WP Minute Producer and SEO correspondent, John Locke of Lockedown SEO discusses Google Search and what is important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). John is a member of the WPMinute community and participates regularly in WordPress and SEO. He has helped customers with their website workflow, boost their sales, and rank higher in Google. John’s channel on YouTube has so much information on SEO, Marketing and Web Design. It is worth checking out.
In 2008 Google first published its blueprint for SEO success and it was that brands were the solution. In order to retain market share for the future, Google needed to have trusted brands on their side forever. John covers the “unspoken” part about brands in this episode. To maximize the content on your website for SEO you need to think about scalable ways in which Google measures your brand characteristics.
One of Google’s important measurements appears to be that large brands will sometimes rank with secondary content. How does duplicate content appear under that brand and not yours? Well, Google ranks duplicate content with the most authoritative site (big brand).
Google looks for characteristics of big brands. Large brands work across several channels and social profiles. They often have the budget for a site that is designed for optimization. They have the staff to do that work and often post on job boards when they need additional staff. When customers find these larger brands on social sites it triggers that they are happy.
So what do you do as a small brand to improve your rankings? You need to act like a big brand. Work across social channels so that you become recognized as a prominent brand. In order for you to rank in the 2020s, you need the right content for your target keywords and keep appearing as large as a brand as possible so that the signals are picked up by Google search. Work with an expert to review your site design to help move you up in the rankings.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it on social media.
Episode transcript
Back in 2008 in one simple statement, Google gave out the blueprint for SEO success and revealed what their long-term goals were for the ranking. On that note worthy day, then CEO, Eric Schmidt stood in front of a room of media advertisers and said, brands are the solution. Not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.
Schmidt was referring to the dilemma of algorithmically sorting through trillions of webpages and delivering the best search results. So Google could retain market share through the foreseeable future. His analogy was having prestigious and trusted brands on one side and everyone else. On the other side, he went on to say that brands are an important signal that a website’s content could be trusted.
Every tweak to the algorithm since then has had this mission statement in mind to maximize the SEO of content on your website. You should think about scalable ways in which Google might measure the characteristics of a brand. Let’s look at one example of how Google favors large brands in the present day in a 2021, Google hangout, Google representative, John Mueller was.
How Google determines the original author of a piece of content in a question regarding duplicate content Mueller’s answer is that Google will sometimes rank a piece of copied content from a secondary source, not the original source material. He said that sometimes it makes sense to show meaning rank that content instead of the original, because.
Does not only measure quality by the text on the page. He also said that Google looks at design and presentation of information as factors. One unspoken part of this is that in reality, when other factors are equal, Google usually ranks duplicate content from the most authoritative site, meaning that site has the strongest link pro.
This is the page that will almost always win the rankings in a case of word for word, duplicate content, big brands that are authoritative tend to have very robust link profiles and are linked from sites from within their industry. The characteristics of a large and trustworthy brand aren’t limited to links alone.
When I first considered how far reaching the statement about brands was I was watching a presentation by Wil Reynolds of sear interactive. He was talking about a concept called real company stuff or RCS. Now, what does this mean? Google evaluates, whether a brand is large or a small mom and pop shop by looking at many different types of external and internal factors.
Real companies we’ll do real company stuff. If a company exhibits characteristics of a global or national brand, then it looks like a quote real company, unquote to Google. What are characteristics of large brands that can be measured easily by Google? Well for one, a large brand looks to do customer acquisition in a variety of channels.
They don’t want to pass up any opportunities to raise brand awareness and acquire new customers. And to do that, they’re going to have to be on all of the top social platforms, brick and mortar businesses. We’ll have a Facebook page in most cases, but many don’t have all of the major social profile. Real companies have a LinkedIn company, page, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, because these are platforms where many of their potential customers hang out and a small brand will not bother with these because they have enough leads already.
A large brand is also looking to hire new people all the time. They may have a careers page on. And have a job listings on all the major job platforms because they are growing and replacing outgoing employees. Smaller brands do not hire new employees very often, and they have no presence on job boards.
Now, global rants also use content publishing on their website to market, to potential customers. See the top middle and the bottom of the.
When customers find these webpages, they send measurable signals that they’re happy with what they’re reading or consuming and small mom and pop shops do not have these marketing systems in place. Large brands need to be constantly attracting new customers and moving them down. A marketing and sales funnel.
And despite what anybody tells you, getting links from industry sites and maintaining a steady link. Velocity is also a sign of large brand global brands have earned thousands. If not millions of links to their website, through their content and brand awareness. This is a sign for Google’s algorithm that it should trust.
Brand’s at Google trusts have links that are a short distance from what are known as seed sites. And these are old and or highly authoritative sites that have established their credibility. These sites have astronomical authority and getting a link from them or from a site that they link to is a hallmark characteristic of a prominent.
Now more recently, Google seems to favor websites that have good design, and I’m not necessarily talking about information architecture though. That helps too, but simply good aesthetically pleasing design. Google seems to have a means of measuring user satisfaction with the. And you can, Conject conjecture about what that might be, but the results are pretty obvious.
If you watch the search results over a long enough timeline, you will notice it that over time sites that have superior design will rise in rankings. When all other factors are comparable, the signals that are the hardest to fake, like user satisfaction. Brand mentions link profiles and specifically links from prominent sites within your industry that have integrity are going to be the best signals for determining the influence of a given brand, because they must be earned.
And at the end of the day, Google must make a choice between trusting your website and hundreds of. For any given search query and it will usually choose the sites that exhibit characteristics of large brands in conclusion, in the 2020s, SEO comes down to the right content for your target keywords, having those on the page, the right content and appearing to be as large of a brand.
I was possible.
Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash
