How to Survive Google Algorithm Updates with SEO Services
As a digital marketing agency, we have been actively promoting and helping our customers make their websites SEO-friendly and optimized. To tell you the truth, sometimes SEO services remind us of Halifax weather: unpredictable and full of surprises, like the recent significant change to Google's search algorithm in March 2024 that affected most SEO reports. Like any other algorithm change, it influenced our website's organic traffic stats too and made us question and revise the way we approach SEO and rely on it.
So what happened with this Google Algorithm update anyway?
According to Google, the recent updates were done to improve search for users by providing them with helpful, original content. Regular language translation? They want to reduce content, defined as low quality by Google, that is specifically designed to drive traffic to a page via SEO. This makes some sense and mirrors what we always say about any search engine. Their customer is actually the person making a search, and the search engines want to provide the best possible result to their customers. The challenge for many websites, big and small is that they all suffered dramatic drops in traffic, despite their having been highly ranked in the past, and possibly their perceived content quality.
It turned out that Google's algorithm changes impacted sites that previously ranked well, favoring larger, established brands and user-generated content platforms like Reddit. Critics argue that Google's changes harmed small businesses, reducing diversity and quality of content. Google maintains that its updates are designed to improve user experience by promoting valuable, original content and reducing spammy results.
It seems like Google is determined to care less about how we format our content, making sure we hit the technical aspects of a page optimized for SEO, and more about what we publish. Sounds reasonable and reminds us that the information we create and publish on our websites is what we want to share with our readers for their own good, not solely for the sake of clicks. Lets be honest, we all start with the right intentions to educate our clients, but sometimes don’t we push our content length, or key phrases a bit to make sure we hit the old way Google assessed pages as being “Effective for SEO”? Hopefully, it will work exactly as intended, and if your website did experience some traffic downfall in March, soon it will be restored and continue growing.
How to Grow Traffic to My Website Despite Algorithm Changes
So, what should your business do to stay afloat and make forward progress when it comes to organic search? Is there some sort of protection shield to help a website survive search algorithm changes and regenerate its traffic even if it has been affected?
Pillars of SEO Services
Unique and useful content has always been important for a website's SEO optimization. To survive and thrive on search engines no matter what the changes and shifts impact, we always recommend to our clients that they follow what we consider to be the key elements of effective SEO strategies:
Optimize for User Experience
Part of your ranking has to do with how visitors engage with your actual website. Do they hang around, browse different pages or engage with your page? Do they share your page or in the case of business partners or other websites, or create links back to your page because they believe it’s a great resource?
Part of great website performance is making sure if your website is user-friendly, has fast load times, looks great across all screen sizes (commonly referred to as being mobile optimized), and makes it super easy to navigate around the site to retain visitors and encourage return visits. Our website development team spends hours doing just these things on the website we build.
Diversify Traffic Sources
For those of us who have been around and working in marketing since before social media and digital marketing we understand a fundamental truth. You never have all of your communication in one single basket. Just like years ago we wouldn’t have suggested a pure newspaper advertising program, but would have worked to create multiple channels to engage with customers and partners. Even if organic search like Google is a key part of your business, you should always have other ways to generate traffic to your website, and interest in your company.
We encourage all website owners to explore other platforms like social media, email marketing, and direct engagement with real live people to attract visitors. Community-building activities and investments in relationship building always pay back in times of search engine uncertainty or changes to the marketing & communication landscape.
Create an Easy-to-Adapt Content Strategy
It is important to focus on creating high-quality, unique content that offers genuine value to users. Emphasize first-hand experiences, detailed reviews, highlight cases, and expert insights. Think about the questions that visitors might ask about you, and publish content that answers those questions. What’s interesting about what you do, or unique about the way you think about what you do. Share that content with people and help them understand what sets you apart!
Consider Alternative Digital Campaigns
Sometimes it is worth supporting/promoting your projects with online advertising through channels like social media ads, sponsored content, or Google Ads to maintain visibility, reach, and get leads. This can be a great addition to your SEO program as you pay to position yourself at the top of search results, and provided your ads are well written and pull people back to appropriate pages you can gain some authority for bringing people to the site but having the content to keep them around. We have a number of clients who use hybrid approaches to their online marketing.
Get an SEO Backup
We know it is hard to do it all. Staying updated on SEO practices is not likely on your list of priorities today. We can help here and have your back. We can’t protect you from Google changing its algorithms (although mighty, we’re too small for that job) but we definitely can help you get ready, help create a solid plan and strategy, and hopefully build the behaviours that make your more resilient to changes by the large search engines.
By adapting to the evolving digital landscape and diversifying content and advertising strategies, small to medium-sized businesses can better meet the challenges and find their unique and effective marketing mix to get results. If you're wondering how to grow traffic to my website, our comprehensive approach ensures you're prepared for every change.