How to beat the search engine blues

These days, when nearly everyone has a website, from marketing agencies through to the local builder, driving traffic to your site through SEO has become harder than ever.
If the site is not updated regularly, you’re more than likely to be struggling, because SEO is evolving so quickly into SocialSEO and beyond.
All of which means that website development has never been more critical, especially with the increasing appearance of external ‘Quality Raters’ being employed by Google to manually review sites once they start to progress up the search rankings.
These ‘Quality Raters’ will rate websites on many factors, which includes their user experience, commercial intent and the perceived usefulness of content, along with reputation. This is because Google wants to ensure that search results match user intent and expectation.
For SEO businesses this poses the question: what if your client’s website was built in the early Nineties, you’ve been optimising their site based on SEO best practice and building content that will be useful to their customers, but the site does not look fresh, modern and up to date compared to the websites of the big brands that you are competing with?
Business owners which are not website / user experience savvy may be under the impression that their site more than suites its purpose. However, leaving these elements untouched could leave you open to a manual filter that pushes you out of the top positions you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
It’s not only about the look and feel of the site; the primary focus should be on the user experience. Therefore, in order for SEO experts to successfully deliver, they need to ensure their clients see the value of having a modern and user-centric website and advise accordingly. This will mean added investment into site development if the overall user experience is not good.
With the changing search qualifying metrics, this is crucial if you want make an impression in a competitive market.
At the same time, it is advisable to grab the opportunity to push for responsive design to optimise for mobile search, after all it’s unlikely to be long before mobile becomes part of the quality review.

Helene Hall is director of search at Gravytrain