Last week, digital marketers were harshly reminded of the perils of search engine real estate when we learned that
Google was officially doing away with its right-rail ads on desktop in favor of another – yes, another! – text ad above its search results. For those keeping score at home, that brings us to
four total ads at the top (note: Product Listing Ads and Knowledge Panel Ads will be unaffected).
This development was a long time coming. But as Google continues to refine the look, feel and experience of its results pages, it’s already causing consternation among marketers who heavily – and rightly – valued “above-the-fold” and page one rankings. Simply, this change will further depress organic search results. What’s more, it feels like only a matter of time that similar changes will come to mobile search (i.e., smaller screen = more scrolling to reach organic search results). Fact is, search algorithm and ad product changes are happening constantly. It’s easy to view these changes as yet another example of Google expecting brands to throw money at yet another digital marketing problem. But if there’s been one constant throughout all these changes, it’s that smart search marketing is about more than just dollars – it’s about quality, engaging organic content that will have search engines doing backflips over your site (while indexing it and raising your ranking, of course). So what does it all mean?
The More You Update, the More You Get Indexed: Search engines love frequent updates, as it gives their crawlers the opportunity to see what’s new on your site and index your pages accordingly. That said, don’t get sloppy with your site content: Google knows a keyword-packed cheat-of-a-page and will even penalize you for it. Rather, focus on high quality content that will further complement (or supplement) the information on your site.
The More Content, the More Keywords: Avoid the temptation to pack a page with keywords by strategically telling your story over a series of blog posts and articles. This will allow you to more naturally and organically integrate strong, important keywords into your site and focus on content quality vs. the total number of keywords.
The Fresher the Content, the Higher the Authority: The more you publish, the more users will continue coming back to your site as a resource for high-quality information, and potentially even lead to in-bound links to your website. But it doesn’t stop there. Distribution is key, whether via social media engagement or other content distribution efforts. Together, all of these activities will lead to a website with high authority and allow your website to stand alone among the pack.
