So your website has been receiving a good number of hits every month for the past few years, but you have started to notice a decrease in traffic. The past few months have not looked good and there is a steady decline for the last couple of months. Sound familiar? We outline one factor that may be contributing to this decrease: the lack of fresh website content.
So your website has been receiving a good number of hits every month for the past few years, but you have started to notice a decrease in traffic. The past few months have not looked good and there is a steady decline for the last couple of months. Sound familiar? We outline one factor that may be contributing to this decrease: the lack of fresh website content.
Google’s algorithm changes, such as the July 2015 Panda update, causes a global shift in the factors that determine how your website ranks. In 2015 we have seen a considerable change in search engines as they are starting to focus more on the quality of website content. Let’s have a look at some of the reasons for this:
- There are over 1 billion websites on the internet. If you had a list of every website and were able to read 1 site per second, you would be reading for 31 years!
- Google has indexed close to 50 billion pages. Meaning one of your website pages, is 1 in 50,000,000,000.
- In 2000 there were 9 billion Google searches. In 2012 there were 1.2 trillion searches.
Now not all these figures relate directly to the South African market, but with search engines scouring the internet for information every second, it is important that your website stands out from the noise.
With this mass of online information and millions of websites talking about the same topics, it is vitally important to segment yourself by complying to search engine best practice. We have listed a few key points to ensure your website ranks higher on the search engine list:
- Have a strong keyword strategy:
- What keywords best relate to your business but have low competition and a medium to high search volume?
- What keywords are people searching for that you can make use of? There may be opportunities are you missing out on.
- Ensure frequent content updates.
- Make sure you have content being published onto your site weekly. This shows Google your website is not dormant.
- This is the space to implement your keywords and to show search engines what your page should rank for.
- Build strong backlinks.
- These are links across the internet that link back to a specific page on your website.
- They are important to show search engines that your content is relevant for online users.
TL;DR
Ensure your website content is optimised with relevant keywords in order to have your pages rank for search phrases. Google wants to see more relevant content, more frequently. A strong SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign can drive more traffic to your site, with the aim of generating more leads for your business.
