each user can load your page.
Brand Mentions
Gary Illyes is a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst who recently spoke out about how Google utilizes online brand mentions in its search signal grading. There are multiple ways that a brand can be used to help your site rank.
Search engines now look for brand mentions across the web to see how much authority you have in relevance to certain keywords. This is why it’s important to develop SEO content strategies around your products with your brand name attached.
In addition, reputation, trust, advertising, and complaints attached to your brand name also matter. Google is learning how to tell the difference between good and bad mentions. This means that Google will use reviews and ratings, as part of reputation metrics, to rank your site.
GDPR
If you haven’t googled GDPR, then you may not know about the cookies policy, and if you want to rank at all, you’ll install this policy if you have cookies.
Link Building
The same strategy still works for e-commerce link building. You want to make sure that content pages have both internal and external links that will build authority on the page. However, these are some new things that Google values in relation to your links:
- The font size of link’s anchor text
- The position of the link on the page (higher the better)
- The position of the link on the list
- Font color and any italics or bold attributes
- Type of link, such as image or text
- Text surrounding the link
Basically, you should pay special attention to the links that you use and always ensure that your content is highly readable.
