Google has launched its latest core updates over the past months, and it has undoubtedly affected digital businesses globally. For the most part, whenever there’s a change in the algorithm, businesses experience a decline in their sites’ traffic.
Many people are doing what they can to keep up with Google’s changes. They make sure to get real-time updates, and they would quickly integrate it into their marketing strategy even when they still don’t have full knowledge of how it actually works. Guy Sheetrit from the Over the Top SEO said that the best way to get ahead of Google’s algorithm is to create human content.
What does this mean? There are three ways to help you gain an understanding:
1. Produce high-quality content
Gone are the days when SEO was all about keyword stuffing and chasing backlink quantity at the cost of quality. Google had caught on to these tactics years ago and now punishes sites that still practice them. Today, the best way to conduct SEO is to produce regular, high-quality content.
What this means is that Google favors content that Internet users value. Your content must be easily digestible, informative, and clear. Remember that you are writing content to answer the questions of your clients. Additionally, having a good layout and design also helps in encouraging your readers to read what you have to say.
2. Rank your content
Today, Google’s search engine results page (SERP) has significantly changed. It is now more challenging to get on the first page of the results because of Google’s added features, which are:
Ads
These are the first few results that you will see in Google’s SERP. Users can quickly identify these because it has an “ad” indication before its URL address.
Answer box
This is the snippet of content that users see on top of the SERP that directly answers the users’ queries.
Video carousel or row of images
This showcases videos and images related to the users’ queries.
People Also Ask (PAA) box
This shows the queries related to what the user has searched.
All of these features affect the ranking of the content. These take up most of the space on the first page leaving the runners up on the lower portions, causing them to receive little to no exposure at all.
With that said, you should work your best to produce valuable content to make it appear on the SERP’s top results
3. Get content ideas from the PAA box
Experts still have no solid knowledge of how the queries in the PAA are generated. It seems like the list of queries changes each time, even if you are using the same keywords. That made it hard for companies to understand how they can rank or get their content included in the PAA queries.
Since it seems like people haven’t yet figured out how to rank in PAA, you can use them as sources for keyword ideas that you can target with new content. Try it with your current keywords, and look through the PAA for new content ideas. This will help you produce content that people are actually interested in.
Conclusion
Google will continually make changes in its algorithm, which means SEO best practices will continuously change as well. To survive these changes, the best thing you can do is to produce high-quality content that stays relevant and provides answers to users’ queries.
To learn more about organic SEO services, check out our blog. We share expert advice and techniques that help US-based businesses rank better on Google.