If you’ve noticed a change in your site's search engine ranking or the traffic it receives, a recent algorithm update from Google might be the cause.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) requirements keep changing and it can be hard to keep up with the latest developments. But, if you want traffic to reach your site, you have to know how to get it there. Having a strong organic ranking will help you remain competitive, prevent you from losing leads to competitors, as well as help increase your margin.
Spending time developing your SEO strategy is a crucial part to improving your profitability. We’ve seen partners go from strength to strength after increasing their SEO efforts and they believe that this is now just as important as their paid acquisition.
So how does SEO work?
Search Engine Optimisation is the active practice of optimising a website with the goal of achieving a higher ranking in search engines.
SEO is critical for driving traffic to your site. The majority of web traffic is driven by the biggest commercial search engines - Google, Bing & Yahoo. If your site can’t be found by search engines you could be missing out on valuable traffic and potential new members!
How to develop your SEO strategy?
Quality should be the main focus of your SEO strategy. It’s important to create quality content that is relevant to a search and that users will want to see. SEO done well is not about tricking Google into ranking your web page - it’s about creating content that users would want to find and helping Google to deliver the search results.
What has changed recently?
Following recent updates, Google has changed how they process noindex and other directives in the robots.txt file. You might have noticed it is getting more difficult to maintain your sites ranking on Google as a result of this.
This update is now a very important feature for Google. The robots.txt file is now a real web standard and is no longer considered ‘best practice’. If the robot hits multiple errors before reaching a robots.txt file, Google may not be able to crawl certain pages on your site.
SEO is ever-changing and this is a key example. It’s important that you keep up to date with search engine algorithm updates to ensure your strategy isn’t negatively impacted when something changes. Click here for information about creating a robots.txt file.
If you’re using our Design Tool, you won’t have the option to add a robots.txt file. Instead, you’ll need to add a custom meta tag 'robots' and insert values of 'index, follow' or ‘no index, no follow' depending on what pages you would like Google to crawl.
Get in touch with your account manager today if you’re concerned about your organic search results.
