SEO is something of a ‘dark art’ to many people outside the industry and that’s why getting professional input for your online campaigns can really reap rewards. However, like most things in life there are some top tips that can help make sure your digital marketing features as high in the search rankings as possible.
The system
Google has always attempted to do two main things with its search engine. Firstly, it aims to make the search experience easy for users and to get them the results they actually want to see. Secondly, it is constantly updating its algorithms and processes to make sure it’s nigh on impossible for anyone to fool the ranking system.
A recent study from Advanced Web Ranking revealed that on the first search engine results page (SERP) the top five results account for 67.60% of all clicks. Positions six to 10 account for just 3.73%. That means that if you are lucky (or clever) enough to be in the first five results you are doing extremely well.
Paid Search
Most casual users of Google probably won’t even realise that the top of the SERP is actually up for sale on every query. A brand, company or business can almost guarantee taking the top slot simply by paying for a website to appear in the Ad sections. As well as the top of a SERP, ads can also appear to the right-hand side and in the separate ‘Shopping’ section, but the latter is only available to those with a product to sell and who are already using Google Shopping Campaigns.
Quality score
Google also uses a judging system called a ‘quality score’. This metric looks at the relevance of your ad to any particular search, how many clicks it has had and how relevant your actual website landing page might be.
Google News
To obtain a high ranking in news related SERPs you have to submit your site to Google News so that the company’s web crawlers will index your content as news items.
As with many other areas of SEO management, making sure that you are using meta-tags correctly can make all the difference here.
