Atthe end of last month, the team descended on the beautiful city of Brighton forthe ever-exciting BrightonSEO. With so many brilliant talks on offer, it washard to pick just four to attend. Armed with a notebook and pen, we were readyto learn as much as we possibly could!
Social Updates
Inpretty much all of the sessions that we attended, the speakers werehighlighting just how vital SEO is for your business, especially consideringthe recent social media updates.
Lastyear Facebook radically overhauled how it displays content on its newsfeeds tousers. Facebook now prioritises your friends' posts over business posts, whichcan be great for the consumer, but what about brands? Brand content will stillreach Facebook users, but this will be far more sparse than previously seenunless you put budget behind your posts.
Withthis valuable tool changing, a strong and constantly maintained SEO strategy isneeded now more than ever.
Socialmedia is a great tool to use, but Steve Rayson and Giles Palmer talked usthrough a report of content trends they’ve conducted and reinforced that themajority of content gets very few shares. They pushed that you should focus ongetting links not shares for your content.
Whilstit’s never been easier to create content, it’s harder now more than ever to getyour content recognised on social media due to content saturation. So, what canyou do with your content?
Content
Therewere some great takeaways from the content talks including looking at factorsthat Google takes into account when it ranks your website. Page speed isnothing new but Marcus Tober talked us through how pages with longer contentare now being ranked higher with the average page containing 1,900 words.
Marcusalso discussed the type of content Google will expect to see depending on theindustry. For example, lawyer content tends to be in paragraphs and therelikely won’t be videos as, let’s face it, who gets divorced by video!
Youwon’t need many images on a page about divorce either, however, your audiencewould expect to see an array of images on a website that sells furniture asthey will want to see exactly what they are buying.
Thekey is to think about what your audience will want to see in your content, andprovide them with that!
Revamping Your Content
Googledoes not like duplicate content so now is the time to trawl through your siteand revamp your content. Eleni Cashell revealed that around 29% of the internetis duplicate content!
Ifyour content comes from third parties, for example, a press release, it’slikely that the same content, word for word, has been sent to other people. Ifthey use it on their website(s), Google will struggle to work out which webpageto rank, and you could be penalised by losing the ranking war.
Don’tbe afraid to delete old content if it’s no longer relevant, as long as yourwebsite is still fully populated. Google bots will be able to crawl your sitemuch easier if there is less content that is more relevant. Quality overquantity!
Ifyou can’t bear to delete anything, then consolidate what you have and bring itup to date and make it relevant. For example, based on what we’ve said, if yousell furniture and you have blogs on your website, why not add in a bunch ofimages to give the content a fresh lease of life.
It’salso worth making sure all your content is in the same tone of voice and isn’ttoo ‘sales-y’.
So,with Facebook referrals dropping due to algorithm updates, and social sharingnot guaranteed for your content, SEO is more important than ever. But it’s notall doom and gloom as Google referrals are increasing; meaning it’s the righttime to put the effort into your SEO strategy and cash in on those Googlereferrals.
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