Keeping up with Google

Keeping up with Google and all its changes to AdWords, Google My Business, and its search engine algorithms can be a real challenge for small business owners. Google provides immensely helpful services to business owners and consumers alike, but the way it has made itself indispensable is by making constant tweaks in order to highlight quality content.

So what do all of these changes mean for you? Keeping up with Google can eat up valuable time that you could be spending on the core aspects of your business. But it’s an essential task since large changes can severely impact your website traffic and bring it down in the search rankings.

Here are a few tips for keeping up with Google and offering a high quality user experience.

A Few Tricks for Keeping up with Google

• Publish new content frequently. If your website doesn’t have fresh content, Google won’t be happy. This means frequent (we recommend once a week) blog posts and frequent website updates.
• Don’t give up on quality. But don’t let the quest for frequent updates trick you into posting repetitive, useless content. All of Google’s changes are oriented towards rewarding high quality content.
• Think about what your reader wants. Quality content means content that your site visitors really need. Think about what your customers would most want to know about when they Google you, and then tailor your content accordingly. Make it easy for people!
• Keep an eye on website analytics. This should be done at least once a month and will help you stay on top of potential technical issues that may arise. If you observe any abnormalities (or receive warning messages) it’s critical to work to resolve these issues as soon as possible.
• Don’t depend entirely on Google. Though Google provides so many powerful tools, you can’t rely on it alone to drive business. This is where social media marketing efforts and email newsletters come in–they diversify how you are reaching your target customers.
• Reduce your bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the rate at which visitors leave your site. A high bounce rate will hurt your website rankings, so make sure that your visitor spends a lot of time on your site by offering high quality content and designing your website to be user friendly (quick to load, easy to navigate, etc.).
• Be mobile friendly. People do almost everything on their phones these days, so you need to make sure that your website will read well on a mobile device (also called responsive design).

These are a few things you should be focusing on in order to keep up with Google, but keeping abreast of each and every update is very difficult. As a Google Partner, we are the first to know about the latest updates and changes, and we have the knowledge necessary to help you tweak your website and AdWords in order to take advantage of the updates. Contact Niki at [email protected] to learn more about how we can help you keep up with Google’s changes and how doing so will pay off for your business.