Invest in good copywriting and avoid becoming a slave to the (algo)rithm.
Google manages the majority of the world’s searches, so any changes – however small – in its algorithm are big business. This July mouses were twitching as Google supposedly shifted its ranking algorithms.
Google is notoriously secretive about how it ranks pages, leading to huge amounts of speculation, conjecture and misinformation.
There are copywriting and content agencies that make their money by promising to somehow ‘game’ Google, finding some mechanism to accelerate your rise to the top of the rankings.
Sadly, it’s usually nonsense.
The good news is, doing the fundamental things will get you noticed and improve your ranking. It’s about investing in good copy and content that’s relevant to users and reflects their searchers.
Here are a few pieces of advice:
Understand your industry keywords
Research what people are searching for and reflect that in your keywords. It seems so simple, but even some sophisticated businesses won’t use the data to drive their content strategies.
Don’t be one of these.
Make it easy for Google
Ensure that your on-site SEO is sound. That means structuring pages with the proper tags, using meta-tags appropriately etc.
This isn’t an SEO less, there are thousands (OK, billions) of those out there. Just take some time to do the stuff behind the scenes. Google will thank you for it.
Blog with purpose
Google wants content. Create a blog and use it. Create regular content that users want to read.
Once you’ve done so, share it across all of your channels. The more clicks you get, the better.
But content needs a purpose, a structure and an outcome.
Build links
If you’re as old as us, you’ll remember the early days of the internet when links = prizes. It’s not as simple as that nowadays, but links are still very important.
Creating shareable content is a positive way to get links.
Do your own thing
Trying to pre-empt or play Google is a mugs game. There are no ways for you to rank without good ,old fashioned hard work. Follow the simple principles above and – in time – you’ll start to see results.
This is the most basic of basic guides to SEO, content and algorithms, but don’t worry. This is a simple primer that will lead us into much deeper and more compelling content that will tackle these issues in greater details.
To get a quicker insight, email us at hello@copywritingbristol.co.uk where we can chat further.
