SEO is something many businesses cast aside. It can appear fiddly and complicated, but despite experience being needed to tame this beast, it is a vital tool for upping the position of your website on a search engine results page. VerriBerri, an SEO agency in Essex, have over 12 years of experience in optimising clients’ websites. We understand that you may not know how to put this process in to practice. This is why we have a dedicated SEO team on hand! VerriBerri can adapt your existing website to meet SEO criteria and get you rising up the rankings of the SERP (search engine results page).
The algorithm that Google uses is forever changing and developing, this means an SEO experts work is never done. Our SEO agency in Essex keeps on top of all the changes that Google makes and when they make them, so that we can adapt websites accordingly. These changes may affect which practices are deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the eyes of Google. If you aren’t adjusting to the changes, your positioning will suffer. Here, we’re going to talk you through the most recent update and give you some tips on here to please the Google gods.
SEO 101
Not sure what SEO is? Let us break it down for you! SEO is short way of saying search engine optimisation. This is the name given to the technique used to make a website more favourable to a search engine algorithm. Once you optimise your website in this way, it will rank higher on the SERP and you are more likely to see an increase in organic traffic to your site.
How does a website get ranked?
To fully understand what you need to do to optimise your content, you have to delve deeper into how content is ranked in the first place. Google enlists the help of bots called crawlers. When people hear the word ‘bots’, they might panic – don’t worry, these are the good kind! Crawlers will go through a website, analysing the content and checking if it meets certain criteria for the algorithm. Google will then decide based on these, whether to recommend a site to a user searching for a query. The algorithm that is used changes on a regular basis. These may be small changes or big changes; however, one thing will constantly remain the same – Content that displays EAT will always rank higher, and this is something that our SEO agency in Essex focuses on.
What is EAT?
EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These individual criteria are picked up by the crawlers and are used to rank your website in the SERP. Expertise refers to the content and whether it displays expert knowledge in the specific field. If you can prove this and back it up, the algorithm will love it. Authoritativeness is all about whether you hold any influence in the sector you’re talking about. This is hard to achieve if you’re new. Trustworthiness means is the content you put out reputable and is it valued by others as authenticated information.
What’s changed in the May 2021 Google update?
The nemesis of every SEO team is the Google algorithm update. Once we think we’ve got our heads round it, change is introduced, and it needs to be figured out all over again. This is, of course, part of the fun of SEO. Take it from our SEO agency in Essex, it can, however, be confusing to someone who has never encountered SEO before. Despite updates seeming to be every few months, modifications are being made every single day to ranking factors. Most go unnoticed but sometimes major updates need to be paid attention to.
In May 2021, Google rolled out their latest update. This one includes something called Page Experience. Page experience encases all the aspects of how users interact with your webpage, and it will take into account how good or bad it is for them. It will pay more attention to loading times, interactivity (clicks and time spent on the page) and the visual stability, which is all about having a page that doesn’t move around unexpectedly.
How to adapt to this new update
Reducing the loading time of your page can be the difference between a user staying or clicking off. Research found that ages with a load time of more than 10 seconds, a mobile user is more likely to click off, increasing the bounce rate by 123% – you want to avoid this as much as possible. If your loading time is less, it will increase the amount of time a user spends on your page, and means they are more likely to click and interact with the rest of your website.
Another way to get a user to stay on your site is by focusing on your content. As we mentioned earlier, crawlers will always look for EAT, no matter what changes in the algorithm updates. You need to adapt your content by including things like keywords and checking your varying sentence lengths. These variables will help demonstrate EAT to the bots and will aid in retaining a user’s attention.
Need some SEO help?
If you’re still struggling to get your head around it all, our SEO agency in Essex is here for you. With updates continually dropping and smaller alterations being made every single day, it can be difficult to stay on top of it all. That’s why experts like our team at VerriBerri exist. We quickly wrap our head around the new updates and can optimise your content and site. Whether you’re a new website looking to start out with your SEO or even if you’re just looking from maintenance of your SERP ranking – we can help!
Get in Touch with us
Our SEO agency in Essex can discuss tailored SEO strategies for your website to help you adapt and grow along with any algorithm changes that come your way. Get in contact with our friendly team today, we would love to hear from you!