With the latest Google algorithm changes (Google Medic, read more about it here) we thought it’s about high time we wrote a blog on how you can give your website the best shot at ranking well on Google. If you read our Google Medic blog, you’ll see that Google now values what is termed “E-A-T”, this stands for expertise, authority and trust – and you need to weave this into your digital marketing for the best possible results.
- By far the most important aspect to get great E-A-T ranking is by creating quality content. Did we hear a groan? Yep, we bang on about it, but it’s true! Your content needs to be (truly, a whole range of things) helpful, useful, on point, engaging, accurate, link to authority sources and more. Long gone are the days of filling your web pages with “words”, you need to be providing your visitors with purpose on their journey through your site. Just try and think of it as a department store or experience – you want them to come back, not to go off frustrated.
- Make sure you have an about page. Sometimes it might seem like a trivial page to have, but it is so important to providing that trust to your visitors. This is a page where you can add personality to your business, showcase your friendliness, expertise and authority. Think about keeping this page up to date perhaps once a year, add a photo, include links to your business social media and more.
- Constantly create content – yes, another groan. We always recommend static and dynamic pages on any website. So your static pages are those that very rarely change, the cornerstones of your site. The dynamic are pages that change often, perhaps information is updated regularly, or a blog section. Google dislikes duplicated content, and we know that content is copied across social, websites, apps and more. So jig it up, chaneg it about, write new blogs on the same topics as 2 years ago!
- Check your contact page often – how many businesses can hold their hand up and say that they actually check their contact information on their website? Has it changed? Is there a Google map to show your location? Can visitors get in touch with you easily using a variety of methods? Keep this page fresh and up to date, as helpful as possible. Especially important with what looks like Google prioritising local businesses over larger organisations in searches.
- Testimonials – ideally on Google itself, but otherwise Facebook, Trustpilot, Trip Advisor – depending on the nature of your business of course. Lead your website visitors to those all important reviews, encourage your clients to review you and this will help show Google, and your visitors that you can be trusted.
- Think about an FAQ page – this won’t suit all businesses, but for those that it will, this is a great page to offer helpful, to the point and useful information to your visitors. You can even encourage engagement by asking visitors for their questions if yours don’t quite answer them!
- Making your website so that visitors feel safe. This is important and likely very overlooked – you hired someone to make you a website or you made it yourself, you know you are a genuine real human, so why would the internet not trust you? This is why an about page and up to date contact information is great, as well as those all important FAQs. Other ways of making visitors feel safe are HTTPs (read our blog on that), making sure you adhere to GDPR and have policies within easy access for your visitors.
- Here’s a big one with another groan – social media! Nothing to groan about though, these days social media comes part and parcel with running a business, and if you are struggling with how to get started, management, content ideas or general social questions then get in touch with us! Your social media is a great place to showcase your E-A-T, and it’s also super easy to be friendly and helpful – that’s what being social is all about! We’ve written a few blogs about social media so do check out our blog section.
- You could dig deeper and monitor your website’s domain and page authorities. Learn more about this in detail from Moz, who calculate the domain authority (out of 100). A new website or page will have a ranking of 1, those sites or pages that are well established with useful information will be nearer 100 (think, Wikipedia).
- Now here’s something that we don’t do, and will be implementing on our website during Septembr 2018 – featuring author bios. At the moment, when we write a blog on our website, no one knows who it was written by from our company! It seems that across the web, articles written by well established authors saw a significant rise in ranking with the new Google Medic algorithm. So, include authors on the blog, and author biographies to add that trust.
To Conclude
There’s often an uproar when Google release a major update, we’ve all worked hard to try and hit that special ranking and it’s annoying that yet again there are more changes. Or is it? As far as we can see, the changes that are being made make total sense – the internet is evolving, social media is having an impact and with a huge surge of businesses online, why should we not be aiming towards E-A-T?
From our point of view, it’s something we’ve been really pushing at our clients for a couple of years, especially from a social media point of view, and it’s just great to see that actually the changes in Google’s algorithm affirm our thoughts on how you should market yourself digitally.
Don’t forget to get in touch if you have any questions!