Sometimes when I’m checking the progress of a client’s keyword rankings and see them coming up high for Bing/Yahoo, I find myself thinking “well…who cares”.
Now before the confusion sets in, of course we’re working on clients for almost the sole purpose of GETTING those rankings up there on Bing/Yahoo. The “who cares” comes into play when I’m severely more concerned about those rankings being the same, if not better, on Google.
Don’t get me wrong – it is important to be ranked high in every place as much as possible. Any company will take a decent keyword top 3 on Bing, Yahoo, Ask, AOL, anything search engine any day. It’s just another opportunity. I think the emphasis is not being content with any of these places, because it is 2014, and Google is still by far the dominant search engine and the most important place to follow your rankings on. 80% of searches still take place on Google today, so that means that every other search engine in the world combined makes up the rest.
So if it is ultimately much more important to be on Google instead of Bing/Yahoo (Bing and Yahoo use the same search engine algorithm) how do I optimize my site specifically for Google. Great question, and a difficult one to answer. Both algorithms are proprietary (to the fullest extent of the word), but both have many very intelligent people speculating over their composition. Much speculation that I’ve pondered over has returned generally the same information:
- Google likes more stuff that it can crawl when it indexes websites. That means that more of the site marked up with more HTML is going to go further than sites that are entirely flash and other forms of multimedia.
- Google continuously crawls websites and has a habit of seeing if the site is “fresh”, or consistently has content being added. Google tends to favor websites that are periodically updating with new pages, articles, and blogs.
- Websites that compete aggressively for Google Rankings typically participate in some form of a link building strategy.
Experts will argue plenty more differences, but these outline the basics.
If you are having trouble ranking for the keywords you want on Google, set up a free consultation with us. We’ve had success achieving positioning for clients on Google within their desired industries!
The ongoing digital revolution is transforming the way that all businesses interact with clients and customers. Consumers rely heavily on digital channels for researching products and services and expect to make buying choices with the swipe of a finger. For organizations that want to remain competitive, having a defined digital marketing strategy and execution plan is essential for successful outcomes. With a demonstrated history of creating and implementing strategic digital marketing initiatives that drive growth, I am committed to delivering real, measurable results for my clients.