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Current SEO best practices, Yellow Cherry Digital Inverness

Search Engine Optimistation (SEO) – Are we doing it right?

It’s been a little while since we chewed your ear about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and it is an important way for you to promote your business and bring customers to your website. SEO is constantly evolving, so we will explain some of the key areas of current SEO practice.

Google RankBrain

Search Engines now use machine learning systems to help sort web results and where websites should rank in these results, an example of this is Google RankBrain. The purpose of Google RankBrain is to measure how users interact with search results they receive.

If we search for lemon meringue pie:

and pick the search result that is most appealing to us – let’s say the “Delia Online” third from the top, when you get to the page it is exactly the recipe you were looking for and you stay on the page for some time while you check the ingredients. RankBrain will recognise that you clicked on this specific result and it will receive a rankings boost, it will also pick up that you spent some time on the page (Known officially as dwell time) which will also give the result a rankings boost.

So what can you do to increase the chances of RankBrain boosting your websites search results?

  1. Ensure your content is relevant and up to date
  2. Work on displaying images on your results thumbnails
  3. Figure out the best way to keep people on your website once you get them there!

Featured Snippets

The aim of the featured snippet is to answer the searchers question straight away, for this reason they feature at the top of googles search results. Known as position 0 in SEO land, there is no proven formula (yet) to get your content into this coveted position.

The easiest way is to ensure your content is of good quality and that you are using keywords that match keywords used by the featured snippet.

Begin your content with 40 – 60 words containing the keywords you want the featured snippet to pick up, if you want to answer a question make sure the question and answer are there.

You can also start your content with a list or clearly formatted table as there are different kinds of snippets.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keyword

In ye olden days google would simply analyse the html of a page to see how many times a keyword is used in the text – while spiders still crawl for title tags, urls, alt text, descriptions and heading tags, they are now clever enough to look at the context! LSI Keywords are words and phrases that are strongly associated with the topic of you pages. Modern search engines use a mathematical technique to recognise the patterns in these phrases.

You can use online tools for LSI Keyword work or google itself – by looking at the related search results for your keywords.

Mobile First Indexing

Mobile first indexing continues to be rolled out across Google. What this means is that when indexing your website, Google considers the mobile version of your website as the real version. This is not surprising when Finder tells us that people in the UK spend on average 3 hours and 15 minutes online per day, with 68% of this time accessing via a smartphone device.

Checks to ensure that your website is good for mobile first indexing are:

  1. Is your content consistent across mobile, tablets and desktops?
  2. Is your website responsive? If you have a separate mobile version of your website now is the time to switch to a fully responsive website offering.
  3. Make sure your website is actually mobile friendly, it shouldn’t take ages to load and the important content should be easily available before secondary content is displayed.

Online Video

Did you know that the 2nd largest search engine after google is YouTube? Couple this with Cisco calculating that 82% of IP traffic in 2022 will be online videos then you need to start thinking about creating content specifically for YouTube. If you publish SEO optimised YouTube videos then you also get more Google space at the same time as over half of Google search results contain 1 video related to the topic searched.

You can also use your YouTube content embedded on your website to help with user engagement and RankBrains dwell time.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9EyekX0ZSw[/embedyt]

Voice Search

With the rise in voice activated technologies like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant and the advances in the AI technology behind them, meaning accuracy has increased it’s difficult to ignore the value in optimising your content for voice searches. It is especially important for local SEO as people will often utilise voice search while they are driving in order to check a businesses location or hours. The best way to optimise for voice search is to consider the differences in what people will say when they query something rather than when they type it. You need to be thinking about the questions people would ask that would include your keywords. There are online tools that can  help you with this and Google also provides a “People Also Ask” section. Once you have these longer keywords selected you should add them into your page content, but bare in mind you don’t want to overload your content with them.

for more on voice search look here

If you have any questions or would like to check on your SEO you can use our handy tool or get in touch to see how we can help.